This article introduced "the Human and the Social" inaugural issue of NatureCulture. In this article, Kasuga examines a broad intellectual moment, which has been characterized as a turn to ontology in anthropology, and towards networks and symmetrical approaches to humans and non-humans in STS. He diagnoses this as part of a “tremendous upsurge of questioning classical ways of understanding the universe” in which there has been a “drastic collapse of the distinction between language and world, epistemology and ontology” (2012, ii). This necessitates an approach to consider the world and its protagonists, not as “undeniable objects, given realities susceptible to simple observation, description, and analysis,” but as effects of heterogeneous linkages of other things, living or non-living, tangible or intangible (Kasuga 2012, i),
Naoki Kasuga, "Introduction: The Human and the Social", contributed by Grant Jun Otsuki, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 8 April 2021, accessed 19 April 2024. http://www.stsinfrastructures.org/content/introduction-human-and-social
Critical Commentary
This article introduced "the Human and the Social" inaugural issue of NatureCulture. In this article, Kasuga examines a broad intellectual moment, which has been characterized as a turn to ontology in anthropology, and towards networks and symmetrical approaches to humans and non-humans in STS. He diagnoses this as part of a “tremendous upsurge of questioning classical ways of understanding the universe” in which there has been a “drastic collapse of the distinction between language and world, epistemology and ontology” (2012, ii). This necessitates an approach to consider the world and its protagonists, not as “undeniable objects, given realities susceptible to simple observation, description, and analysis,” but as effects of heterogeneous linkages of other things, living or non-living, tangible or intangible (Kasuga 2012, i),