A Carse
Biographic Data
| ID | 50856 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Carse |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Carse |
| SIGNATURE | CARSE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6457-8448 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 364 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1920 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Afterword: An Elemental Ethnography Toolbox
T he ethnographer, we are often told, is a data collection instrument who learns through gradual attunement to a social world-by participating, observing, interviewing, and writing fieldnotes.But what does the ethnographer do when their research engages with materials, processes, and scales only partially accessible to or comprehensible by means of the established toolbox?This is a conundrum for what we might call elemental ethnography: a suite o…
What Comes after the Conquest of Nature
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
The Feel of 13,000 Containers: How Pilots Learn to Navigate Changing Logistical Environments
This article analyses how the 2016 expansion of the Panama Canal changed the work of the pilots responsible for navigating massive ships through the chokepoint. For pilots, the expansion meant learning to maneuver Neo-Panamax vessels that dwarfed anything in their experience. The pilot training associated with the expansion reveals a paradox at the heart of a shipping industry that pursues efficiencies through economies of scale and automation. I…
Chokepoints: Anthropologies of the Constricted Contemporary
This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or 'choke' the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints - ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more - recasts longstanding anthropological concerns with the character and consequences of global circulation or 'flow'. Chokepoints, we argue, are zon…
The dredger
The dredging of navigable waterways is a critical but often overlooked precondition for global trade. Focusing on the figure of “the dredger”—which can refer to a machine that excavates underwater sediment or a person who does that work—this short article links the modern maritime industry, colonial expansion, and terracentric anthropological thought. I argue that the figure of the dredger is useful for understanding the collective geological age…
Mitigation
The ecobiopolitics of environmental mitigation: Remaking fish habitat through the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project
Environmental mitigation has become a catch-all term for efforts to avoid, minimize or compensate for the adverse impacts of development. Through an analysis of the expensive and complex plan developed to mitigate the anticipated impacts of deepening Savannah Harbor, I develop an ecobiopolitical approach to mitigation. Environmental mitigation is triage, involving difficult choices about which entities are worthy of concern and, thus, candidates …
Dirty Landscapes: How Weediness Indexes State Disinvestment and Global Disconnection
Unbuilt and Unfinished
Infrastructures have proven to be useful focal points for understanding social phenomena. The projects of concern in this literature are often considered complete or, if not, their materialization is assumed to be imminent. However, many-if not most-of the engineered artifacts and systems classified as infrastructure exist in states aptly characterized as unbuilt or unfinished. Bringing together scholarship on unbuilt and unfinished infrastructur…
Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity
Several decades ago the sociologist Murray Davis proposed a new field—the sociology of the interesting—based on a proposition: interesting theories deny the assumptions of their audience (“That's Interesting!,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Dec. 1971, pp. 309–44). Noninteresting theories, by contrast, affirm audience assumptions. To make his case, Davis reviewed influential social theories and identified twelve categories of interesting prop…
Toward a political ecology of infrastructure standards: Or, how to think about ships, waterways, sediment, and communities together
Scholars have shown that technical standards play an important role in building global transportation and communication infrastructures, but the environmental standardization efforts associated with infrastructures have received far less attention. Combining scholarship from transportation geography, political ecology, and science and technology studies, we show how global connection is made, maintained, and contested through environmental manage…
Panama Canal Forum: From the Conquest of Nature to the Construction of New Ecologies
Pueblos Perdidos, or How the Lake Ate the River
This chapterexaminesthe relationships between the Panama Canal administration and the nearby rural communitiessometimes called “ pueblos perdidos ” (lost towns). Canal administrators resettled these communities in the early twentieth century when the Chagres River was dammed and Gatun Lake was floodedfor navigation purposes. Drawing on ethnography and oral history, the chapter shows how “lost towns” has remained an apt characterization of canal-c…
Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal
A historical and ethnographic study of the conflict between global transportation and rural development as the two intersect at the Panama Canal. In this innovative book, Ashley Carse traces the water that flows into and out from the Panama Canal to explain how global shipping is entangled with Panama's cultural and physical landscapes. By following container ships as they travel downstream along maritime routes and tracing rivers upstream across…
The Year 2013 in Sociocultural Anthropology: Cultures of Circulation and Anthropological Facts
In this review essay, I explore the relationship between cultures of circulation and anthropological facts. Research published in 2013 advanced the field by attending to the coproduction of globally circulating things (commodities, race, brands, authenticity, blood) and specific cultural landscapes. Building on the field's renewed interest in materiality, scholars showed how anthropological facts are produced at the intersection of interlocking c…
Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed
The Panama Canal requires an enormous volume of fresh water to function. A staggering 52 million gallons are released into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with each of the 35–45 ships that transit the canal daily. The water that facilitates interoceanic transportation and global connection falls as rain across the watershed surrounding the canal and is managed by an extensive system of locks, dams, and hydrographic stations. These technologies – …
Moral Economies of Water Management: Tensions in the Panama Canal Watershed
The sources of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
The Prince Regent's band
Brass instruments in the orchestra: An historical sketch
Th Century Instrumentation
Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed
The Panama Canal requires an enormous volume of fresh water to function. A staggering 52 million gallons are released into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with each of the 35–45 ships that transit the canal daily. The water that facilitates interoceanic transportation and global connection falls as rain across the watershed surrounding the canal and is managed by an extensive system of locks, dams, and hydrographic stations. These technologies – …
Unbuilt and Unfinished
Infrastructures have proven to be useful focal points for understanding social phenomena. The projects of concern in this literature are often considered complete or, if not, their materialization is assumed to be imminent. However, many-if not most-of the engineered artifacts and systems classified as infrastructure exist in states aptly characterized as unbuilt or unfinished. Bringing together scholarship on unbuilt and unfinished infrastructur…
Chokepoints: Anthropologies of the Constricted Contemporary
This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or 'choke' the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints - ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more - recasts longstanding anthropological concerns with the character and consequences of global circulation or 'flow'. Chokepoints, we argue, are zon…
Toward a political ecology of infrastructure standards: Or, how to think about ships, waterways, sediment, and communities together
Scholars have shown that technical standards play an important role in building global transportation and communication infrastructures, but the environmental standardization efforts associated with infrastructures have received far less attention. Combining scholarship from transportation geography, political ecology, and science and technology studies, we show how global connection is made, maintained, and contested through environmental manage…
The Year 2013 in Sociocultural Anthropology: Cultures of Circulation and Anthropological Facts
In this review essay, I explore the relationship between cultures of circulation and anthropological facts. Research published in 2013 advanced the field by attending to the coproduction of globally circulating things (commodities, race, brands, authenticity, blood) and specific cultural landscapes. Building on the field's renewed interest in materiality, scholars showed how anthropological facts are produced at the intersection of interlocking c…
The Feel of 13,000 Containers: How Pilots Learn to Navigate Changing Logistical Environments
This article analyses how the 2016 expansion of the Panama Canal changed the work of the pilots responsible for navigating massive ships through the chokepoint. For pilots, the expansion meant learning to maneuver Neo-Panamax vessels that dwarfed anything in their experience. The pilot training associated with the expansion reveals a paradox at the heart of a shipping industry that pursues efficiencies through economies of scale and automation. I…
Panama Canal Forum: From the Conquest of Nature to the Construction of New Ecologies
The ecobiopolitics of environmental mitigation: Remaking fish habitat through the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project
Environmental mitigation has become a catch-all term for efforts to avoid, minimize or compensate for the adverse impacts of development. Through an analysis of the expensive and complex plan developed to mitigate the anticipated impacts of deepening Savannah Harbor, I develop an ecobiopolitical approach to mitigation. Environmental mitigation is triage, involving difficult choices about which entities are worthy of concern and, thus, candidates …
Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity
Several decades ago the sociologist Murray Davis proposed a new field—the sociology of the interesting—based on a proposition: interesting theories deny the assumptions of their audience (“That's Interesting!,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Dec. 1971, pp. 309–44). Noninteresting theories, by contrast, affirm audience assumptions. To make his case, Davis reviewed influential social theories and identified twelve categories of interesting prop…
Th Century Instrumentation
Brass instruments in the orchestra: An historical sketch
The Prince Regent's band
The sources of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
Moral Economies of Water Management: Tensions in the Panama Canal Watershed
Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed
The Panama Canal requires an enormous volume of fresh water to function. A staggering 52 million gallons are released into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with each of the 35–45 ships that transit the canal daily. The water that facilitates interoceanic transportation and global connection falls as rain across the watershed surrounding the canal and is managed by an extensive system of locks, dams, and hydrographic stations. These technologies – …
Pueblos Perdidos, or How the Lake Ate the River
