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Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity (CATT)

The CATT (Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity) is an international research hub dedicated to the documentation, analysis and comparison of the ways in which diverse communities preserve, develop and conceptualise specific technical relations with their local, social, cultural and natural environments.

Context

The globalisation of EuroAmerican political, economic and technoscientific models is based on extractive technologies, mass production and logics of automation and digitization. It presents the social sciences with complex situations which entangle environmental, public health and technological issues with social and political matters, gathered under the contested notion of the Anthropocene.

Such complex issues have invited urgent responses from national and international organisations, institutions and corporations. Often framed in terms of social and technological transformation, these responses also bring increased attention to sustainability, biodiversity and social justice, to meet challenges posed by humanity’s future. However, in reaction to these global tendencies, we also witness localised or “grass-roots” responses, resistances and re-appropriations of these dominant material conditions, practices and equipment to fit the specific contexts in which these communities are living.

Aim

The CATT assembles researchers focussing on responses to these various global challenges, based on anthropology’s established expertise in the empirical documentation of how local communities (indigenous and others, urban or not) have developed unique modalities of technical relations with their “milieus”.

Milieu is used here to avoid distributing environmental issues between Nature and Society. It invites a renewed attention to the ecologies of minds, materials and social relations which partake in world building practices. Milieu is thus taken as a relational field which entangles humans with other things, beings and species. From this perspective, CATT researchers see cultural, social or bio-diversity as possible effects of these localised modalities of actions — in other words, of technodiversity.

Similarly, we understand technical as the ways in which groups adopt specific technics as practices which weave together materials, objects, species, knowledge and conceptualisations in their practical engagements with a given emergent milieu. As a result, CATT researchers challenge the separations between “Technology”, “Nature” and “Society” and consider instead technics as specific modalities of socialised and socialising actions which emerge as humans engage with their milieus, with and without the medium of technical objects.

The focus on the interrelations between technics and milieu, as embedded, transformative and generative practices, is essential for understanding the actualisation in material and practical forms of specific views and understandings of the world, its inhabitants, and their metaphysical relations (or cosmologies). While globalisation might present a generalised functionalist model of utilitarianism, progress, and rationality, ethnographic research has shown how local responses to this model actually lead to a diversification of practices and modalities of actions. From horticulture to Fablabs, from Japanese Robotics to artisanal mining, from crafts to sustainable projects, different groups have tried to develop heterogenous ways of dealing with their milieus in ways that are inherently generative of alternative futures for themselves.

The CATT researchers aim to document and theorize the development of multiple local technical responses to the challenges exacerbated by global environmental, economic and political issues. These might include practices of resilience, resistance, disputes, DIY or hacking, all grounded in their particular local milieus and proposing unique visions of their own futures.

Methods and Fields

Material culture studies and the anthropology of technics have the capacity to produce empirical and ethnographically driven studies of these practices. The set of methodological and analytical tools developed over the last five decades are well honed to document with precision the diversity of material and technical practices and how these are inseparable from moral and social values, as well as anchored in their milieus. This has led to an understanding of technical transformations as profoundly political, as demonstrated by the various stances taken by many localised stakeholders.

CATT researchers are all engaged in localised ethnographic research. Whether they are explicitly or implicitly using the frame provided by the Anthropology of Technics, they all focus on local practices that enrol human agents and their milieux. The CATT currently includes fields such as:

  • Horticulture in Melanesia (L. Coupaye)
  • Artisanal Mining in West Cameroon (R. Allain)
  • 'The material politics of zero-carbon energy in the UK (H. Knox)
  • Robotics in Osaka Japanese experimented Lab (R. Buono, PhD cand.)
  • Fab Labs and biomaterial workshop in Chile (N. Cristi, PhD cand.)
  • 'Hunting and gathering in the Congo Basin, with a focus on indigenous elephant hunting techniques. (Jerome Lewis)
  • Afro-Brazilian Art and Black Art in Sao Paulo, Brazil (T. Braga, PhD cand.)
  • Sex technics among British Sex workers (C. Dominique, PhD cand.)
  • Objects and education (D. Mercier)
  • Weaving among Algerian Women (M. Naji)
  • Art Performance in Athens, Greece (E. Dennie, PhD cand.)
  • Vanilla Production in Madagascar (F. O’Dowda, PhD cand.)
  • A biotechnological forest: fishing, nature conservation and fish domestication in the Amazon (C. Sautchuk)
  • From the Amazon to the Cerrado: new trajectories and techniques related to the rubber tree and the arapaima fish (C. Sautchuk and E. Di Deus)
  • Scientific and traditional knowledge on fire management in the Amazon (G. Fagundes, Post-doc)
  • New configurations of hunting among the Panará Indians (Brazil) (F. Bechelany)
  • Objects as communication strategies between isolated indigenous people and Brazilian government (C. Jabur, PhD cand.)

