Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Prof. Dr. Richard Rottenburg (Halle)
The concept “technology of inscription” makes a twofold reference to inscription. On the one hand, it refers to devices of inscription that translate realities into specific codes and forms that can travel or can connect with other codes and forms. Inscription devices range from analog forms (like patient record, customer record, police report record, but also photographs, x-ray imaging,) to complex digital technologies (like sonography, MRI-imaging, digital data banks). On the other hand, a technology of inscription is, like any other technology, inscribed with a rich array of rules, meanings and values about the user, the use of the device, the material and institutional context, and the future that is hoped for by using the device. Social practices of ordering are nowadays normally conceived as implicating different dimensions of materiality and often technologies of inscription are thought to be at the core of ordering practices. What becomes visible when technologies of inscription travel – leave their usual institutional context – and become involved in experimental practices and the making of new institutions?
Richard Rottenburg holds a Chair in Anthropology at the University of Halle. His research focuses on the anthropology of law, organization, science and technology (LOST). He has written and edited books on economic anthropology, networks of formal organizations, the making of objectivity, biomedicine and governmentality, and on theorizing experimentalization and governance.
richard.rottenburg@ethnologie.uni-halle.de
Recent Publications
2012a: Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/creating Categories of Difference and Belonging (ed. with Katharina Schramm and David Skinner), New York: Berghahn Books.
2012b: Rethinking Biomedicine and Governance in Africa. Contributions from Anthropology (ed. with Wenzel Geissler and Julia Zenker), Bielefeld: transcript.
2009a [2002]: Far-fetched Facts. A Parable of Development Aid, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
2009b: “Social and public experiments and new figurations of science and politics in postcolonial Africa,” in: Postcolonial Studies 12/4: 423–440.