This article seeks to address how topological approaches to cultural change might be combined with ethnographic analysis in order to suggest new ways of thinking empirically about the dynamic political and moral spaces that infrastructural systems create and sustain. The analytical focus is on how diverse notions of relationality and connectivity are mobilized in the production of infrastructural systems that sustain the capacity of ‘state-space’ to simultaneously emerge as closed territorial entity and as open, networked form. The article seeks to (...) establish that the differences and discontinuities inherent in all spatio-temporal relations might productively be considered as ‘intervals’ that both separate and connect across time and space. The notion of an infrastructural system as an interface that conjures both topological and topographical space is the idea that I set out to explore. (shrink)

What does it mean to know something - scientifically, anthropologically, socially? What is the relationship between different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing? How is knowledge mobilised in society and to what ends? Drawing on ethnographic examples from across the world, and from the virtual and global "places" created by new information technologies, Anthropology and Science presents examples of living and dynamic epistemologies and practices, and of how scientific ways of knowing operate in the world. Authors address the nature (...) of both scientific and experiential knowledge, and look at competing and alternative ideas about what it means to be human. The essays analyze the politics and ethics of positioning "science", "culture" or "society" as authoritative. They explore how certain modes of knowing are made authoritative and command allegiance (or not), and look at scientific and other rationalities - whether these challenge or are compatible with science. (shrink)