Project members

Rik Adriaans

Rik Adriaans

Rik Adriaans (he/him) is a Lecturer in Media Anthropology at UCL. He is interested in questions of media and mediation, music, and post-socialism. His doctoral thesis was a multi-sited ethnography of the media circuits connecting the Armenian diaspora of Los Angeles to post-Soviet transition focusing on the politics of recognition and redistribution. More recently, he began conducting a research project on the role of digital emulation, analogue electronics, and haptic materiality in the culture of Eurorack modular synthesizers. Challenging linear conceptions of music technology, this project is an ethnography of technical operations and digital mediations among synthesizer musicians and circuit designers for whom the digital and the analogue are increasingly interwoven. He also maintains an interest in the anthropological study of memes and virality.

Rosalie Allain

UCL CATT Rosalie Allain

Rosalie Allain (she/her) is a Departmental Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, where she was previously an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, on a project titled “The Rise and Demise of Gold: Mapping Technological Change and Creativity on a Cameroonian Resource Frontier”. She completed her PhD at UCL in 2021 and her research engages with the study of techniques, natural resources, cosmology, material culture and economic life.

Rosalie’s research looks at changing artisanal gold mining practices among Gbaya communities in Cameroon, where she conducted two years of ethnographic research, in a context of resource depletion and economic marginalization brought about by Chinese-led mechanized extraction. Her research examines the cosmological and economic conditions and effects under which technical practices and devices are enacted, thought about, and transformed in extractive processes, through interactions with colonial French and contemporary Chinese mining, and how mining techniques mediate local understandings and states of ‘scarcity’ and ‘generativity’ at the interface with capitalist extractive logics. She critically engages with the concept and domain of ‘technology’ to explore questions surrounding historical change, creativity, ritual, luck, the intersection of vital and technical processes, environmental dispossession and transformations in economic practice.

Rosalie is also a member of the ‘Anthropologie de la Vie’ (Anthropology of Life) research group at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (Paris).

Jenny Bulstrode

Jenny Bulstrode_CATT UCL

Jenny Bulstrode is a historian and sociologist of science, with particular interest in materials, techniques, and the cosmologies they articulate. Her research uses an interdisciplinary combination of archives, oral traditions, tacit skills and material science to explore histories of material practices, how those practices shape differing ways of knowing the world and how these historical cosmotechnics relate to social justice struggles in the present day.

Trained as a historian of the physical sciences, archaeology and materials in an anthropological and sociological tradition, her work seeks to understand differing ways of knowing the world and centre marginalised sciences both for their importance to dominant traditions in the physical sciences and on their own terms. For an example of this approach tracing the technodiversity and cosmotechnics of iron in cross-cultural encounters between Britain and Jamaica, see: 'Performances on the World Stage', Greg Dening Memorial Lecture, University of Melbourne, 2021 (recording of lecture). For an example of this approach reframing canonical history of physics with Indigenous cosmopolitics, see 'The face of a metal and the skin of a bomb'. Previous, award-winning work has engaged with flint knapping, elastic glass and iron in whaling lore. Current interests include coal, metallurgy, magic lanterns and the ways in which diaspora knowledges are articulated.

Jenny's staff page

Julien Blanc

Julien Blanc_CATT UCL

Julien Blanc (Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France) is an environmental anthropologist who, over the last twenty years, has been investigating on the ongoing 'greening' of agriculture in the so-called developed (or at least 'modern') economies. His ethnographic focus in on small-scale agriculture, in Brazil and in France, where he studies how peasants/farmers explore new manners of dealing with “nature”. He works more specifically on “ways of knowing”, conceived as part of a relational dynamic. In these respects, the technical dimension plays a central role, both as an operator of relations and a means of knowing. From a broader perspective, the highly contrasting technical choices made in the context of this 'greening' of agriculture correspond to worlds under construction that are themselves highly contrasting. It thus highlights the ontogenetic power of technodiversity, to understand how worlds are being made and unmade.

