Suchergebnisse

As a contribution to the field of valuation studies this article lays out a number of lessons that follow from an exploratory inquiry into 'good tomatoes'. We held interviews with tomato experts (developers, growers, sellers, processors, professional cooks and so-called consumers) in the Netherlands and analysed the transcriptions carefully. Grouping our informants' concerns with tomatoes into clusters, we differentiate between five registers of valuing. These have to do with money, handling, historical time, what it is to be natural, and sensual appeal. There are tensions between and within these registers that lead to clashes and compromises. Accordingly, valuing tomatoes does not fit into inclusive formal schemes. Neither is it simply a matter of making judgements. Our informants told us how they know whether a tomato is good, but also revealed what they do to make tomatoes good. Their valuing includes activities such as pruning tomato plants and preparing tomato dishes. But if such activities are meant to make tomatoes good, success is never guaranteed. This prompts us to import the notion of care. Care does not offer control, but involves sustained and respectful tinkering towards improvement. Which is not to say in the end the tomatoes our informants care for are good. In the end these tomatoes get eaten. And while eating performs tomatoes as 'good to eat', it also finishes them off. Valuing may lead on to destruction. An important lesson for valuation studies indeed.

AbstractVeterinary science draws on different traditions for knowing and acting, and mobilises different kinds of materials and techniques. This article explores these differences and their tensions for the diagnosis of foot and mouth disease in the UK in 2001. It shows that when they talk of foot and mouth disease, different veterinary traditions refer to the different objects. The clinic looks for deviances in animals, the laboratory detects the presence or otherwise of virus, while epidemiology focuses on patterns of transmission in populations. Despite the fact that they use the same word, clinic, lab and epidemiology are each involved with their own specific ontological variant of 'the' disease. At the same time other figures and configurations shift with the disease. This means that it is not possible to map different versions of foot and mouth disease onto a background of shared co‐ordinates. So in 2001 clinic, lab and epidemiology diagnosed foot and mouth disease mobilising different kinds of materials, the entities inhabiting these practices had different qualities and they operated in different ways. Even time lines and spatial relations changed. Such differences are usually treated as a matter of perspective: it is assumed that everyone is looking at a single world. The article challenges this assumption by arguing that different veterinary traditions draw upon and contribute to different worlds in the plural. This shift makes it easier to explore the strengths of these worlds, their drawbacks and their limitations.

We all know that we have and are our bodies. But might it be possible to leave this common place? In the present article we try to do this by attending to the way we do our bodies. The site where we look for such action is that of handling the hypoglycaemias that sometimes happen to people with diabetes. In this site it appears that the body, active in measuring, feeling and countering hypoglycaemias is not a bounded whole: its boundaries leak. Bits and pieces of the outside get incorporated within the active body; while the centre of some bodily activities is beyond the skin. The body thus enacted is not self-evidently coherent either. There are tensions between the body's organs; between the control under which we put our bodies and the erratic character of their behaviour; and between the various needs and desires single bodies somehow try to combine. Thus to say that a body is a whole, or so we conclude, skips over a lot of work. One does not hang together as a matter of course: keeping oneself together is something the embodied person needs to do. The person who fails to do so dies.

In 1996 after nearly fifty years in public ownership the British rail network was privatised. As a part of this what had been single organisation, British Rail, was broken into a set of different units which were individually sold off. Prominent among these were Railtrack plc (owner of the track, stations, signalling and other infrastructure), more than twenty train operating companies (TOCs) which received franchises to run trains (usually with government subsidies), and three companies which owned and leased rolling stock.