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"At the Pivot of East and West is the companion volume to Michael M. J. Fischer's Probing Arts and Emergent Futures. In this book, Fischer continues his investigation into artistic practices with a focus on documentary films and novels, and introduces three analytics to do so: pivots, knots, and hinges. For Fischer, "pivots" signals geopolitical spaces, like art markets and commissions, as places to think with; "knots" speak to feminist and intercultural knots in women-authored novels; and "hinges" as a counterpoint to the notion of an event, a persistent slow change that only retrospectively seems dramatic and that remains unfinished. At the Pivot of East and West draws widely from global arts with a focus on art from Singapore and Southeast Asia"--

Examining the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists, Michael M. J. Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today.

Prologue: changing modes of ethnographic authority -- Ethnography in the meantime -- Experimental ethnography in ink, light, sound, and performance -- Ontology and metaphysics are false leads -- Pure logic and typologizing are false leads -- Ground-truthing -- Violence and deep play -- Amazonian ethnography and the politics of renewal -- Ethnic violence, galactic polities, and the great transformation -- Tone and tuning -- Health care in India -- Hospitality -- Anthropology and philosophy -- Temporalities and recursivities -- Changing media of ethnographic writing -- Recalling writing culture -- Anthropological modes of concern -- Epilogue: third spaces and ethnography in the anthropocene

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue: The Third Spaces of Anthropology -- Emergent Forms of Life -- Critique within Technoscientific Worlds -- Subjectivities in an Age of Global Connectivity -- New Pedagogies and Ethics -- Epilogue: On Distinguishing Good and Evil in Emergent Forms of Life (Woodblock Print to Newspaper Illustration) -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Intro -- Contents -- 1 CULTURE, HISTORY, AND POLITICS -- Culture, Common Sense, and Symbolic Structures -- History, Politics, and the Sociology of Iranian Islam -- 2 RISE AND DECLINE OF THE MADRASA -- Shi'ite Islam -- The Karbala Paradigm and the Family of the Prophet -- Paradigm, Passion, and Drama -- The Establishment of Shi'ism as a State Religion -- Formation and Defense of the Canon -- The Scriptural School Form -- The Islamic Madrasa -- The Jewish Yeshiva -- The Christian Studium -- Decline of the Scriptural School Form -- 3 MADRASA: STYLE AND SUBSTANCE -- The Madrasa as a Free University -- The Institution: Students, Innovations, Problems -- The Ruling Elite and the Role of the Marja'-i Taqlid -- The Vocal Elite and the Role of Wa'iz -- 4 QUM: ARENA OF CONFLICT -- Evolution of the Shrine Town: Shi'ite and Royal -- The Religious Establishment and the Expanding Bureaucratic State -- The Demonstrations of 15 Khordad 1975 -- Technocratic versus Religious Style -- 5 DISCOURSE AND MIMESIS: SHI'ISM IN EVERYDAY LIFE -- Sufism, Self-Development, and the Upper-Class Idiom -- Social Utopia and the Religion of the Ulama -- Political Theory: 'Ali and Husayn -- Islamic Economics -- Personal Morality -- Reforming Utopia? -- Ritual Drama and Popular Shi'ism -- 6 THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT OF 1977-1979 -- The Social Drama: Political Liberation -- Prologue -- The Breach: Muharram 1977 -- Ramadan and Black Friday, 1978 -- Military Rule and Muharram, 1978 -- Victory 1979 and Its Problems -- Ideological Revolution -- Karbala in the Active Mood -- Governing in the Mold of 'Ali and Muhammad -- A New Era -- EPILOGUE: MUHARRAM 1400/1979 -- The Muharram Drama -- Revolutionary Processes and Youth -- Continuing Conversations -- APPENDIXES -- 1 Courses of Study -- 2 Maraji'-i Taqlid since the Twelfth Imam -- 3 Qum Statistical Profile.

AbstractEast Asia and Southeast Asia provide at least four relational locales or sites of cultural critique and materials for new twenty-first-century theory construction governed by growing biological and ecological knowledge. I document a moment in East Asian and Southeast Asian STS that grounds methodological advocacy for how anthropological STS initiatives revise received models and theories and how they work from multiple and differentiated Asian sites, thereby focusing on the importance of Asian examples in global theory without sliding into meaningless discussions of Asian essentialisms or East versus West orientalisms and occidentalisms. The four relational technoscientific sites and perspectives are those of (a) scientists as social hieroglyphs and peopled networks; (b) hidden curriculums and education reforms; (c) geoportraits of influencing machines, bioecological entanglements, and cultural flows; and (d) disaster and repair cycles, new and old cultural genres for coping, and structures of feelings. By citing the growing new anthropological STS ethnographic work in a variety of Asian locales, I suggest that new narratives and models are already out there as emergent forms of life, that is, as contested, shifting third spaces (forming in the interstices of old distinctions and categories) and ethical plateaus (terrains of decision making where multiple technological changes intersect and impose double-binds or trade-offs among simultaneous imperatives).

The journalistic stereotypes of BGI (the world's largest sequencing centre) as a Chinese state venture, and of Singapore's Genome Institute of Science (GIS) as a neoliberal platform, are inverted. Methodologically, by looking at qualitative networks, charismatic leaders and research strategies, this essay proposes a finer grained, meso-level, ethnographic analysis that allows for multi-scalar tracking and juxtaposition as generators of comparative insights. It deploys a social hieroglyphic analysis of the leaders of BGI and an updated account of the post-2010 'industrial re-alignment' of GIS to highlight the role of cross-national networks in the construction of what are usually seen as national science projects, as well as the roles of mixed state and market strategies, and mixed clinical, basic science, biotech and big pharma protocols and platforms of the contemporary life sciences. It pays particular attention to the small worlds of the scientific republic and the charismatic voices of leaders forging new institutional arrangements.

Anthropological STS, distinct from its nearest neighbors social studies of science (SSK), social studies of technology (SCOT), and actor–network theory (ANT), is (a) more holistic and culturally embedded than those neighbors and (b) in conversation with comparative literature, film, and media studies, including imaginaries of networks beyond national boundaries. Asian STS, or theory from the Global East, rearranges theory from the Global North (traditional STS), the Global South (South Africa), India (postcolonial or subaltern studies), or white settler postcolonial theory from the antipodes. New key journals and networks are centers for STS in Asia. With consciousness of anthropocene changes and biological sensibilities of how systems interact, regenerate, stabilize, or collapse and morph, transform, and become otherwise, this article argues that we need more perspectives, located in different parts of the earth, on our bios and our polis, including revisionist histories of inter-Asian circulations and global circuitries, both as sentinels and as sources for robustness, consent, and legitimacy of flexible and responsive governance of emergent and interacting, if culturally variegated, technoscientific societies.