Raffaele Buono (PhD Candidate)

UCL CATT Raffaele Buono

Raffaele Buono’s (he/him) current research investigates social robotics in Japanese academic laboratories, where he is conducting 18 months of fieldwork research. His research explores mechanical and computational techniques and processes imbuing robots with their own sociality, understood as specific capacities to engage with an environment. By paying attention to such structures and models allowing information exchange and interaction, it ultimately strives to think through capacities to be ‘social’ beyond anthropocentric lenses. In doing so, this project aims to understand how technics in their broadest sense create the very foundation for human (and non-human) association at multiple scales, highlighting how (cultural) diversity is a product of technodiversity.
Raffaele has spent over a year at UCL Computer Science, carrying out collaborative research and gaining foundational training in the discipline. He is interested in exploring ways to foster communication and collaboration between anthropology and computer science towards the establishment of a common language.

Túlio de Avena Braga (PhD Candidate)

UCL CATT Túlio de Avena Braga

Túlio Braga’s (he/him) current research is dedicated to the documentation of dissonant techno-artistic practices among contemporary Black artists in Brazil. His work focuses particularly on how Black artists in São Paulo re-appropriate and intertwine vernacular technical heritage in their artistic praxis in order to re-position themselves within Brazil's social fabric. Through the analysis of technical gestures, material choices, and visual narratives, his project unfolds the key components that conceptualise Afro-Brazilian art-making as a technical practice of sociality and resilience.

 

Flavia Carraro

Flavia Carraro

Flavia Carraro (she/her) is maîtresse de conférences at the Department of Anthropology of the Toulouse University Jean Jaurès and researcher at the LISST - Centre d'Anthropologie Sociale. Her ethnographic and comparative research work lies in anthropology of technology, linguistic anthropology, and anthropology of knowledge. She is especially interested in the relation between material culture and symbolic forms, between social structures and devices of knowledge, as they can be explored through the intellectual and material dimensions involved in writing and weaving, from ancient times until modern innovations. Her investigation addresses coding/decoding practices of signs and threads in an anthropological and epistemological perspective, or technodiversity through knots and ligatures, braids and graphs, gestures and squiggles, protocols and algorithms. 

Ludovic Coupaye (Director)

UCL CATT Ludovic Coupaye

L. Coupaye (he/him), one of the cofounders and the director of CATT, works at UCL, Anthropology.  He is also an associate member of the group Anthropologie de la vie et des représentations du vivant (LAS, Collège de France), and membre of the editorial board of the journal Techniques & Culture. His work on the Anthropology of Technics examines the interrelations between “Technology”, “Society” and the “Environment”. Building on his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea on the intertwining nature of gardening, rituals, visual arts and the environment, he has brought into dialogue the Francophone Anthropology of Techniques with the Anglophone tradition of Material Culture Studies, and the Anthropology of Melanesia, through an empirical analysis of vernacular modalities of actions. More recently, his research examines the extent to which technical objects which display autonomous behaviours (most of contemporary technical innovations, from “smart” machines to robots) are shaping humans’ skills and imaginations, and simultaneously have reticulated relations and effect at various scales, be it on cognitive, social, natural or political environments, enabling or preventing the emergence of forms of technodiversity. In parallel, Coupaye investigates how dominant narratives and conceptions of “technology”, as an independent category, frame approaches to objects and practices in a problematic Eurocentric way, and seeks to document alternative modalities of thinking with, through and about Technics.

Ludovic's staff page

Nicole Cristi (PhD Candidate)

UCL CATT Nicole Cristi

Nicole Cristi’s (she/her) current research explores practices of biofabrication in labs and workshops in Chile, challenging the category of tecnología [technology] from a situated perspective. She explores the imbrications between the technodiversity approach of the CATT with the Latin American idea of the Pluriverse, from the Zapatist movement (Escobar, 2018; De la Cadena & Blaser 2018). Through a participatory techno-ethnography, she researches the diversity and interrelation of different “technical-worlds” and technical milieu immersed in biofabrication practices, focusing on “growing” and “cooking” processes to produce biomaterials based on a co-activity between humans, microorganisms, technical objects, institutions and the territory.

Nicole's profile

Elena Dennie (PhD Candidate)

UCL CATT Elena Dennie

Elena Dennie’s (she/her) research is on the technical processes of individual and collective performance art making in contemporary Athens, Greece. Her focus is particularly on the body and its milieu (material objects, relationships, and landscape), to understand how performance art figures into the art scene of Athens and internationally, and what the relationship is between performance art and contemporary art in the space of residencies, research collectives and programmes, emerging key sites for the diverse global arts.  Focusing on performance art making as the interweaving of techniques and milieu is the entry point through which she is conducting an ethnography of pnevma (πνεύμα, spirit), investigating the localised moral, cosmological, and political facets and implications of this category in Greek society. Through her research, the CATT technodiversity approach aligns with the Anthropology of Performance as emerged in the 1970s.

