Alberto Corsín Jiménez
Biographic Data
| ID | 74378 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alberto Corsín Jiménez |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alberto Corsín |
| FAMILY NAME | Jiménez |
| SIGNATURE | JIMÉNEZ A C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1360-4060 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 410 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1956 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Augural Territories
In this article I introduce the concept of augural territories to theorize the urbanism that emerged during pandemic lockdowns. I draw on ethnographic research in Madrid to examine how community‐based responses—including mutual aid networks, food pantries and neighbourhood associations—disrupted the spatial and temporal logics of territorial urban governance. Through logistical improvisations, the design and deployment of ad hoc transport and dis…
Popular logistics for collective unpredictabilities in pandemic Madrid
This article develops the concept of collective unpredictability as a socio-geographic gathering and sensibility for redescribing territories of urban habitation. It describes in detail the databases, privacy protocols, call centres, inventory and queue flow management systems, spatial surveys, food supply chains, transport operations, credit and voucher economies, and financial accounting systems designed by community organizations during the CO…
Afterword
The language of capture is everywhere, from accumulation by dispossession to carbon capture, from the capture of attention to the capture of subatomic particles. Capture, it would seem, has become capitalism's technology of self-detection. In this article I take a broader look at capture by placing it in a wider comparative and anthropological canvas. Specifically, I make a case for thinking of capture as part of an axis of transformation whose u…
Informe sobre la situación del área de antropología social en las universidades y centros de investigación en relación con el reconocimiento de la actividad investigadora por parte de la CNEAI en form…
La evaluación de la investigación ha sido una actividad constante de la producción de conocimiento científico. Buena aparte de su formalización se ha realizado en las últimas décadas. El uso de indicadores bibliométricos y cuantitativos de productividad han sido las herramientas más utilizadas, pero en la actualidad existen ya importantes críticas a una parte de los procedimientos seguidos. Guiados por estas críticas, presentamos en este informe …
Opening Editorial
Our generation of editors faces a shared set of critical challenges (ESTS Edi
Public, libre, commons
This paper tells the story of Decide Madrid (Decide), a civic tech platform designed by Madrid's municipality in 2015 in the spirit of the autonomous and hacker philosophies that spearheaded the Spanish Occupy or 15M movement. We develop a biographical account of Decide to show how the design of the platform was modified over the course of four years to accommodate shifting ideas of how digital infrastructures can channel, both online and offline…
An Anthropological Trompe L'Oeil for a Common World
Our political age is characterized by forms of description as 'big' as the world itself: talk of 'public knowledge' and 'public goods,' 'the commons' or 'global justice' create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of des…
Ethnographic Drafts and Wild Archives
Anthropological Entrapments
This article develops an argument for ‘entrapment’ as a heuristic of social process. Building on classic and contemporary ethnographies of traps and machine interfaces, the article offers the language of entrapment as an alternative to other idioms of complexity in social theory, such as ‘relations’, ‘entanglements’, and ‘assemblages’. The heuristic appeal of entrapment lies in its ability to kindle modes of description where place and landscape,…
En relación
Nos complace celebrar el cambio de nombre de nuestra revista con una entrevista a Marilyn Strathern, una de las antropólogas más originales e influyentes de los últimos cincuenta años. El texto consta de tres partes. La primera parte ofrece una panorámica de la trayectoria académica y vida institucional de Strathern. La segunda parte presenta una introducción a su obra. En la tercera y última parte se ofrece una entrevista que Alberto Corsín Jimé…
The anthropology of traps
Traps connect not only predator and prey, but mind and materiality, technology and landscape, and infrastructure and ecology. Through them, bodies, knowledge practices, materials and environments are assembled in transformative encounters which, because of their lethal agency, have emotive and moral force. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, the authors explore the conceptual bridges and disciplinary admixtures invited by ethnographic atte…
Prototyping Cultures
Spiderweb Anthropologies
What Is Analysis
Recent years in anthropology have seen a noticeable trend, moving from debates about theory to a concern with method. So while some generations ago we would tend to identify ourselves as anthropologists with reference to particular theoretical paradigms-for example, Marxism, (post-)structuralism, cognitivism, cultural materialism, interpretivism-these days our tendency is to align ourselves, often eclectically, with proposals conceived as methodo…
A celebration of Roy Wagner and ‘The reciprocity of perspectives’
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Autoconstrução Redux
