ABSTRACT: Recent discourses about innovation and management are full of organic metaphors. From innovation ecosystems to business incubation to digital ecology, terms from biological and ecological sciences are now widely used to denote practices and organizational processes of business and technoscience. This workshop aims to shed light on this trans-boundary displacement of organic notions by focusing on the intermingling of the semiotic and the material in technoscience. Organic metaphors of social processes have long history that stretches back to the early social organism theory in the 19th century and beyond. Anthropology has also paid attention to metaphors of body and organism in wide-ranging settings. This workshop tries to extend such classic interests further by focusing on material practices of making analogies between processes of life and other domains. From robotics and industrial district, many of recent organic metaphors aim not only to understand social processes by organic metaphors but also to create artifacts and social organizations functions like organisms. In other words, in these practices metaphors of life are taking material forms. By focusing on this performativity of such analogies, the papers of the workshop explore emerging intermingling of the mechanical and the organic, the imaginary and the material, and institutions and ecologies.

ABSTRACT: How can we assess the ways in which the humans (concerned persons, bystanders, experts, activists, administrators, and politicians) conceptualize the problems of the world? With what apparatuses – words, equipments, machines, bodies, conventions, social organizations, cultural values, symbiotic relations with living things and non-living things – do we conceive of our surrounding world and its difficult situations? (Is our surrounding world singular or plural?) With what temporalities – short-term events, individual life courses, social times, the annual budget cycles, business cycles, nature’s (and perceiving society’s) seasons, various half-lives of radioactive materials, long-term geological and evolutionary times – do we examine the longstanding issues? How can scientists (of different kinds) and anthropologists (of different kinds) constructively challenge each either to think in new ways about the many problems that face humanity? Our session takes up the notion of scales to explore such issues in concrete and in plural terms wherein we follow emerging contours of a problem of common concern. The question about the scales is, in the same instance, the question about the how of subjectivities. Take for instance; an immune system activated within our body transforms the contour of our individuality and subjectivity. The emerging subjectivity is no longer identical to our consciousness or will to be. The transformation of our environment as a result of, say, global warming or nuclear waste pollutions, inevitably has consequences in our intestinal microenvironment. Prostheses, including robotic devices and smart phones, attached to one’s body, transform the body and the embodied mind, and hence, the mode of existence in the world. In this session, we will be presenting concrete ethnographic cases related to these issues, in one way or another, which will be followed by a cross-disciplinary round-table discussion.