Elena's profile

Eduardo Di Deus

UCL CATT Eduardo Di Deus

Eduardo Di Deus (he/him) is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Brasília’s Faculty of Education (FE / UnB) and a researcher at the Graduate Programme in Education, Professional Modality, as well as at the Laboratory of Anthropology of Science and Technique (LACT/UnB). He has earned his PhD in Anthropology at the same institution, and is currently interested in the following areas: the anthropology of technique, teaching and learning, work and labour, rural studies, human-plant relations, and environmental education.

In his doctoral research, Eduardo conducted an ethnography of the rubber tapping in São Paulo’s Hevea plantations, casting a historical look at the transformations in the technical systems of rubber tapping in the global diaspora of this species. In his current research, Eduardo begins to explore the interface between technodiversity and learning/education in Brazilian rural milieux, starting from local processes of technical knowledge in agriculture.

Chloe Dominique (PhD Candidate)

UCL CATT Chloe Dominique

Chloe Dominique (she/her) is an Anthropologist of the material cultures of sex at University College London. Her current PhD work (funded by LAHP) focusses on the material culture practices of sex workers in London. Her more broader research interests lie in the material culture of sexual practices, the role that sexual techniques play in the formation of our sexual subjectivities, the relationship between sex and capitalism, and cosmotechnics of the body.

Chloe is the founder of the Materialities of Sex Research Group, which invites cross-disciplinary academics, artists and interested persons to explore themes of identity politics, material cultures, ethics, social morality and the legal frameworks of sexual practice. Most importantly, Chloe seeks to produce research that is accessible and available to the communities she works with, joining together Anthropology and activism. She is on the Editorial Board of Math Magazine, part of the Editorial Collective of an upcoming RAI Special Edition anthology on Diversity, has supported the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), and Sex Worker Advocacy Resistance Movement (SWARM), and was co-founder of PAPER, a decolonial collective in UCL’s Anthropology Department.

Fíacha O’Dowda (PhD Candidate)

UCL CATT Fíacha O’Dowda

Fíacha O’Dowda studies how forest ecologies in North East Madagascar are shaped by human desires and practices, both local and distant. By following the relationships, techniques, and theories through which forest substances are transmuted into worlds of human value, to be tasted, smelt, exchanged, consumed, and metabolised, research explores how the imbrications of such material and symbolic flows of substance shape life, human and otherwise, in forest and town. By observing the exchange, circulation, and sublimation of vanilla, plastics, cloves, rice, woods, radios, tubers, and tenrecs, peopled forests are described in their social and historical complexity, nuancing narratives of ecological change and extinction, opening consideration of conditions and techniques to realise a heterogenous conviviality of many-species in the Anthropocene.

Delphine Mercier

UCL CATT Delphine Mercier

Delphine Mercier (she/her) is a curator in UCL Ethnography Collections (UCL Anthropology) and a PhD student in UCL Science and Technology Studies Department. Her research investigates museums objects as the remains of networks of livings and non-livings. Combining a diversity of approaches among which a multisensorial engagement with, an experimentation of, and an emotional relation with objects, but also relying on indigenous knowledge, Delphine challenges traditional knowledge hierarchy in museums and collections. Using a meticulous engagement with objects and interviews of students on their experience of engaging with them, she focuses on the traces of the making and use processes left at the surface of artefacts. She analyses them using a variety of methods including semiotics, classifications or chaîne opératoire from an archaeological perspective, which she combines with interviews of members of source communities to try to develop a new approach of museums and collections material.

Myriem Naji

UCL CATT Myriem Naji

Myriem Naji (she/her) is a research fellow at the Department of Anthropology, where she received her PhD in 2008. She is interested in productive and creative processes and their significance for livelihood, identity and ways of living. Her theoretical approach is grounded in the anthropology of materiality, techniques, craft, knowledge, and work. Her current project, for which she received an EMPK grant, aims to research textile material knowledge and practices in Morocco. She is interested in local revitalization initiatives and their impact on livelihood and knowledge transmission, as specific forms of technodiversity. In prior research on organic farmers in the south of France she also explored the relationship between production, economy and activism. In 2011 she curated a major exhibition at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, entitled ‘Weaving the threads of livelihood: the aesthetic and embodied knowledge of Amazigh/Berber weavers’. In her past research she has explored the trajectories of Sirwa carpets from their place of production to international marketplaces and how their circulation and materiality mediate political and economic relations.

