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Assemblage Ethnography: Configurations Across Scales, Sites, and Practices

Post-Structuralism

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The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology

Abstract

Understanding how human societies are organised has been at the very core of anthropology since its inception as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century. While early twentieth-century social anthropologists set out to characterise the kinship, economic, and political systems that shaped the social life of ‘communal’ societies, by the end of the century, a new style of ethnography had emerged. This chapter provides a genealogy of ‘assemblage ethnography’, showing how it developed as a methodological response to the challenge of understanding social organisation across scales, sites, and practices in a ‘hypercomplex’ technologising and globalising world through three iterations: (1) governmentality-inspired ethnographies that take dispositifs as their object; (2) multi-sited ethnographic studies of how biomedicine is being harnessed to administer and enhance ‘life itself’; and (3) approaches that have deployed a more fluid understanding of assemblages to capture the rhizome-like ways that macro, meso, and micro scales are connected. Assemblage ethnography has become a key approach within anthropology generally, and the anthropology of technology specifically, because of its ability to locate sited ethnographies within the broader complexes that are characteristic of a world in which daily lives are constantly (re-)shaped by technoscience, laws, regulations, technocracies, institutions, and forms of expertise.

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Acknowledgements

This chapter has benefited immensely from discussions I have had through the years with so many colleagues and collaborators. In particular I would like to thank Barbara Prainsack, Anders Blok, Maja Hojer Bruun, Brit Winthereik, Klaus Hoeyer, and two anonymous reviewers whom I have learned so much from. I would like to acknowledge the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme for funding the VITAL project (grant agreement No ERC-2014-STG-639275) that has allowed me to contribute to the development of assemblage ethnography as a methodological approach.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Ayo Wahlberg

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  1. Ayo Wahlberg
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Correspondence to Ayo Wahlberg .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Maja Hojer Bruun

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Ayo Wahlberg

  3. Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Rachel Douglas-Jones

  4. Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Cathrine Hasse

  5. Center for Medical Science & Technology Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Klaus Hoeyer

  6. Department of Business and Management, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Dorthe Brogård Kristensen

  7. Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Brit Ross Winthereik

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Wahlberg, A. (2022). Assemblage Ethnography: Configurations Across Scales, Sites, and Practices. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_6

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