Articulating Bodies

Articulating Bodies shows how Victorian fiction’s narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality.

Julian Stubbe aims at characterizing what novelty is in the becoming of objects and how the new becomes part of a shared reality. The study’s method is comparative and concerned with technological practice in science as well as in art. It draws on a detailed comparison of two cases: the becoming of a robotic hand made from silicone, and the genesis of a media art installation that renders visible changes in the earth’s magnetic field. In contrast to the canon of sociological innovation studies, which regard novelty as what actors in the field label as new or innovation, the author attempts to delineate certain shifts in an object’s becoming that individuate an object and render its difference visible. This entails attending the enactment of novelty through cultural imaginaries and narratives about technologies, as well as acknowledging the shifts in technical forms that make loose elements enter a new kind of circularity. From this perspective, novelty is an articulation: when differences are not contradicting, but when differing characteristics are aligned, fitted, and click in so as to appear and behave as a distinct entity.

This reprint of a collection of articles addresses the challenges that European ethnology is facing. Representing a variety of localities, they give new insights and perspectives to the importance of doing empirical fieldwork and of seeing the emergence of new patterns as well as the remaking of old ones.

In Bodies in Formation, anthropologist Rachel Prentice enters surgical suites increasingly packed with new medical technologies to explore how surgeons are made in the early twenty-first century.