Carlos Emanuel Sautchuk (Co-director)

UCL CATT Carlos Emanuel Sautchuk

Carlos Sautchuk is a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Brasília, where he coordinates the Laboratory of Anthropology of Science and Technique (LACT) and the research program TRANSTEC – Technical transformations in local perspectives. He is co-founder and co-director of CATT. He has long experience of ethnographic research on topics related to techniques and the environment in the Amazon, initially on changes in traditional fishing methods and environmentalism. His current studies focused on the role of technical objects, skills and the relationship with different environments in the configuration of subjectivities and cosmologies. He focuses on historical changes in the relationship with the largest fish in the Amazon region, addressing the technical processes involved in fishing, sustainable management and the recent process of domestication and aquaculture. Focusing on transformations, this research dialogues with a broader interest in the correlation between technodiversity and biodiversity in the Amazon region, involving amerindian peoples and other populations. He teaches and supervises students in the area of Anthropology of Technique, on topics such as fire management, indigenous hunting, rubber tapping, buffalo cattling, coffee production, traditional carpentry and climate change.

Tim Saunders

UCL CATT Tim Saunders

Tim Saunders (he/him) is an independent researcher and consultant; his practice focuses on the effective use of software and technology within organisations.

His research is focussed on the interpretation and mobilisation of contingency by the various groups and individuals involved in the construction/maintenance and use of digital objects - such as no and low code development platforms. One strand of this research explores how the diversity of interpretations of contingent events such as bugs, glitches and defects is revelatory of the relations between the groups, their technical objects and the broader milieu - including the political and ethical aspects of these relations.

Of particular interest is how various milieu might intersect and the ramifications of increasingly blurred and overlapping boundaries between more traditional separations of developer and user - also how accounting for and enabling diversity of interpretation and action across milieu can lead to a radical opening up of potentialities and ontologies.

Francisco Vergara (PhD Candidate)

UCL CATT Francisco Vergara

Francisco Vergara’s research explores the rhythm of social practices. To do so, he examines how mestizo groups from the Peruvian Central Andes conceptualise, perform, and use rhythm, and then compares it with what anthropologists have said about the topic. Based on two seasons of ethnographic fieldwork, his research reveals that through a set of concepts such as Hailpa, Cacharpari, Chakiri, Wairi, Arranques, Albas and Estaciones, mestizos groups produce and embed social practices with a rhythmical frame that customises two apparently contradictory temporal ontologies: indigenous and western. Doing so allows them to employ rhythm in the process of de-Indianization, but also to produce differences between them. Thus, the rhythms of dancing at dance contests, cargo fiestas, and pilgrimages allow mestizo groups to negotiate and stamp their own identities and create different worlds.  This research shows that rhythm is actively employed in social life and in the processes of creating a world. It argues that distinctions such as cyclical and linear, natural and cultural, traditional or modern rhythm are more related to an anthropological denial of coevalness than to an indigenous conceptualisations and uses of it. In general terms, this research establishes a dialogue between Andean history and anthropology, the anthropology of time, the anthropology of techniques and the anthropology of landscape.

Publications by members

Anichini, G. Carraro, F. Geslin, P. & Guille-Escuret, G. (2017). Technicity Vs Scientificity: Complementarities and Rivalries. John Wiley & Sons.

Blanc, J., &  Mariani, L. (2023). Faire et savoir ; Partage pédagogique et perspectives anthropologiques au Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Journal des anthropologues, 172-173 (pp.179-183).

Blanc, J. (2022). L’attention comme savoir paysan. Transrurales initiatives, Pratiques Paysannes – Les lueurs d’un contre-pouvoir, 491 (pp 43-45) .

Blanc, J. & Mariani, L. (2022). Dans la texture des relations : savoir et faire, faire et savoir.  In, Mariani, L., Le Goût des possibles ; Enquêtes sur les ressorts symbolistes d'une crise écologique », Presses Universitaires de Nanterre, Nanterre. [co-written conclusion of the book].

Blanc, J. (2022). La construction brésilienne de l’Agriculture Naturelle : religion, pragmatisme et fécondité des marges ; in Foyer J., Choné A., et V. Boisvert (Eds.), Scientificité et spiritualité dans les agricultures alternatives, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble.