This chapterexaminesthe relationships between the Panama Canal administration and the nearby rural communitiessometimes called “ pueblos perdidos ” (lost towns). Canal administrators resettled these communities in the early twentieth century when the Chagres River was dammed and Gatun Lake was floodedfor navigation purposes. Drawing on ethnography and oral history, the chapter shows how “lost towns” has remained an apt characterization of canal-c…
Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal
A historical and ethnographic study of the conflict between global transportation and rural development as the two intersect at the Panama Canal. In this innovative book, Ashley Carse traces the water that flows into and out from the Panama Canal to explain how global shipping is entangled with Panama's cultural and physical landscapes. By following container ships as they travel downstream along maritime routes and tracing rivers upstream across…
The Year 2013 in Sociocultural Anthropology: Cultures of Circulation and Anthropological Facts
In this review essay, I explore the relationship between cultures of circulation and anthropological facts. Research published in 2013 advanced the field by attending to the coproduction of globally circulating things (commodities, race, brands, authenticity, blood) and specific cultural landscapes. Building on the field's renewed interest in materiality, scholars showed how anthropological facts are produced at the intersection of interlocking c…
Panama Canal Forum: From the Conquest of Nature to the Construction of New Ecologies
Toward a political ecology of infrastructure standards: Or, how to think about ships, waterways, sediment, and communities together
Scholars have shown that technical standards play an important role in building global transportation and communication infrastructures, but the environmental standardization efforts associated with infrastructures have received far less attention. Combining scholarship from transportation geography, political ecology, and science and technology studies, we show how global connection is made, maintained, and contested through environmental manage…
Water: Abundance, Scarcity, and Security in the Age of Humanity
Several decades ago the sociologist Murray Davis proposed a new field—the sociology of the interesting—based on a proposition: interesting theories deny the assumptions of their audience (“That's Interesting!,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Dec. 1971, pp. 309–44). Noninteresting theories, by contrast, affirm audience assumptions. To make his case, Davis reviewed influential social theories and identified twelve categories of interesting prop…
Dirty Landscapes: How Weediness Indexes State Disinvestment and Global Disconnection
Unbuilt and Unfinished
Infrastructures have proven to be useful focal points for understanding social phenomena. The projects of concern in this literature are often considered complete or, if not, their materialization is assumed to be imminent. However, many-if not most-of the engineered artifacts and systems classified as infrastructure exist in states aptly characterized as unbuilt or unfinished. Bringing together scholarship on unbuilt and unfinished infrastructur…
The ecobiopolitics of environmental mitigation: Remaking fish habitat through the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project
Environmental mitigation has become a catch-all term for efforts to avoid, minimize or compensate for the adverse impacts of development. Through an analysis of the expensive and complex plan developed to mitigate the anticipated impacts of deepening Savannah Harbor, I develop an ecobiopolitical approach to mitigation. Environmental mitigation is triage, involving difficult choices about which entities are worthy of concern and, thus, candidates …
The dredger
The dredging of navigable waterways is a critical but often overlooked precondition for global trade. Focusing on the figure of “the dredger”—which can refer to a machine that excavates underwater sediment or a person who does that work—this short article links the modern maritime industry, colonial expansion, and terracentric anthropological thought. I argue that the figure of the dredger is useful for understanding the collective geological age…
Mitigation
The Feel of 13,000 Containers: How Pilots Learn to Navigate Changing Logistical Environments
This article analyses how the 2016 expansion of the Panama Canal changed the work of the pilots responsible for navigating massive ships through the chokepoint. For pilots, the expansion meant learning to maneuver Neo-Panamax vessels that dwarfed anything in their experience. The pilot training associated with the expansion reveals a paradox at the heart of a shipping industry that pursues efficiencies through economies of scale and automation. I…
Chokepoints: Anthropologies of the Constricted Contemporary
This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or 'choke' the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints - ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more - recasts longstanding anthropological concerns with the character and consequences of global circulation or 'flow'. Chokepoints, we argue, are zon…
What Comes after the Conquest of Nature
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Afterword: An Elemental Ethnography Toolbox
T he ethnographer, we are often told, is a data collection instrument who learns through gradual attunement to a social world-by participating, observing, interviewing, and writing fieldnotes.But what does the ethnographer do when their research engages with materials, processes, and scales only partially accessible to or comprehensible by means of the established toolbox?This is a conundrum for what we might call elemental ethnography: a suite o…
Water Governance and Infrastructure (11 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · History (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Anthropology (4 works) · Art (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works)