This dissertation takes up a heterogeneous assemblage of elements in the Sudan-South Sudan border-zone, and inquires into the quasi-causal dynamics that set this assemblage in motion, and how such an inquiry can be constructed in contemporary anthropology.

There is a bewildering array of different forces in the border-zone, from military groups to aid organizations, and from transhumant pastoralists to anthropologists and historians. I did fieldwork in the border-zone for eighteen months, in 2010-12, during the period in which South Sudan seceded from Sudan, and became a state.

This dissertation makes a series of second-order observations about the principal modes of understanding the conflict in Sudan and South Sudan. I judge that a number of attempts to understand this border-zone in history, anthropology, and journalism, are inadequate. One of the principal approaches taken is to narrativize the history of the border-zone in terms of three civil wars: the first (1955-1972) and second (1983-2005) Sudanese civil wars, and the current South Sudanese civil war. These narratives are either written as tragedies, or as progressive histories, and turn on a periodization in which declarations of peace correspond to qualitative shifts in life in the border-zone. Such narratives are neither able to account for the strong continuities that this dissertation will show existed in the border-zone throughout the second half of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st, nor are they able to articulate what is emergent in the current configuration of the border-zone assemblage. I argue that these impasses are exemplary of a more general blockage in attempts to understand the temporality and dynamics of contemporary conflict, particularly in Northeast and Central Africa.

The judgment that this dissertation makes is based on a conceptual clarification of the terms used by observers of Sudan and South Sudan to understand the recent history of the border-zone. This dissertation undertakes an analysis of several key terms, such as 'civil war,' and 'state,' and tests them against the Sudanese border-zone.

To do so, this dissertation analyzes its recent history. I find that none of the key terms, in the way they are deployed by the observers that I investigate, are adequate unless they are reconfigured. The border-zone poses great challenges to an anthropologist attempting to give an adequate account of its dynamics. It is composed of a number of elements, such as ongoing negotiations between Sudan and South Sudan over the final location of the border, and military movements by a series of groups whose relationship to the armies of the two states is ambiguous. Each of these elements retains properties and interior dynamics that are not causally related to the other elements within the assemblage. Thus, for instance, negotiations in Addis Ababa have a form, a venue, and a mode of practice that do not depend on military confrontations in the border-zone, and such confrontations, equally, are contoured by rhythms (such as those of the seasons), that are distinct from the dynamics of the negotiations.

This dissertation finds that existing accounts of the border-zone both refuse to acknowledge the relative independence of the elements that constitute the Sudanese border-zone as an object of inquiry, and thus assume (normatively or actually) correspondence relations between political statements and military movements, and insist on the separation of other elements of the assemblage, such as between inter-state negotiations over the border, and transhumant grazing rights. Such accounts fail to respond to the challenge of analyzing the dynamic inter-relationship of elements that do not produce a homogenous apparatus in which parts are placed in causal relation.

The labor of this dissertation, however, is not simply critical. It also gives an account of the dynamics of the border-zone, and of what is emergent in this assemblage. I argue that the principal change to the transhumant forms of life that exist in the border-zone occurred neither with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 (and an end to the twenty-two year long second civil war), nor with South Sudanese secession, and the putative imposition of an absolute border of state sovereignty onto flexible lines of pastoralist grazing. Instead, I trace the transformations of the border-zone to the emergence, in the 1980s and 1990s, of a military mode of exchange and predation, which super-imposed itself on forms of military, political, and economic organization orientated around kinship structures. I argue that this emergent form of organization calls into question the adequacy of accounts that periodize Sudan's history, and instead argue for an account of the border-zone that insists on the importance of intensifications and dynamic affordances as conceptual operators, rather than civil wars and periods of peace.

This dissertation thus attempts a two-fold labor. It analyzes the Sudanese border-zone, and elucidates a number of emergent dynamics that afford capacities to the elements that constitute the assemblage. This dissertation also inquiries into the adequacy of a series of conceptual and practical forms of inquiry currently employed by observers in the border-zone, and poses the question of what a contemporary anthropology of conflict would look like, in an assemblage in which anthropological second-order observation is only one species of observation amongst many others, and when such second-order observations also form part of the dynamics of the conflict.

This dissertation takes up the theme of collaboration between the human sciences and natural sciences and asks how technical, veridictional and ethical vectors in such co-labor can be inquired into today.

I specify the problem of collaboration, between forms of knowledge, as a contemporary one. This contemporary problem links the recent past of the institutional relations between the human and natural sciences to a present experience of anthropological engagement with a novel field of bioengineering practice, called synthetic biology.