Blanc, J. & Moruzzi, P.M. (2022). A Agricultura Natural de Mokiti Okada: uma experimentação moral e política como fonte de inovação de ordem ecológica. Revista Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura (CPDA/UFRJ).

Bulstrode, J. (2023). Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution. History and Technology, 39(1), 1-41. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2023.2220991.

Carraro, F. Casajus, D. Herrou, A. Houdart, S. & Rivoal, I. (2022). Cryptographies: Codes, jeux d’arcane et arts de l’intime. Société d’Ethnologie.

Carraro, F. Joulian, F. & Nova, N. (forthcoming). The digital transformation of the world: continuities and changes. Techniques & Culture.

Carraro, F., & Mariani, L. (Eds.). (forthcoming). Des rapports avant toute cause. Textes à la mémoire de Georges Guille-Escuret, Paris, Éditions des archives contemporaines (Études de sciences).

Coupaye, L. (2022c). Making ‘Technology’ Visible: Technical Activities and the Chaîne Opératoire. In M. Hojer Bruun, A. Wahlberg, R. Douglas-Jones, C. Hasse, K. Hoeyer, D. Brogård, K. H. Brit Ross Winthereik (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology (pp. 37-60). New York: Palgrave.

Coupaye, L. (2022a). Danse avec les catégories: anthropologie de la « technologie » et anthropologie des techniques. Artefact, techniques, histoire et sciences humaines, 15, 127-150.

Coupaye, L. (2022b). Technology. In L. A. De Cunzo & C. D. Roeber (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies (pp. 436-468). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cristi, N. (2023). Growing Materials: Technical and Caring Processes as Rooted Design Practices. In M. Tironi, M. Chilet, C. Ureta Marín, & P. Hermansen (Eds.), Design For More-Than-Human Futures: Towards Post-Anthropocentric Worlding. Routledge.

Cristi, N. (forthcoming, 2023). How to call for collective action: graphic reproducibility of the Popular Unity poster. In H. Palmarola, E. Médina, & P. Alonso (Eds.), How to design the Revolution. Lars Müller Publishers.

Cristi, N. (2023). Fragmentos de una Memoria Gráfica en una Ecología de Resistencias Visuales. In J.M. Plaza (Ed.), Estallido estético: Aportaciones desde la historia, la teoría, el registro y la creación artística para comprender el estallido social. Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales.

Di Deus, E. (2023). Travailler avec l'arbre qui saigne. Le métier de saigneur d'hévéa dans les plantations à São Paulo, au Brésil. Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances, 17(1).

Naji, M. & Ait Elhousseine, H., (2023). La tempérance du forgeron: composer avec le milieu de la forge. Socio-anthropologie, 48.

Naji, M. (2023). L’akhnif: organe occulaire portatif ou instrument de violence? In P. Gerimont & L. Smolderen (Eds.), Entrelac, Textiles, rituels, Catalogue d’exposition - Musée international du Carnaval et du Masque, Binche.

Naji, M. (2023). Le peigne à tasser: un instrument de fermeture technique et corporelle. In P. Gerimont & L. Smolderen (Eds.), Entrelac, Textiles, rituels, Catalogue d’exposition - Musée international du Carnaval et du Masque, Binche.

Sautchuk, C. E. (2023). Moral Gestures: Forms of Life and Forms of Death in Amazonian Waters. In M. Bolton & P. Loovers (Eds.), Sentient Entanglements and Ruptures in the Americas: Human-Animal Relations in the Amazon, Andes, and Arctic (Vol. 1, pp. 17-38). Brill.

Vergara, F. (2022). Lección de Barro y la Antropología del Ritmo. Boletín de la Sociedad Chilena de Arqueología, 52, 129-138.

Vergara, F. (2022). Movement, time and rhythm among Hunter-Gatherers. A view from Guaiquivilo rock art, Southern Andes, Chile. In P. L. Polkowski & F. Förster (Eds.), Rock Art in the Landscapes of Motion (pp. 71-92). Oxford: BAR Publishing.

Conferences, workshop and talks delivered by the members

Adriaans, R. (2023, April 13). “Of walkmans, hard drives and Amigas: modular synthesizer interfacing as enchanted obsolescence.” Presentation at SOAS, panel Toward an Anthropology of Techno-Diversity, ASA conference 'An Unwell World? Anthropology in a Speculative Mode'.

Blanc, J. (2023, November 2 – 5). Cosmopolitiques et mises à l’épreuve dans les nouveaux mondes agricoles, « Gouverner la vie pour affronter la crise écologique ? », 3e Congrès international de l’Association Française d’Anthropologie et d’Ethnologie, INALCO, Paris, France.