Este artigo recupera o conceito de autoconstrução como uma heurística para o método e a teoria antropológica. Com base no uso original do conceito nos estudos urbanos, eu sugiro que a autoconstrução oferece uma visada capaz de dar conta não só dos projetos de base que mobilizam recursos, materiais e relações de um modo inventivo e transformador das ecologias urbanas, mas que também ajuda a delinear a forma como a teoria, em si, é autoconstruída: …
The Anthropology of Organisations
Anthropology of Organisations
Auto-Construction Redux
This article recuperates the concept of auto-construction as a heuristic for anthropological theory and method. Drawing on the concept's original usage in urban studies, I suggest that auto-construction offers a handle for grasping not only how grassroots projects mobilize resources, materials, and relations in ways that are inventive and transformative of urban ecologies but that it also helps outline how theory itself is auto-constructed: the o…
Political exhaustion and the experiment of street
This essay describes the complex negotiations around stranger sociability, public space, and democratic knowledge that shaped the meetings of popular assemblies in the wake of the Spanish 15M/Occupy movement. The work of assembling was 'exhausting', by which participants would mean two things. In one sense, meetings would often turn into tiresome affairs, trying the patience and resilience of participants. In another sense, attendants would descr…
We fall
Mortgage Durée
The article offers an ethnographic analysis of the imagination of the city as a mortgage environment: a space of sociability mediated by interest rates, legal language, square metres, actuary calculations and temporalities, real estate brokers, political and financial corruption, and so on. A central aim is to understand what it may mean for our contemporary political theory and anthropology to say that a society's democratic imagination rests on…
Ethnography
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Ethnos on 2017, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2015.1133688
Auto-borradores
Qué clase de relato es el relato etnográfico? ¿Qué tipo de relaciones sociales y relaciones empíricas se entremezclan y confunden en él? El artículo repasa brevemente la historia de la primera ciencia experimental en el siglo XVII, donde nació el concepto de ‘relación’ como a un tiempo descriptor sociológico (para hablar de ‘relaciones sociales’) y descriptor analítico (para dar razón de fenómenos empíricos). Esta doble capacidad de la relación p…
Forum Rethinking Euro-Anthropology
A remarkable fact of recent developments in Science and Technology Studies is that anthropologists have begun to study the laboratories of natural scientists but have \nnot turned the anthropological gaze onto themselves. Until ethnographic studies of the functioning of anthropology departments in France, Germany, Finland, Japan \nand other countries are done, ‘symmetrical anthropology’, as Latour (2013: 290) calls it, remains unrealised. If the …
The Right to Infrastructure
This paper develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the 'right to infrastructure' as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that have come into being. It describes, first, a genealogy for open source technology, focusing in particular on how open source urban hardware projects may challenge urban theory. It moves then to describe in detail various dimensions and imp…
Trust in anthropology
The article explores some of the assumptions behind the current valence of the notion of trust and in particular its entanglement in discourses of social robustness, the management and reporting of (corporate) knowledge, and its underlying culture and systems of responsibility. It unfolds by contrasting classic and contemporary anthropological work on cultures of suspicion, culpability and spiritual ambiguity with the new vocabulary of capitalist…
On Space As A Capacity
This article is about space and social relationships. More precisely, it is about the space of and in social relationships. It is also about the efficacy of social relationships in segregating their own contexts of meaning and value. The article also addresses the question of how agency comes about. This 'coming about' of agency, its swelling and appearance in a structure of meaning, is what I call 'capacity'. Social relationships have 'capacity'…
An anthropological concept of the concept
This article attempts to sketch a new anthropological epistemology. It does so by revisiting the work that concepts do in economic models, and by suggesting an alternative 'anthropological concept of the concept' for the economy. The article looks to how concepts create their own limits of meaning and uses the very idea of limit to rethink how conceptual thought out-grows and transforms itself. We develop our epistemology by looking at the socio-…
The anthropology of traps
Traps connect not only predator and prey, but mind and materiality, technology and landscape, and infrastructure and ecology. Through them, bodies, knowledge practices, materials and environments are assembled in transformative encounters which, because of their lethal agency, have emotive and moral force. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, the authors explore the conceptual bridges and disciplinary admixtures invited by ethnographic atte…
Auto-Construction Redux
This article recuperates the concept of auto-construction as a heuristic for anthropological theory and method. Drawing on the concept's original usage in urban studies, I suggest that auto-construction offers a handle for grasping not only how grassroots projects mobilize resources, materials, and relations in ways that are inventive and transformative of urban ecologies but that it also helps outline how theory itself is auto-constructed: the o…
