Things and Virtuality : An Essay on the Tardian Anthropology of Objects(<Special Theme>Anthropologizing Moving Assemblages)

Abstract

This article aims to develop a new approach to "things," inspired by the 19th-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, whose reputation has been recently resurrected by a new generation of anthropologists and sociologists. Under the influence of actor-network theory (ANT) and a revival of an interest in materiality, 'things' have recently attracted fresh attention from anthropologists. The new interest in things has grown against the backdrop of the recent reexamination of the culture/nature dichotomy that once served as a fundamental framework of anthropology. That framework presumes the contrast between the singular "nature," which serves as a given condition for human action, and multiple "cultures," which are products of human creative actions. In that framework, anthropologists drawing on modern science, which permits direct access to the singular nature or the "world itself," hold a privileged position letting them interpret and analyze a variety of cultures, or "worldviews." However, that framework has been undermined by a recent development in science and technology studies (STS), which has revealed that scientific facts-a prime example of singular nature-are not just existing "out there," independent of human actions, but only emerge in the complex interventions made in laboratories. That finding has stimulated an "ontological turn" in anthropology, led by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Marilyn Strathern. They have questioned the universal applicability of the nature/culture dichotomy, and have warned of the danger of automatically interpreting indigenous accounts as cultural views of a singular nature. Viveiros de Castro argues that it is not self-evident that non-Western people and Euro-Americans employ the same ontology, beautifully demonstrating how a discreet exploration of people's ontology can yield productive insights. As a consequence, those studies have led to the new possibility of an anthropology that does not focus on epistemology, but rather on ontology-namely, the question about how things are constituted. One can regard Tarde as a precursor of such an ontological exploration. His social monadology-which argues that entities, humans, societies, celestial bodies, etc. are formed from the associations of minute monads-provides significant insight here. Drawing on the Newtonian theory of mechanical relationships among celestial bodies and their constituents, Tarde argues that monads maintain relationships with external entities within themselves, calling such relations "mutual possessions." In addition, he also indicates the potentiality of things in relation to a feature of associations among monads. He argues that monads engage with each other by one facet of their being, and escape it by the other facets. Thus, there always remains the possibility of a different world by making an association involving other facets of monads. That apparently weird claim has an interesting resonance with ANT and Strathernian anthropology, which argue that relations not only appear as external ties that connect entities, but are also embodied in the very things they connect. Categories such as wife and husband, which presuppose the marriage relation and co-implicate each other, are good examples of that. In a similar vein, ANT argues that a technical object is designed to embody the relations with its users, using the environment and related technologies, because the stable relations with those entities are necessary for the function of the object. Those relations usually remain invisible, but become visible in specific occasions when the actual environment of usage does not match the one assumed in the designing process. Technology transfer is a typical case of such a situation. Following the parallel between Tarde and current works in ANT and anthropology, this article

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