I compare two modes of engagement, in which I participated during 2006-2011. One project, called Human Practices, based within the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), instantiated an anthropological mode of inquiry, explicitly oriented to naming ethical problems for collaboration. This project, conducted in collaboration with Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, took as a challenge the invention of an appropriate practice to indeterminate ethical problems. Flourishing, a translation of the ancient Greek term eudaemonia, was a central term in orienting the Human Practices project. This term was used to posit ethical questions outside of the instrumental rationality of the sciences, and on which the Human Practices project would seek to work.

A second project, the Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) project, based at the Arizona State University's Center for Nanotechnology in Society (ASU-CNS), was an explicitly `method driven' project, whose rationale was for human scientists, through the use of a method, to act as mediums for the reflexivity, and self-observation, of research scientists relative to their on-going projects. The aim was for such interaction and self-observation to produce modulations of thought and practice within research settings. I used the method, from May-December 2009, within a bioengineering laboratory of a newly established Department of Biosystems science and engineering (D-BSSE) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH).

The comparison on which I reflect is between one mode of engagement characterized by its encompassing ethical orientation, and a mode characterized by it methodology and orientation to the latent social aspects of research decisions, made within on-going work. With respect to their relation, I diagnose the problematic effects of parameterizing the goods of biology and the stakes of collaboration solely within the dominant ameliorative and industrial norms and values of the scientific field.

The general demand in the present, to modify the practice of science with respect to ethical questions, was in this case unable to be actualized. I argue that the projects in which I participated were structured in a double bind situation in which the transformation of the ethical field in which bioscience operates, was simultaneously demanded (by a range of funding agencies, political activists, bio scientists and human scientists) and undermined. I argue that the discord comes from incommensurable conceptions and embodied stances to the ethical ends and practices of knowing.

This blockage is set within a broader historical problematization of the relation between forms and practices of science, within research venues from the mid-19th Century to the present. The intellectual and ethical breakdowns arising from within the practice of collaboration in the present, between a specific set of bioscientific and engineering practices and two social science modes of engagement, are thus situated within a historical problematization of the relation of science and ethics.

In this dissertation I examine the forms and possibilities of truth-speaking in contemporary Italian news and media industry. I ask the following questions: 1) What does an Italian contemporary journalist need to do in order to be acknowledged as a truth-teller? 2) How does technological innovation, and in particular portable video-technology, influence self-reflexivity? 3) What kind of relation to the political present does truth-telling enable?

I assume Italy's news and media industry as a "case-study" rather than as a self-enclosed field because my focus is on a problem rather than on a "culture". The approach followed in this dissertation is thus a conceptual one: rather than highlighting the Italian cultural specificity, I seek to conceptually articulate problems in news and media that, while more manifest in Italy, belong to contemporary news and media industry per se. Approaching Italian journalism as a "case-study" enables the author to address a more general topic: the transformation of contemporary forms of self-reflexivity in the sway of technological and political change, and, in particular, of that quintessential form of self-reflexivity that is truth-speaking. Since I adopt a conceptual approach, I explore, where I find it necessary, "cases" seemingly "far away from the field", such as the semiotics of all-news channel Aljazeera's website (Chapter II); the ethics of BBC's treatment of the Libyan revolution (Chapter III); or the use of portable media in the Libyan revolution itself (Chapter IV). Every chapter focuses on a specific aspect of truth-speaking: its relation to self-reflexivity, to economy, to technology, and to aesthetics.

This dissertation attempts to put anthropology in conversation with "the book." It does so through an empirical specification of mass book digitization, the industrial-scale, retrospective conversion of books into digital form. Such mass digitization is the work of research libraries, Internet companies, non-profit organizations, national governments, and the computer scientists, digital librarians, and the lawyers and administrators who advise, encourage, and support them.

The dissertation approaches mass digitization as a venue for plumbing the turbulent waters of what I consider the "contemporary book": an arena of experimentation arising from the productive, seismic encounter of the modern book apparatus with an emergent assemblage in motion around the production, authorization, storage, preservation, circulation, and production of knowledge. By the "contemporary book," I refer to the modern book apparatus (dispositif) as it is being worked upon, reconfigured, and called into question in the early twenty-first century.

The activities of the digitizers I studied are based upon a shared conviction that the book and its institutions are "closed" and need to be "opened": books are "inaccessible" or "locked up" by virtue of their materiality (their printedness); by the institutions that store and keep them (physical libraries); and by the state's often misguided regulation (copyright). For them, mass digitization is an important development in moving from the closed nature of the modern book apparatus to a remediated knowledge infrastructure, a future book. If it could be achieved, mass digitization would be a breakthrough in the long-anticipated opening of the book.