The atmospheric person
The Occupy movement in Spain, locally known as the May 15 movement (15M), singularly developed throughout 2011 into a network of local neighborhood "popular assemblies." Over one hundred assemblies cropped up in Madrid alone. This article explores the conceptual and infrastructural work invested by the assemblies in the production of a particular experience of neighborhood (barrio). The barrio has become the centerpiece of the assemblies' politic…
Assembling Neighbors
This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Fuzzy Studies" reports on the rise of the "popular assemblies" movement that swept the streets of Madrid in the wake of the May 15, 2011, occupation of Puerta del Sol. Assemblies have since taken installation in public spaces as infrastructural with significant methodological implications. Their incorporation into the cityscape has demanded of participants an inventive deployment of techniques …
Changing Scales and the Scales of Change
This article is an elucidation of what anthropology can say about social and economic change, and about its relationship to political economy at large. I locate the argument within the recent debate about 'modernity' in anthropology, because of the debate's conspicuousness, and because of its concern with describing and analysing 'change'. The argument is based on an ethnographic and institutional analysis of urban change in the city of Antofagas…
Political exhaustion and the experiment of street
This essay describes the complex negotiations around stranger sociability, public space, and democratic knowledge that shaped the meetings of popular assemblies in the wake of the Spanish 15M/Occupy movement. The work of assembling was 'exhausting', by which participants would mean two things. In one sense, meetings would often turn into tiresome affairs, trying the patience and resilience of participants. In another sense, attendants would descr…
Ethnography
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Ethnos on 2017, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2015.1133688
Working out personhood
Towards interactive professional ethics
Relations and disproportions
In this article, I provide an ethnographic exploration of some of the terms for imagining knowledge in today's "knowledge society," and I attempt to situate the kind of "sociology of knowledge" behind this imagination. In particular, I am interested in the sociological imagination of knowledge in terms of a relational economy, in which knowledge flows uninterruptedly to create and shape what Yochai Benkler has dubbed "the wealth of networks." I p…
Mortgage Durée
The article offers an ethnographic analysis of the imagination of the city as a mortgage environment: a space of sociability mediated by interest rates, legal language, square metres, actuary calculations and temporalities, real estate brokers, political and financial corruption, and so on. A central aim is to understand what it may mean for our contemporary political theory and anthropology to say that a society's democratic imagination rests on…
Spanishrevolution (Respond to this article at http
The article reports on the street protests that took over Spanish cities earlier in May and June. The protests have been explained as a response on the part of new media democratic networks to the governance of the economic crises by corrupt political and financial classes. We offer here a tentative chronology of the events, and essay instead an argument about a revitalised municipalist tradition, that sees in the plaza the centrepiece of new for…
Daribi kinship at perpendicular angles
What are the contours of such "knowledge" that does double duty both as a public good or commons and as a source of individual empowerment and liberty? This article offers an analysis of the epistemological organisation of the "knowledge economy" by shooting ethnographic work on Free Software through a playful trompe l'oeil of Roy Wagner's classic piece on Daribi kinship. It offers a preliminary template for thinking of Euro-American knowledge as…
The Political Proportions of Public Knowledge
The article offers a critique of the proportional epistemology shaping political and economic theory about the public value of knowledge and opens up the potential for alternative descriptions afforded by ethnography. It does so by exploring one particular exemplification of the new public value of knowledge found in political calls for making Science and Society converge. Such convergence takes at least three forms: the public value of research;…
En relación
Nos complace celebrar el cambio de nombre de nuestra revista con una entrevista a Marilyn Strathern, una de las antropólogas más originales e influyentes de los últimos cincuenta años. El texto consta de tres partes. La primera parte ofrece una panorámica de la trayectoria académica y vida institucional de Strathern. La segunda parte presenta una introducción a su obra. En la tercera y última parte se ofrece una entrevista que Alberto Corsín Jimé…
The Interior Design of [Free] Knowledge
What would a “free knowledge bank’look like if it were to be designed as an architectural object? The challenge was posed by El Ranchito, a curatorial project based at Madrid’s contemporary art centre, Matadero, to the art and architectural collective Zoohaus in 2011. The project aimed to turn into a 3-D model (hereafter known as the Offfficina) a variety of architectural “collective intelligences’ (based on do-it-yourself, retrofitted, community…
