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How can an anthropology of digital technology contribute to our understanding of climate mitigating initiatives? Governments and private sector industries argue that climate mitigation must focus on "decoupling" economic growth from carbon emissions if we are to reduce climate impact while still maintaining a healthy economy. Most proponents of decoupling envisage that digitalization will play a central role in this operation. Critics, however, argue that IT has a large and often unacknowledged climate impact, while IT solutions also frequently bring new and unforeseen problems, particular or systemic. The challenge of decoupling is thus broader than the management of the relationship between the economy and the climate. As much as decoupling is about how we imagine that the climate crisis can be solved with technologies, trusting that they can create the changes we need, it is also about the cultural value of lifestyles that we do not want to change. Seeing the climate crisis from this perspective opens the door for an anthropology of digital technology, which allows us to approach decoupling as a matter of how sociocultural change is imagined in the spaces between IT, climate change and society. The article thus contributes to the qualitative social scientific literature on perceptions of change by focusing on some of the ways that implicit ideas of change are embedded in the promotion of digital technologies as solutions to climate change. In addition, it presents to a wider scientific audience the perspectives that an anthropologically inspired analytic may provide on this topic.

This article contributes to debates about how capitalist corporations
'see', and how they concurrently relate to the places where they
are located. It argues that an analytical focus on 'seeing' illuminates how
internal organization and outward relation making are tied together in
complex ways. Even so, corporations of the extractive industries in particular
cannot be assumed to encompass a single coherent view. The empirical
case is a critical examination of how a gas project employed strict
health, safety, and security measures to generate order when encountering
alterity in an unfamiliar environment in Papua New Guinea. It reveals
how the project was organized around two conflicting ways of seeing its
host country—trying to separate itself from it while simultaneously having
to engage and provide benefits for it.

This article refers to carbon valuation as the practice of ascribing value to, and assessing the value of, actions and objects in terms of carbon emissions. Due to the pervasiveness of carbon emissions in the actions and objects of everyday lives of human beings, the making of carbon offsets and credits offers almost unlimited repertoires of alternatives to be included in contemporary carbon valuation schemes. Consequently, the article unpacks how discussions of carbon valuation are interpreted through different registers of alternatives - as the commensuration and substitution of variants on the one hand, and the confrontational comparison of radical difference on the other. Through the reading of a wide selection of the social science literature on carbon markets and trading, the article argues that the value of carbon emissions itself depends on the construction of alternative, hypothetical scenarios, and that emissions have become both a moral and a virtual measure pitting diverse forms of actualised actions or objects against each other or against corresponding nonactions and non-objects as alternatives.

Dalsgaard reviews A TRIAL SEPARATION: Australia and the Decolonisalion of Papua New Guinea by Donald Denoon.

Time and the Field; Contents; Introduction; Chapter 1Limits and Limitlessness; Chapter 2The Time of the State and theTemporality of the Gavman inManus Province, Papua; Chapter 3Out of Conclusion; Chapter 4Times of the Other; Chapter 5Surfacing Moves; Chapter 6Boredom, Rhythm, and theTemporality of Ritual; Chapter 7Episodic Fieldwork, Updating,and Sociability; Chapter 8Trans-temporal Hinges; Afterword; Index

This article investigates how disability can work analytically as a 'critique from within'. Our case is the accommodation of citizens with disabilities during the voting process in Denmark. Here disability makes explicit how Danish democracy is produced as disability rubs up against implicit, normalized and mundane infrastructures and practices. We investigate disability as critique in this sense of affording a both analytic and practical 'breakup'. To do so, we promote a 'compositionist' post-actor-network theory approach to disability and to polling and investigate what entry-point for critique this offers. We analyze an incident at a polling booth during the 2013 Danish Municipal election. This renders visible some of the complex socio-material processes through which citizens and the Danish state co-enact and co-authorize one another. We highlight how 'detachments' are vital to such processes and we examine parts of the historical background for the production of authority in the context of managing disability as exception during polling. In doing so we point out that as the organization of electoral processes evolves, new potentialities for infra-critique also emerge.

This article discusses how a small place – the polling booth – can be bounded as an ethnographic site with reference to the political and democratic event that it is supposed to facilitate. Concerns about the socio-material bounding of the booth form the main empirical case – a debate, which recently occurred in Denmark when the government proposed to digitalise voting. Digitalisation here became a controversy because of the potential illicit influences that computer experts argued would enter the polling booth and challenge the secrecy and the privacy of the vote, the transparency of the electoral process, and thus the electoral enactment of democracy itself. In this way the polling booth potentially works as an ethnographic entry point for following shifts in contemporary debates.