Primary research for the dissertation was conducted at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, CA. Additional research took place in a variety of locations in the United States, in specific relation to the public controversy around the Google Book Search Settlement.

The dissertation critically examines the process of discovery, thought and language at the frontier of modern science. It is based on two and a half years of ethnographic research at the particle accelerator complex, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland. In March 2010, the LHC began the world's highest energy experiments as a probe into the structure of matter and forces of nature. In the light of the LHC experiments, the dissertation investigates the relation of general beliefs and technical procedures of science with the principles of classification of knowledge, to show how they conjointly constitute a specific cultural or symbolic mode of apprehending the world, and to inquire how this mode is expressed, affirmed and maintained in everyday behavior.

Dwelling amongst the particle physics community at CERN, I observed that conceptions of matter and energy were derived from submerged assumptions about how the universe works. These assumptions took the form of proscriptions and dualisms: values do not affect physical reality, the mind does not participate in the universe, or conventions do not impinge on laws of physics. In spite of this, and perhaps more interesting, I found a few puzzling concepts in specific data-sets of theory, experiment and instrumentation, that confront and challenge, quite effectively to my mind, the separations of subject and object, or sign and thing, in a discipline that ostensibly proceeds from their strict separation.

The dissertation examines the classification of handedness (right and left) in particle interactions with the underlying question: Does physics admit of orientation? To characterize right or left presupposes an observer, and conventions. But if physics proceeds from the separation of subject and object, then how can it posit - as it does - a physical universe with a preferred orientation? The focus here shifts to the experimental concept of "signatures." Decays from particle collisions, such as a Higgs boson decaying into two photons, are termed signatures and constitute the unit of discovery in particle physics. Focusing on the physics signature, I inquire into the potential relevance of formal theories of semiotics in considering natural signs. Finally, my work explores the rich material culture of the laboratory through the lens of a concept of pure circulation - energy - as it flows in the magnetic fields and currents of the accelerator. By analyzing a concept that attempts to bring together Maxwell's equations of the field with the exigencies of machine parameters, the research arrives at a key moment in the life of a laboratory when the division of theory and practice stands critically exposed.

Bio-fabrication: Experiments and Experiences in Ethics and Sciences provides an account of an experiment I undertook in ethics and anthropology as part of the International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology, the BIOFAB. It offers an analysis of the facility's programmatic attempt to actualize a core claim of the new field of synthetic biology: that living beings can be conceived as collections of interoperable genetic components, constructed through rational design, standardized, and fabricated at scale. It provides a diagnosis of the scientific, vocational, and ethical limits of this endeavor. And demonstrates why, in the end, loyalty to truth and seriousness required an exit from the both the mode and stakes of my undertaking.

My experiment with the BIOFAB constituted a distinctive and final phase of a five-year project to design Human Practices, which began as part of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). Extending ontological and ethical lines of inquiry characteristic of an anthropology of the contemporary, I asked: how are researchers in the BIOFAB bringing things into the world? How are they naming these things, distributing, and modifying them? Equally important, what habits, dispositions, and capacities are being cultivated and managed in order to make such ontological work possible? And, most crucially, what is the price to be paid?

Following intensive participation-observation of the biologists whose task was to put into operation the BIOFAB's strategic vision, the dissertation examines a double-bind at the heart synthetic biology: those who are most capable of taking on the technical challenge of standardizing biological parts are also those least ready to fully commit themselves to such a vision for the future of bioengineering. The ethical and scientific challenge for these biologists was thus how to take a stance toward their work that would simultaneously allow them proceed with a technically difficult experiment, while distancing themselves from the lack of scientific seriousness often attributed to the BIOFAB's undertaking. As the thesis demonstrates, a similar challenge proved equally troublesome for me.

The dissertation concludes that the attempt to incorporate ethics and anthropology as defining elements of synthetic biology reactivates a typically modern problem. Despite efforts to remediate the relations of ethics and science, actual asymmetry in power between biologists and non-biologists encumbers such work. Crucially, the thesis shows that this problem is as characteristic of governance at the highest levels as it is the micro-practices of life in the BIOFAB. In the case of my experiment, such difficulties initially required raising a second-order question: how are asymmetries in power being formed and how might they be unsettled? Ultimately, however, they required an ethics of exit: how can persistent disconnections between power, truth, and ethics be productively refused and, where necessary, left behind?

