Journal articles by Morten Axel Pedersen
Big Data & Society, 2018
The era of 'big data' studies and computational social science has recently given rise to a numbe... more The era of 'big data' studies and computational social science has recently given rise to a number of realignments within and beyond the social sciences, where otherwise distinct data formats-digital, numerical, ethnographic, visual, etc.-rub off and emerge from one another in new ways. This article chronicles the collaboration between a team of anthropologists and sociologists, who worked together for one week in an experimental attempt to combine 'big' transactional and 'small' ethnographic data formats. Our collaboration is part of a larger cross-disciplinary project carried out at the Danish Technical University (DTU), where high-resolution transactional data from smartphones allows for recordings of social networks amongst a freshman class (N ¼ 800). With a parallel deployment of ethnographic fieldwork among the DTU students, this research setup raises a number of questions concerning how to assemble disparate 'data-worlds' and to what epistemological and political effects? To address these questions, a specific social event-a lively student party-was singled out from the broader DTU dataset. Our experimental collaboration used recordings of Bluetooth signals between students' phones to visualize the ebb and flow of social intensities at the DTU party, juxtaposing these with ethnographic field-notes on shifting party atmospheres. Tracing and reflecting on the process of combining heterogeneous data, the article offers a concrete case of how a 'stitching together' of digital and ethnographic data-worlds might take place.
History of Anthropology , 2019
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2020
This article has two objectives. In the first part, I present a critical overview of the extensiv... more This article has two objectives. In the first part, I present a critical overview of the extensive anthropological literature that may be deemed "phenomenological." Following this critique, which is built up around a classification into four different varieties of phenomenological anthropology, I discuss the relationship between phenomenological anthropology and the ontological turn (OT). Contrary to received wisdom within the anthropological discipline, I suggest that OT has several things in common with the phenomenological project. For the same reason, I argue, it is not accurate to posit OT and phenomenology as opposing or antagonistic projects, as they are often depicted among critics and advocates of OT alike. On the contrary, I go as far as suggesting, OT may be understood as one of the most concerted attempts anthropology has produced to realize a distinctly anthropological version of Husserl's method of phenomenological bracketing, namely what could be called the ontological epoché.
This special section explores the various ways in which states of certainty and doubt are generat... more This special section explores the various ways in which states of certainty and doubt are generated and sustained, focusing on what we call the 'infrastructures' that undergird, enable or develop alongside them. The articles in this collection build on the growing literature on these topics, notably the very extensive recent work on doubt, uncertainty and opacity, and they extend it further by directing attention not to the consequences of these states or people's responses to them, but instead to the various semiotic, material and social forms that make possible the assertion or recognition of certainty or doubt. We use the idea of 'infrastructure' as a heuristic device to explore these processes.
In a neglected corner of peri-urban Ulaanbaatar's sprawling post-socialist slums, the livelihood ... more In a neglected corner of peri-urban Ulaanbaatar's sprawling post-socialist slums, the livelihood of dozens of households has over recent years been affected by a large infrastructure project that will never be built. 'Power Plant #5' was originally tendered to a Chinese construction firm in 2008 as part of a national strategy to develop Mongolia's energy production to meet new needs. Taking its departure in the story of a poverty-stricken woman long employed as a caretaker by a mysterious organization allegedly in charge of Power Plant #5, this article explores the peculiar dynamics by which lacking knowledge about this and other infrastructural projects in contemporary Mongolia feeds into dispossessed people's dreams about and plans for the future. Indeed, it suggests that ignorance itself may be conceived of as an infrastructure in its own right, insofar as it constitutes a ground from which certainty as well as uncertainty emerge.
Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores the spatio-temporal properties of debt r... more Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores the spatio-temporal properties of debt relations in urban Mongolia. During socialism, relations of debt were mostly restricted to closed circuits of friends, whose exchange of objects and favours often stretched over a long time. With the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, both the number of debt obligations and the size of loans expanded dramatically, without being subject to similar curtailment or other formalization. The result is that ‘no one pays back what they owe’, as people complain. Departing from the seemingly peculiar fact that people nonetheless keep on lending others money – including debtors they hardly know or with a bad reputation – I argue that debt has acquired a gift-like nature in Ulaanbaatar, and show how the temporality of such ‘generalized debt’ is inseparable from the neo-liberal deregulation of residential spaces in this and other postsocialist cities.
“Is there an ontology to the digital?”, Hannah Knox and Antonia Walford provocatively ask. Depart... more “Is there an ontology to the digital?”, Hannah Knox and Antonia Walford provocatively ask. Departing from this provocation, I offer some preliminary reflections on possibilities for intervening into the recent hype around big data by drawing on an interdisciplinary computational social science research project that I have been part of since 2013.