Public, libre, commons
This paper tells the story of Decide Madrid (Decide), a civic tech platform designed by Madrid's municipality in 2015 in the spirit of the autonomous and hacker philosophies that spearheaded the Spanish Occupy or 15M movement. We develop a biographical account of Decide to show how the design of the platform was modified over the course of four years to accommodate shifting ideas of how digital infrastructures can channel, both online and offline…
Forum Rethinking Euro-Anthropology
A remarkable fact of recent developments in Science and Technology Studies is that anthropologists have begun to study the laboratories of natural scientists but have \nnot turned the anthropological gaze onto themselves. Until ethnographic studies of the functioning of anthropology departments in France, Germany, Finland, Japan \nand other countries are done, ‘symmetrical anthropology’, as Latour (2013: 290) calls it, remains unrealised. If the …
Popular logistics for collective unpredictabilities in pandemic Madrid
This article develops the concept of collective unpredictability as a socio-geographic gathering and sensibility for redescribing territories of urban habitation. It describes in detail the databases, privacy protocols, call centres, inventory and queue flow management systems, spatial surveys, food supply chains, transport operations, credit and voucher economies, and financial accounting systems designed by community organizations during the CO…
Why an open access publishing cooperative can work
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has recently announced that it will soon issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) to invite potential publishers to bid for the business of managing the association¿s publishing program (see Schmid 2015). The new contract would begin January 1, 2018 and likely run for the next ten years. Because the AAA is the world¿s largest publisher of anthropology titles (twenty-one journals and Anthropology News), th…
Teaching the field
In this paper I would like to reflect on the confrontational and contradictory forces that make us ‘ethnographers’ and ‘anthropologists’, and of the consequences that accompany the way we position ourselves against our discipline and against ourselves as practitioners of that discipline. The paper may thus be read as an elucidation of boundary-formations: of how we classify and fence the kind of knowledge that we believe to be studying/making, an…
Juan Valera y la generacion de 1868
Teaching the field
In this paper I would like to reflect on the confrontational and contradictory forces that make us ‘ethnographers’ and ‘anthropologists’, and of the consequences that accompany the way we position ourselves against our discipline and against ourselves as practitioners of that discipline. The paper may thus be read as an elucidation of boundary-formations: of how we classify and fence the kind of knowledge that we believe to be studying/making, an…
Working out personhood
On Space As A Capacity
This article is about space and social relationships. More precisely, it is about the space of and in social relationships. It is also about the efficacy of social relationships in segregating their own contexts of meaning and value. The article also addresses the question of how agency comes about. This 'coming about' of agency, its swelling and appearance in a structure of meaning, is what I call 'capacity'. Social relationships have 'capacity'…
Changing Scales and the Scales of Change
This article is an elucidation of what anthropology can say about social and economic change, and about its relationship to political economy at large. I locate the argument within the recent debate about 'modernity' in anthropology, because of the debate's conspicuousness, and because of its concern with describing and analysing 'change'. The argument is based on an ethnographic and institutional analysis of urban change in the city of Antofagas…
Towards interactive professional ethics
An anthropological concept of the concept
This article attempts to sketch a new anthropological epistemology. It does so by revisiting the work that concepts do in economic models, and by suggesting an alternative 'anthropological concept of the concept' for the economy. The article looks to how concepts create their own limits of meaning and uses the very idea of limit to rethink how conceptual thought out-grows and transforms itself. We develop our epistemology by looking at the socio-…
Madrid “En Construcción”
Culture and Well-Being
Relations and disproportions
In this article, I provide an ethnographic exploration of some of the terms for imagining knowledge in today's "knowledge society," and I attempt to situate the kind of "sociology of knowledge" behind this imagination. In particular, I am interested in the sociological imagination of knowledge in terms of a relational economy, in which knowledge flows uninterruptedly to create and shape what Yochai Benkler has dubbed "the wealth of networks." I p…
The Political Proportions of Public Knowledge
The article offers a critique of the proportional epistemology shaping political and economic theory about the public value of knowledge and opens up the potential for alternative descriptions afforded by ethnography. It does so by exploring one particular exemplification of the new public value of knowledge found in political calls for making Science and Society converge. Such convergence takes at least three forms: the public value of research;…
Spanishrevolution (Respond to this article at http
