Mattering Technology
Particular attention has this week been paid to technological matters inherent to olive cultivation and the making of olive oil. Not intentionally, nor unintentionally, yet much attentively. As I read through my notes and scroll the photos on my phone, it is obvious that I have a thing for technological matterings: those of the people that I work with as well as those of my own. Rhythms and flows, techniques and approaches, organizations and (infra)structures, ambiences and sensations, knowledges and practices occur duly noted in my recordings, and while the technologies of our particular work differs – me participating in their work as a researcher and they as skilled practitioners, me as a note-taking apprentice and they as guiding instructors – we are habitually wrapped up with the equipment we use to carry it out.
Considering my interest in standpoint theory, following Haraway (1988), Harding (1993), and Strathern (2004) in thinking with knowledge as fundamentally situated in kind, relative to both social and material aspects of the context in which it advances, it makes sense to anthropologically probe how various practitioners instrumentally engage olive harvest and olive oil through technological means. Likewise, to critically think about my own instrumental recordings thereof, both literally and technologically. The gallery below features some mattering technology by which olive oil become, and while I in due time perhaps will write more about the workings of technologies in the making of embodied and emplaced practices and experiences, I settle at this point with photographically noting the technological affordances of situated practices and particular perspectives.
References
Harding, Sandra. 1993. Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is “Strong Objectivity”?. In Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (eds.). Feminist Epistemologies. New York: Routledge, 49-82.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575-599.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. Partial Connections. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.