At first blush, “ontology” and “politics” make strange bedfellows. Ontology evokes essence, while... more At first blush, “ontology” and “politics” make strange bedfellows. Ontology evokes essence, while politics, as modern, democratic, multiculturalist citizens tend to understand it, is about debunking essences and affirming in their stead the world-making capacities of human collectives. Yet this notion of a social construction of reality itself instantiates a particular ontology, and a powerful one at that—and here we also mean politically powerful. Still, as anthropologists we are attuned to the “powers of the weak”—to the many complex connections, some of them crucially negative, between power differences (politics) and the powers of difference (ontology).
Complementary social science?: Quali-quantitative experiments in a Big Data world, 2014
The rise of Big Data in the social realm poses significant questions at the intersection of scien... more The rise of Big Data in the social realm poses significant questions at the intersection of science, technology, and society, including in terms of how new large-scale social databases are currently changing the methods, epistemologies, and politics of social science. In this commentary, we address such epochal (“large-scale”) questions by way of a (situated) experiment: at the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen, an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, physicists, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists (including the authors) is setting up a large-scale data infrastructure, meant to continually record the digital traces of social relations among an entire freshman class of students (N > 1000). At the same time, fieldwork is carried out on friendship (and other) relations amongst the same group of students. On this basis, the question we pose is the following: what kind of knowledge is obtained on this social micro-cosmos via the Big (computational, quantitative) and Small (embodied, qualitative) Data, respectively? How do the two relate? Invoking Bohr’s principle of complementarity as analogy, we hypothesize that social relations, as objects of knowledge, depend crucially on the type of measurement device deployed. At the same time, however, we also expect new interferences and polyphonies to arise at the intersection of Big and Small Data, provided that these are, so to speak, mixed with care. These questions, we stress, are important not only for the future of social science methods but also for the type of societal (self-)knowledge that may be expected from new large-scale social databases.
Trans-temporal Hinges: Reflections on an Ethnographic Study of Chinese Infrastructural Projects in Mozambique and Mongolia, 2013
Based on two case studies of Chinese infrastructural interventions in Mozambique and in Mongolia,... more Based on two case studies of Chinese infrastructural interventions in Mozambique and in Mongolia, this article introduces the notion of 'trans-temporal hinge' as a heuristic methodological concept that brings together phenomena and events otherwise distributed across time. The authors explore envelopes used when paying Mozambican workers at a construction site in Maputo and roads dividing Chinese oil workers and local nomads in southern and eastern Mongolia as concrete manifestations of trans-temporal hinges. In exploring the temporal properties of these phenomena, we define the trans-temporal hinge as a gathering point in which different temporalities are momentarily assembled. As an analytical scale derived from a specific ethnographic context, we argue that the trans-temporal hinge provides a novel and, quite literally, timely conceptual invention compared with other recent methods of anthropological knowledge production, such as multi-sited fieldwork.
Vi Bebor Mangfoldige Verdener, 2013
Roads that Separate: Sino-Mongolian Relations in the Inner Asian Desert, 2012
We usually think of roads as tools of social and material connection which serve to enchain place... more We usually think of roads as tools of social and material connection which serve to enchain places, things and people that have not before been as directly, or intensely, linked up. Yet, in the sparsely populated grasslands and deserts of the Sino-Mongolian border zone, it is equally much the other way around. Rather than facilitating more interaction between local Mongolians and the growing number of Chinese employed in mining and oil companies, the many roads that are now being built or upgraded to transport natural resources, commodities and labour power between Mongolia and China serve to curb both the quantity and the quality of interactions taking place between Mongolians and Chinese. Thus, roads here act as technologies of distantiation, which ensure that the two sides become less connected as time passes.
A Day in the Cadillac: The Work of Hope in Urban Mongolia, 2012
Based on fieldwork among Ulaanbaatar's dispossessed youth, this article explores the 'work of hop... more Based on fieldwork among Ulaanbaatar's dispossessed youth, this article explores the 'work of hope' in post-socialist Mongolia. Using anthropological writings on presentism and hope as my theoretical point of departure, I show how the concept of hope allows for the potentials of the moment to overflow the possibilities of the present. The article describes a number of lucky-and not so lucky-events that took place during a day spent with a group of young men cruising around the city in an old Cadillac. Hope emerges as a social method for momentarily integrating heterogeneous assemblages otherwise dispersed across the post-socialist city-in this case, people's metaphysical capacities and their economic assets-into chains of creditors and debtors, which are only barely holding together within an overarching context of failure.
The Task of Anthropology is to Invent Relations: Proposing the Motion, 2012
The proposition that ‘the task of anthropology is to invent relations’ has a certain in-built rec... more The proposition that ‘the task of anthropology is to invent relations’ has a certain in-built recursivity. Does the motion we are proposing today mean that anthropologists make (invent) new social relations as they engage with people in the field? Or should the motion be understood in the stronger sense – that what anthropologists do amounts to the invention of relations out of non-relational things? As far as I am concerned, the second version is the most interesting of the two. For to say that the task of anthropology is to make the non-relational relational flies in the face of one of the most dogged truisms of our discipline, namely that societies, cultures and human beings come into being through networks of connections. It is therefore this version of today’s motion I shall concentrate on. Yet, before embarking on this task, I wish to note yet a further manner in which one might understand today’s motion. On this understanding, it is the task of anthropology to invent relationality as such. Thus anthropologists do not simply describe relations in their different ethnographic guises. Our task is also to invent the relation itself as a concept, and to keep on doing so until the day comes when it is not worth reinventing it any more. As I shall suggest towards the end of this talk, when I will return to this third and most radical reading of the motion, that day is perhaps not so far away as one might think, or hope.
