Technologies of the Imagination: An Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgments

This work was made possible by an ahrc innovation award (reference apn17691). We are grateful to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and the Anthropology Department at lse for hosting the two editorial workshops funded by this award. In addition to the contributors to the present volume, participants included Victor Buchli, Rebecca Empson, Leo Howe, Lars H⊘jer, David Napier and Rane Willerslev who offered valuable perspectives. The project was originally conceived under the auspices of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at Cambridge, and we would like to express our gratitude to Caroline Humphrey for formative conversations at all stages of its development. We also thank her, as well as James Leach, Daniel Miller, Morten Nielsen, and Henrik Vigh, for commenting on drafts of this Introduction. Finally, we are grateful to the editors of Ethnos and the anonymous reviewers of the individual contributions for their valuable input.

Notes

The three authors have contributed equally to this article.

As Strauss notes with reference to Castoriadis' philosophical treatise on the Imaginary Institution of Society (1987), ‘Castoriadis’ formulation, the social imaginary, [is] repeated by anthropologists who use imaginary in his sense. The definite article, “the”, implies just one, and indeed Castoriadis stressed the way each (bounded) society has its fundamental idea' (2006:324; emphasis omitted).

By contrast to the tendency in the existing literature to use the term ‘imaginary’ (e.g. as in ‘social imaginaries’) as a way of reifying the imagination as a field of meaning, in our argument, which presents the imagination in processual terms, ‘imaginary’ is used simply as the adjectival form of ‘imagination’.

Our argument on technologies of the imagination runs parallel to Humphrey's investigation in that article of Soviet infrastructure as technological ‘complexes’ of the social, ideological, and technical. As she shows, in the Soviet Union infrastructure had the overt aim of moulding social behaviour, channelling the imagination by acting as a ‘prism’ of thought.

We may here note the connection between our present focus on ‘technologies of the imagination’ and anthropological writings about the nature of creativity and innovation in a cross-cultural perspective (Liep 1991; Welz 2003; Hirsch & Strathern 2004; Hastrup 2005). Of these, our concept of the imagination resembles what James Leach calls the ‘Melanesian’ concept of creativity (2004), for, much like Roy Wagner understands invention (1981), we see imagination as an immanent aspect of the world, which is not necessarily a result of individual creativity.

The empirical correlates of this analytical distinction are of course hardly clear-cut. So while we propose that phenomena can be distinguished according to their degree of precipitation (or indeterminacy), it may be difficult, if not impossible, to single out any phenomenon that is fully conditioned by the technology that precipitates it. This would accord with our earlier point, with reference to Kant, about the pervasive character of the imagination.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Morten Axel Pedersen

1