Blanc, J. (2023, July 3 – 7). Knowing and knowledge in agriculture. Agroecology facing the modernity paradigm. XXIXth European Society for Rural Sociology Congress Crises and the futures of rural areas Working group 26 - Past and Future: An intergenerational dialog on the critical analysis of the past agricultural modernization processes Rennes, France.

Blanc J. & Mariani, L. (2023 July 5 - 9). Faire et savoir ; Partage pédagogique et perspectives anthropologiques au Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Les Colloques de la Tanière, Nivillac, Fr.

Blanc, J., & Pennec, F. (2023, June 15-16). Les collections d’ethnobotanique du Muséum : témoins de cultures passées et enjeux actuels, colloque "Plantes de l'Entre", Musée Paul Eluard, Saint-Denis, France.

Blanc, J. (2023, May 24). Articulating knowing, technicity and relational process within a research-action perspective with ‘peasants’ in southern France; CATT Seminaries, Department of Anthropology, University College London, London, UK.

Blanc, J. (2023, April 26). Shifting from a knowledge to a knowing perspective to support agroecology, Invited speaker at Center for Agroeoclogy, Water and Resilience, University of Coventry, Ryton Gardens, Coventry, UK.

Blanc, J. & Mariani, L. (2023, March 22 – 23). Dans la texture des relations. Onto-politiques du vivant dans les nouveaux mondes agricoles. Journées d’Etude Le Champ des possibles, expérimentations sociales, politiques et existentielles en milieu rural, ENSA Paris La Villette, Paris, France.

Blanc, J. (2023, February 9). A agricultura Natural de Mokiti Okada enquanto Food and Farming alternatives?  ESALQ/USP, Invited speaker, Seminário sobre transições agroecológicas. ESALQ/CENA-USP, Piracicaba, BR.

Blanc, J. (2022, January 4). Current issues for the Museum's ethnobotany collections: how to put witnesses to the past to work, Invited speaker at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK.

Blanc, J. (2022 December 6). Re-opening the relations: French peasants exploring conditions of vivavibility within deep agroecology, Invited speaker at Center for Biocultural Diversity, School of Anthropology and Conservation, 2023.

Coupaye, L. (2023, February 1-2). Danses with Category: Anthropology of Technics, Anthropology of Technology. Workshop at Universität zu Köln Institut für Ethnologie, Cologne, Germany.

Di Deus, E. (2023, August 01-04). XIV RAM - Reunião de Antropologia do Mercosul. Grupo de Trabalho - Técnica, conhecimento e poder: contribuições etnográficas contemporâneas na América Latina. Coordenação: E. Di Deus (UnB), J. Brussi (UFOPA), S. Carenzo (CONICET). Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Vergara, F., & Godoy, C. (2023, July 10-14). Ritmo y Estilo. El Caso del Arte Rupestre Estilo Guaiquivilo. Paper presented at the XXI Congreso Nacional de Arqueología Argentina, Mesa de Comunicación 4: Patagonia, Corrientes, Argentina.

Vergara, F., Adán, L., & Valderrama, C. (2023, July 10-14). Polímeros Termoplásticos Sintéticos. Paper presented at the XXI Congreso Nacional de Arqueología Argentina, Simposio 2: Arqueologías Políticas: Miradas Intergeneracionales desde el Sur, Corrientes, Argentina.

Bulstrode, J. (2022, December 13-14). Early encounters with coal: retrieving views from below, Amr Ahmed, Andreas Malm, Simon Schaffer, Richard Staley. Presentation at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Coupaye, L. (2022, March 14-15). Tubers as Paradigmatic Containers. Workshop presented at University of Cambridge, UK, Jesus College, in Tuberous Collectivities: An Interdisciplinary Exploration into Human-Tuber Companionship across Histories (ERC, FNRS, ULB).

Bulstrode, J. (2023, April 17-18). Science through the keyhole: revealing scientific practices through workspaces, Jane Desborough & Innes Keighren. Presentation at the Science Museum, London, UK.

Coupaye, L. (2022, May 17-18). Agency as reticulation, UCLouvain, FNRS/Talos, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. International Workshop Ontologies in the Making: Anthropological & Archaeological Perspectives.

Coupaye L. (2022, April 9). Technicity against “Technology”: From Relationality to Exclusion (and Capture). Virtual Conference presented at University of Toronto, The Archaeology Centre. Annual Debates in Archaeology – Captivating Technology.