This research is an attempt to examine elements in the classic relations of state actors to the agency of the individual through the medium of technology development and deployment. The chapters analyze discourses surrounding the notions of `the state' and `technology' as fields for exploration of the Foucaultian problematizations of veridiction, jurisdiction, and subjectivation. Specifically, how have these two poles interacted in practices of `truth telling', governance, and the formation of citizen and ethnic identities.

In particular, the task at hand is to think about the deployment of technology in the configuration of affect in relation to an identity, `the Japanese'. Japan had started as a place of liminality in the research: the non-West modern, that didn't quite fit the mold of so many classical narratives of modernity. But as my inquiry continued the questions turned more sharply towards an investigation of practices of affect and subjectivity. `What part did technology play in the development of a Japanese state identity?' gradually transformed into a montage of narratives in which the technical simply met the subjective, and the questions emerged from this meeting. For example, what is the force exerted by a practice of memory of the atomic bomb upon an idea of peace? And, in the representation of a national disaster what narrative tropes are invoked and hazarded in the contest of the `national experience'?

I select a series of technological developments spanning three centuries of Japanese history and utilize the historical narrative as a space for raising these questions as they emerge and are articulated/argued about by the actors involved, as well as by the `second-order observers': the historians and social philosophers that mark and delimit the field of `Japanese history'.

This thesis is an anthropological study of the making of global health on China's grounds, based on inquiry into the health programs assembled around China's poultry sector amidst outbreaks of avian influenza. Influenza pandemics are global in scale, but since the 1960s flu experts have hypothetically located the origin, or "epicenter," of flu pandemics in southern China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork among flu experts, Chinese veterinarians, and farmers, the thesis describes how the farmed ecology of Poyang Lake in southern China is being studied as a possible epicenter of influenza emergence. As global dangers are attributed to specific Chinese environments and agricultural practices, I follow flu experts as they move from the laboratory to the field and as they shift their scientific object from the sequence to the ecosystem. This movement outside the laboratory is also a movement onto China's grounds, a motion that I argue raises three anthropological problems.

First, emerging transnational scientific collaborations around avian influenza go well beyond the idea that China is a political obstacle to global health. These scientific transactions taking place on China's grounds reframe the historical problematization of China and modern science, as a rising China plays a fundamental role in shaping the contemporary global science of influenza.

Second, unlike other well-studied Asian biotech sites, bird flu research is grounded in transactions with farmers, livestock animals, and rural ways of life. The thesis analyzes how influenza experts adjust their scientific concepts and categories to account for historically and culturally specific practices of breeding and raising livestock, and shows how these livestock breeding practices continue to exceed and complicate scientific categories.

Lastly, the thesis concludes by showing how China's livestock veterinarians become controversial mediating figures between the lab and the farm, transforming the social break between the scientist and the livestock breeder into an ethical problem of vocation and "quality" (suzhi). As a result, the thesis argues that the movement from the lab to the field calls for an anthropology of science that attends to vocation and social relation as ethical problems, going beyond the sociology of scientific fact construction.

This work examines how the conceptualization of knowledge as both problem and solution reconfigured intelligence and law enforcement after 9/11. The idea was that more information should be collected, and better analyzed. If the intelligence that resulted was shared, then terrorists could be identified, their acts predicted, and ultimately prevented. Law enforcement entered into this scenario in the United States, and internationally. "Policing terrorism" refers to the engagement of state and local law enforcement in intelligence, as well as approaching terrorism as a legal crime, in addition to or as opposed to an act of war. Two venues are explored: fusion centers in the United States and the international organization of police, Interpol. The configuration can be thought of schematically as operating through the set of law, discipline and security. Intelligence is predominantly a security approach. It modulates that within its purview, wielding the techniques and technologies that are here discussed.

The dissertation is divided into two sections: Intelligence and Policing Terrorism. In the first, intelligence is taken up as a term, and its changes in referent and concept are examined. The Preface and Chapter One present a general introduction to the contemporary situation and intelligence, via Sherman Kent, as knowledge, organization and activities. Chapter Two traces the development of intelligence in the United States as a craft and profession. Chapter Three discusses some of the issues involving the intersection of intelligence and policy, and how those manifested in the aftermath of 9/11 and the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The second section examines the turn to policing terrorism, beginning, in Chapter Four, with how Interpol has dealt with bioterrorism, and an examination of the shifting conceptualization of biological threats in international law. Moving from threats to their consequences, Chapter Five takes up the concept of an event in order to analyze the common comparison of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Chapters Six and Seven turn to fieldwork done in the United States, with an examination of the suspicious activity reporting system and law enforcement's inclusion in the Information Sharing Environment, focusing on fusion centers and data mining.