Aihwa Ong & Stephen J. Collier 
Global Assemblages [PDF ebook] 
Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems

Provides an exciting approach to some of the most contentious
issues in discussions around globalization–bioscientific
research, neoliberalism, governance–from the perspective of
the ‘anthropological’ problems they pose; in other words, in terms
of their implications for how individual and collective life is
subject to technological, political, and ethical reflection and
intervention.

* * Offers a ground-breaking approach to central debates about
globalization with chapters written by leading scholars from across
the social sciences.

* Examines a range of phenomena that articulate broad structural
transformations: technoscience, circuits of exchange, systems of
governance, and regimes of ethics or values.

* Investigates these phenomena from the perspective of the
‘anthropological’ problems they pose.

* Covers a broad range of geographical areas: Africa, the Middle
East, East and South Asia, North America, South America, and
Europe.

* Grapples with a number of empirical problems of popular and
academic interest — from the organ trade, to accountancy, to
pharmaceutical research, to neoliberal reform.

Table of Content

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgments xiii

Part I Introduction 1

1 Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems 3
Stephen J. Collier and Aihwa Ong

2 On Regimes of Living 22
Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff

3 Midst Anthropology’s Problems 40
Paul Rabinow

Part II Bioscience and Biological Life 55

Ethics of Technoscientific Objects 57

4 Stem Cells R Us: Emergent Life Forms and the Global Biological 59
Sarah Franklin

5 Operability, Bioavailability, and Exception 79
Lawrence Cohen

6 The Iceland Controversy: Reflections on the Transnational Market of Civic Virtue 91
Gísli Pálsson and Paul Rabinow

Value and Values 105

7 Time, Money, and Biodiversity 107
Geoffrey C. Bowker

8 Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship 124
Vinh-kim Nguyen

9 The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in ”Fresh” Organs 145
Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Part III Social Technologies and Disciplines 169

Standards 171

10 Standards and Person-Making in East Central Europe 173
Elizabeth C. Dunn

11 The Private Life of Numbers: Pharmaceutical Marketing in Post-Welfare Argentina 194
Andrew Lakoff

12 Implementing Empirical Knowledge in Anthropology and Islamic Accountancy 214
Bill Maurer

Practices of Calculating Selves 233

13 Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-Functioning of Ethnography 235
Douglas R. Holmes and George E. Marcus

14 The Discipline of Speculators 253
Caitlin Zaloom

15 Cultures on the Brink: Reengineering the Soul of Capitalism – On a Global Scale 270
Kris Olds and Nigel Thrift

Managing Uncertainty 291

16 Heterarchies of Value: Distributing Intelligence and Organizing Diversity in a New Media Startup 293
Monique Girard and David Stark

17 Failure as an Endpoint 320
Hirokazu Miyazaki and Annelise Riles

Part IV Governmentality and Politics 333

Governing Populations 335

18 Ecologies of Expertise: Assembling Flows, Managing Citizenship 337
Aihwa Ong

19 Globalization and Population Governance in China 354
Susan Greenhalgh

20 Budgets and Biopolitics 373
Stephen J. Collier

Security, Legitimacy, Justice 391

21 State and Urban Space in Brazil: From Modernist Planning to Democratic Interventions 393
Teresa Caldeira and James Holston

22 The Garrison-Entrepôt: A Mode of Governing in the Chad Basin 417
Janet Roitman

Citizenship and Ethics 437

23 Biological Citizenship 439
Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas

24 Robust Knowledge and Fragile Futures 464
Marilyn Strathern

Index 482

About the author

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian
Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Stephen J. Collier is a faculty member at the Graduate
Program in International Affairs, The New School University.