CAPA

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https://hdl.handle.net/11209/10454

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Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    Refractions Off Empire: Untimely Comparisons in Harsh Times
    (Duke University Press, 2006) Bond, David; Stoler, Ann Laura
    The conditions of possibility for what U.S empire looks like today may be deeply embedded in the blunt and elusive nature of a broader range of historical imperial formations.
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    The Science of Catastrophe: Making Sense of the BP Oil Spill
    (Taylor & Francis, Ltd., 2011-04) Bond, David
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    Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil
    (Wiley, 2013) Bond, David
    A review of the book Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil. Andrea Behrends, Stephen Reyna, and Günther Schlee, eds. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. 325 pp.
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    Governing Disaster: The Political Life of the Environment During the BP Oil Spill
    (American Anthropological Association, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2013) Bond, David
    This article presents an embedded analysis of how scientists and federal officials scrambled to get a handle on the deepwater blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Taking the environment as a compelling ethnographic question, it shows how the oil spill and the environment are not given objects that then collide during a disaster, as is commonly assumed in “disaster studies.” Rather, crude oil and the environment are unstable fields instantiated and made politically operable in relationship to one another. The BP Oil Spill went from a sprawling mess into a manageable problem by being lodged within a refined deployment of the environment. The ocean was, in a way, transformed into a scientific laboratory within which the true size and scope of diffuse hydrocarbons could finally be mastered. Such placement not only objectified the oil spill, it also quietly defined what knowledge of the disaster and what relations to it could have credibility. The revised environment fully contained the disaster, insulating the biological reach of this oil spill from human considerations and rendering personal accounts of sickness implausible and illegible. Techniques of sequestering and inspecting the oil spill came to underwrite a new regime of disconnection between the disaster and the public.
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    What Was Lost in the BP Oil Spill?
    (Anthropology Now, 2013-12) Bond, David
    A review of the documentary film Dirty Energy—The Deepwater Horizon Disaster: First-Hand Stories from the Louisiana Bayou. 2013. A film by Bryan Hopkins. 94 mins. Distributed by Cinema Libre Studio.
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    The Ontological Spin
    (American Anthropological Association, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2014-02-28) Bond, David; Bessire, Lucas
    In the second Commentary essay, Lucas Bessire and David Bond respond to the Theorizing the Contemporary series, “The Politics of Ontology,” edited by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen.
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    Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique
    (Wiley, 2014-08) Bond, David; Bessire, Lucas
    What does ontological anthropology promise, what does it presume, and how does it contribute to the formatting of life in our present? Drawing from our respective fieldwork on how Indigenous alterity is coenvisioned and how the lively materiality of hydrocarbons is recognized, we develop an ethnographic and theoretical critique of ontological anthropology. This essay, then, provides an empirical counterweight to what the ontological turn celebrates of Native worlds and what it rejects of modernity. In it, we examine the methodological and conceptual investments of ontological anthropology. The figure of the ontological as commonly invoked, we argue, often narrows the areas of legitimate concern and widens the scope of acceptable disregard within social research. We chart how this paradigm’s analytical focus on the future redefines the coordinates of the political as well as anthropology’s relation to critique. Finally, we formulate three conceptual theses that encapsulate our criticism and open this discussion to further debate.
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    Ontology: A Difficult Keyword
    (Wiley, 2014-09-25) Bond, David; Bessire, Lucas
    Ontology is hard to ignore in contemporary anthropology. From conference abstracts to journal word clouds and job descriptions, ontology is fast becoming a new keyword in marquee debates as well as in the unfolding identity and direction of the discipline. Yet, as even the most sophisticated participants and observers soon realize, the word itself is elusive and polysemous. It holds in unresolved tension diverse semantic genealogies, opposed spatiotemporal scales, and various materialist registers. This animating tension couples profound insights with lively disagreements. At the very least, perhaps we can all agree: Ontology is an instrumentally difficult word.
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    The Promising Predicament of the Keystone XL Pipeline
    (Anthropology Now, 2015-04) Bond, David
    Whether ultimately approved or not, the Keystone XL Pipeline offers a telling window into the contemporary politics of fossil fuels in North America. Although oil pipelines have been around for a century, they have long been neglected in scholarship and public debate. Today, that is beginning to change. Whether as a strategic vehicle for energy independence or as an urgent frontline in the fight against climate change, oil pipelines are increasingly understood not as inert things but as consequential projects in our troubled present.