Allain, R. (2022, October). The Vitality of Gold in Artisanal Mining Practices. Participant in workshop, Vie et Technique entre Continuités et Analogies: Réflexions anthropologiques [Life and Techniques between Continuities and Analogies: Anthropological Reflections], part of workshop series ‘Life and Technique: Anthropological, Historical and Philosophical Perspectives’. Collège de France, Paris.

Allain, R. (2022, November). Gifting Luck: The Generativity of Kin and Action amongst Gbaya Mining Communities in Cameroon. Presented at Departmental Research Seminar, SAME, University of Oxford.

Vergara, F. (2022, November). Ritmo, Danza e Identidad en los Andes Centrales. Paper presented at the III Seminario Musicultura: Diálogos desde la diversidad de expresiones, Universidad de los Lagos, Puerto Montt, Chile.

Allain, R. (2022, December). Gifting Luck: The Generativity of Action amongst Gbaya Mining Communities in Cameroon. Presented at Anthropology Seminar Series, Dept. of Anthropology, Goldsmiths.

Mercier, D. with Buchli, V., Jeevendrampillai, D., Pitrou, P., Praet, I. & Sim, G. (2022, December 5). Seedling Biospheres in Outer Space, project Off-Earth Atlas. Collège de France:, Paris.

Bulstrode, J. (2022, December 7). Coal scars and the coal skill. Paper presented at Department seminar, Aarhus University.

Coupaye, L. (2023, January 29). Jardins Abelam magiques et Images végétales. Des Pratiques Horticoles entre Cosmologie et Milieu (Suivi d’une réflexion sur la technodiversité). Musée du conservatoire de l'agriculture et des pratiques agricoles, Chartres.

Cristi, N. (2023, March). Growing Materials and cultivating other possible worlds. Paper presented at Papanek Symposium 2023 Design Anthropology: Critical Speculations, Papanek Foundation.

Coupaye, L. (2023, April 25). “Technicity against ‘Technology’: An Anthropology of Technical Objects. Presentation at University of Manchester, Affective Artefacts seminar series.

Coupaye, L. (2023, May 5). Jardins & Cosmotechniques. Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris: Sémiaire d’Anthropologie des techniques.

Coupaye, L. (May 12). Les Fabuleux Mystères de l’île de Pâques. Alexandre-Koyré (EHESS, CNRS, MNHN), musée du Quai Branly, Paris: Séminaire: Grands mythes de l’anthropologie et de l’archéologie. Regards sur le monde.

Bulstrode, J. (2023, May 17). Dust and debt. Paper presented at Department seminar, Durham University.

Mercier, D., with Buchli, V., Jeevendrampillai, D., Pitrou, P., Praet, I. Sim, G. (2023, June 8). Territories, Project Off-Earth Atlas. UCL, London.

Mercier, D. (2023, June 9). Architectures & Infrastructures, Project Off-Earth Atlas. London, UCL.

Mercier, D. with Buchli, V., Jeevendrampillai, Pitrou, P., Praet, I. Sim, G. (2023, September 15). Cosmologies, Project Off-Earth Atlas. Oxford, Maison Française,

Bulstrode, J. (2023, May 23-24). Colonial Natures, Dániel Margócsy. Presentation at the University of Cambridge, UK.

CATT events

2023, September 21-22: Enchaîner, renchaîner et déchaîner les activités techniques: Atelier méthodologique « chaîne opératoire », Laboratoire de recherche éco-anthropologie du Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (Fr) (L. Coupaye).

2023, June, 6: Simondon by and for Dummies. UCL, Department of Anthropology (L. Coupaye)

2023, June 25: Technology as a protagonist in Sci-Fi Movies and TV Programs. UCL, Department of Anthropology (L. Coupaye)

2023, April,12-13: Towards an Anthropology of technodiversity. SOAS, London. Panel at the 2023 ASA conference 'An Unwell World? Anthropology in a Speculative Mode', organized by Rosalie Allain & Ludovic Coupaye.

2022, March 25: Workshop Making Processes Visible. Technography and the Chaine Operatoire. Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Université Libre de Bruxelles; Brussels (Belg), Anthropologie de la Vie, CNRS – Collège de France, Paris. (Fr) (L. Coupaye & Nicole Cristi)

2023, February, 14-15: Workshop Knowledge and knowing in Agroecology. Post-Graduate Program in Applied Ecology, Universidade de Sao Paulo (USP) – ESALQ, Piracicaba, Brazil. (J. Blanc)