Revolutionary securitization: an anthropological extension of securitization theory, 2012
This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of s... more This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of securitization in International Relations. In contrast to existing attempts to show how, suitably elaborated, this model can be ‘applied’ to various non-Western contexts, our anthropological strategy is to use the contingency of empirical materials (namely the Cuban Revolution and the political forms it instantiates) as a means for transforming the basic coordinates of the model itself. The argument involves two main steps. First we relativize the Copenhagen School model, showing the contingency of its premises. In its paradigmatic form, we argue, the model is liberal in that its abiding concern with states of emergency turns on an ontological distinction between political subjects (e.g. people) and political structures (e.g. state). By contrast, revolutionary politics in Cuba concertedly rescinds just this distinction, to bring about an alternative, non-liberal political ontology. We then go on to use the Cuban case to construct an alternative model of securitization, which we call revolutionary. On this model, the move of securitization pertains, not to a passage from ordinary politics into a realm of emergency, but to a deliberate ontological fusion of the two, such that rule and exception also become coterminous.
“The Soul of the Soul Is the Body”: Rethinking the Concept of Soul through North Asian Ethnography, 2012
As part of a Common Knowledge symposium on the “consequence of blur,” this article reassesses the... more As part of a Common Knowledge symposium on the “consequence of blur,” this article reassesses the anthropologist E. B. Tylor’s famous but vague concept of the animist soul as an optimal reflection of the soul’s fuzzy ontological status among animist peoples. Unlike the Platonic body/soul dichotomy, with its fixed appearance/essence distinction, indigenous conceptions of the soul among North Asian peoples, such as the Chukchi of Siberia and the Darhads of Mongolia, are reversible: persons can turn themselves inside-out as their inner souls and outer bodies cross over and become one another.
This article examines the peculiar nature of comparison in the work of Marilyn Strathern. Contras... more This article examines the peculiar nature of comparison in the work of Marilyn Strathern. Contrasting her approach to more familiar arguments regarding the role of 'reflexivity' and 'multi-sited ethnography' in the comparative agenda of contemporary anthropology, we elucidate the logical and metaphysical tenets that underlie the particular manner in which Strathern connects and disconnects ethnographic materials (not least her juxtapositions of Melanesian and European ethnography). Focusing on her abiding distinction between 'plural' and 'postplural' approaches to analysis, we explore the role of 'scaling' in her anthropological project, and argue that this allows for a characteristically 'intense' form of abstraction, which, among other things, enables her to make 'trans-temporal comparisons' between 'ethnographic moments' otherwise separated by history.
Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction, 2009
Lost in Transition: Fuzzy Property and Leaky Selves in Ulaanbaatar, 2008
For many people in postsocialist Mongolia, the crisis brought about by the ‘transition’ from stat... more For many people in postsocialist Mongolia, the crisis brought about by the ‘transition’ from state socialism to democracy and capitalism has become a permanent condition of life. Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores various religious and economic innovations through which people respond to the ‘age of the market’. We show how, among low-income families of mixed Mongolian and Russian background, one age group in particular suffers from the symptoms of being ‘lost in transition’: alcoholism, soul loss, and a total inability to plan ahead. Inspired by Alexei Yurchak's work on the ‘last Soviet generation’, we argue that this group of men and women, who grew up expecting to live their lives beneath the empty shell of official state discourse, has become permanently stuck in the youth culture of late socialism.
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Journal articles by Morten Axel Pedersen
For much of the twentieth century, Mongolia's communist rulers attempted to eradicate shamanism and the shamans who once served as spiritual guides and community leaders. With the transition from a collectivized economy and a one-party state to a global capitalist market and liberal democracy in the 1990s, the people of the Shishged were plunged into a new and harsh world that seemed beyond their control. "Not-quite-shamans"—young, unemployed men whose undirected energies erupted in unpredictable, frightening bouts of violence and drunkenness that seemed occult in their excess— became a serious threat to the fabric of community life. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Northern Mongolia, Pedersen details how, for many Darhads, the postsocialist state itself has become shamanic in nature.
In the ideal version of traditional Darhad shamanism, shamans can control when and for what purpose their souls travel, whether to other bodies, landscapes, or worlds. Conversely, caught between uncontrollable spiritual powers and an excessive display of physical force, the "not-quite-shamans" embody the chaotic forms—the free market, neoliberal reform, and government corruption—that have created such upheaval in peoples' lives. As an experimental ethnography of recent political and economic transformations in Mongolia through the defamiliarizing prism of shamans and their lack, Not Quite Shamans is an attempt to write about as well as theorize postsocialism, and shamanism, in a new way.