Global Assemblages

Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems

Aihwa Ong editor Stephen J Collier editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:John Wiley and Sons Ltd

Published:31st Aug '04

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Global Assemblages cover

Provides an exciting approach to some of the most contentious issues in discussions around globalization—bioscientific research, neoliberalism, governance—from the perspective of the "anthropological" problems they pose; in other words, in terms of their implications for how individual and collective life is subject to technological, political, and ethical reflection and intervention.


  • Offers a ground-breaking approach to central debates about globalization with chapters written by leading scholars from across the social sciences.
  • Examines a range of phenomena that articulate broad structural transformations: technoscience, circuits of exchange, systems of governance, and regimes of ethics or values.
  • Investigates these phenomena from the perspective of the “anthropological” problems they pose.
  • Covers a broad range of geographical areas: Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, North America, South America, and Europe.
  • Grapples with a number of empirical problems of popular and academic interest — from the organ trade, to accountancy, to pharmaceutical research, to neoliberal reform.

“This compelling book demonstrates how a very sophisticated anthropological perspective can transform ‘globalization’ into a useful tool for investigating emerging social forms and ways of ruling and living. Certainly this non-structural approach is needed—one that attends to the specificity of combinations, interactions, sites, and effects associated with the spread of technology and risk.”

Ulrich Beck, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München


“Global Assemblages provides excellent and rich insight into a developing anthropology of the contemporary world. The intertwining of violence, capital flows, political fragmentation, and regimes of social and moral control are investigated here in what must be recognized as a major contribution to anthropological scholarship.”

Jonathan Friedman, L’ École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Parisand Lund University, Sweden


“This volume will give assemblages of many types a good name—the authors are astute, varied, and at the top of their game; the geographies do justice to the notion of global; and the book has a core intellectual inquiry about reflexive practices that holds together its wide-ranging essays. From transplanted kidneys to research audit protocols, the uneasy interrelationships of global assemblages emerge in the fleshy details of a knotted world.”

Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz

ISBN: 9780631231752

Dimensions: 266mm x 189mm x 34mm

Weight: 1077g

512 pages