The article reports on the street protests that took over Spanish cities earlier in May and June. The protests have been explained as a response on the part of new media democratic networks to the governance of the economic crises by corrupt political and financial classes. We offer here a tentative chronology of the events, and essay instead an argument about a revitalised municipalist tradition, that sees in the plaza the centrepiece of new for…
Daribi kinship at perpendicular angles
What are the contours of such "knowledge" that does double duty both as a public good or commons and as a source of individual empowerment and liberty? This article offers an analysis of the epistemological organisation of the "knowledge economy" by shooting ethnographic work on Free Software through a playful trompe l'oeil of Roy Wagner's classic piece on Daribi kinship. It offers a preliminary template for thinking of Euro-American knowledge as…
Trust in anthropology
The article explores some of the assumptions behind the current valence of the notion of trust and in particular its entanglement in discourses of social robustness, the management and reporting of (corporate) knowledge, and its underlying culture and systems of responsibility. It unfolds by contrasting classic and contemporary anthropological work on cultures of suspicion, culpability and spiritual ambiguity with the new vocabulary of capitalist…
An Anthropological Trompe l'Oeil for a Common World
Our political age is characterized by forms of description as ‘big’ as the world itself: talk of ‘public knowledge’ and ‘public goods,’ ‘the commons’ or ‘global justice’ create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of des…
The atmospheric person
The Occupy movement in Spain, locally known as the May 15 movement (15M), singularly developed throughout 2011 into a network of local neighborhood "popular assemblies." Over one hundred assemblies cropped up in Madrid alone. This article explores the conceptual and infrastructural work invested by the assemblies in the production of a particular experience of neighborhood (barrio). The barrio has become the centerpiece of the assemblies' politic…
Assembling Neighbors
This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Fuzzy Studies" reports on the rise of the "popular assemblies" movement that swept the streets of Madrid in the wake of the May 15, 2011, occupation of Puerta del Sol. Assemblies have since taken installation in public spaces as infrastructural with significant methodological implications. Their incorporation into the cityscape has demanded of participants an inventive deployment of techniques …
The Right to Infrastructure
This paper develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the 'right to infrastructure' as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that have come into being. It describes, first, a genealogy for open source technology, focusing in particular on how open source urban hardware projects may challenge urban theory. It moves then to describe in detail various dimensions and imp…
The Interior Design of [Free] Knowledge
What would a “free knowledge bank’look like if it were to be designed as an architectural object? The challenge was posed by El Ranchito, a curatorial project based at Madrid’s contemporary art centre, Matadero, to the art and architectural collective Zoohaus in 2011. The project aimed to turn into a 3-D model (hereafter known as the Offfficina) a variety of architectural “collective intelligences’ (based on do-it-yourself, retrofitted, community…
Forum Rethinking Euro-Anthropology
A remarkable fact of recent developments in Science and Technology Studies is that anthropologists have begun to study the laboratories of natural scientists but have \nnot turned the anthropological gaze onto themselves. Until ethnographic studies of the functioning of anthropology departments in France, Germany, Finland, Japan \nand other countries are done, ‘symmetrical anthropology’, as Latour (2013: 290) calls it, remains unrealised. If the …
Why an open access publishing cooperative can work
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has recently announced that it will soon issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) to invite potential publishers to bid for the business of managing the association¿s publishing program (see Schmid 2015). The new contract would begin January 1, 2018 and likely run for the next ten years. Because the AAA is the world¿s largest publisher of anthropology titles (twenty-one journals and Anthropology News), th…
Auto-borradores
Qué clase de relato es el relato etnográfico? ¿Qué tipo de relaciones sociales y relaciones empíricas se entremezclan y confunden en él? El artículo repasa brevemente la historia de la primera ciencia experimental en el siglo XVII, donde nació el concepto de ‘relación’ como a un tiempo descriptor sociológico (para hablar de ‘relaciones sociales’) y descriptor analítico (para dar razón de fenómenos empíricos). Esta doble capacidad de la relación p…
The Anthropology of Organisations
Anthropology of Organisations
Auto-Construction Redux
This article recuperates the concept of auto-construction as a heuristic for anthropological theory and method. Drawing on the concept's original usage in urban studies, I suggest that auto-construction offers a handle for grasping not only how grassroots projects mobilize resources, materials, and relations in ways that are inventive and transformative of urban ecologies but that it also helps outline how theory itself is auto-constructed: the o…
Sociology (33 works) · Political science (25 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Anthropology (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works)