Richard Rottenburg
Biographic Data
| ID | 90404 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Rottenburg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Rottenburg |
| SIGNATURE | ROTTENBURG R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 150 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Doing postcolonial gender: An Approach to Justifying Rights, Resources, and Recognition
In this collection, we seek to advance contemporary discussions in postcolonial feminism and science and technology studies (STS) by examining how actors encounter binaries and norms that structure
Measures of future health, from the nonhuman to the planetary
Divining, testing, and the problem of accountabilityRejoinder to Whyte, Sue Reynolds, Michael Whyte, and David Kyanddondo. 2018. “Technologies of inquiry: HIV tests and divination.” Hau : Journal of E…
The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification
The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for p…
Rethinking institutional orders in Sudan Studies: The case of land access in Kordofan, Blue Nile and Darfur
All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse …
Travelling Models: Introducing an Analytical Concept to Globalisation Studies
The introductory chapter presents an overview of concepts covered in this book Travelling Models in African Conflict Management . The book examines how travelling models shape global processes of change in the field of conflict management. Two of the principal questions addressed in the book are the following: How is change in one place related to developments in other places? And, why are certain issues that are important in one place taken up i…
Travelling Models in African Conflict Management: Translating Technologies of Social Ordering
Experimental Engagements and Metacodes
This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article "Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science" (Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 [Spring 2014]: 337 - 62), which concerns the "postcritical" work of Richard Rottenburg, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Helen Verran. Rottenburg's response clarifies the key argument of his book Far-Fetched Facts (2002 in German, 2009 in English), situates it in a bi…
Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging
Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid
Interstitial Spaces
Johannes von Moltke believes that in the three Ruritanian regional capitals, Baridi, Mlimani, and Jamala, the share of the produced water that is paid for is so low that the waterworks could not survive financially. Julius C. Shilling identifies script-switching as the main cause of project’s problem, whereas Martonosi believes that difficulty in development cooperation results from its reduction to a technical game with facts and figures. The wa…
Prologue
This book focuses on the practices of organizing development cooperation, experimental ethnographic writing, and anthropological works. Its six chapters examine the various aspects of a water supply project in Ruritania (a fictional country located in sub-Saharan Africa) and the functions of a development bank. Usually, a development bank reviews the application for a rehabilitation measure and then commissions a private contractor, a so-called c…
Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid
A fictionalized ethnographic study of development aid in sub-Saharan Africa that focuses on technologies of inscription in the interactions of development banks, international experts, and local managers. In 1996, the sub-Saharan African country of Ruritania launched a massive waterworks improvement project, funded by the Normesian Development Bank, headquartered in Urbania, Normland, and with the guidance of Shilling & Partner, a consulting firm…
Social and public experiments and new figurations of science and politics in postcolonial Africa1
In this essay I argue that in certain contemporaneous African contexts the boundary between laboratory and life outside the laboratory is being transgressed in specific ways resulting in the emergence of novel forms of social and public experiments. The main focus of the essay is on biomedical research and its relation to health care, both of them being situated in a larger frame of biopolitics, recent reconfigurations of neoliberal regimes of go…
Report on the current research programme Biomedicine in Africa
This research programme examines how the science and practice of biomedicine is shaped through its engagements in various African contexts. We regard biomedicine as a circulating set of technologies, practices, and ideas that -as a by-product of prevention and healing -links individual bodies to the political order. We take Africa to be central for understanding global shifts in the making of bodies and subjectivities as well as of social, politi…
Relatório sobre o programa de pesquisa atual “Biomedicina na África”
individuais ordem poltica. Consideramos a frica como um ponto central para entendermos as mudanas globais na
Crossing Gaps of Indeterminacy: Some Theoretical Remarks
Carola Lentz, Die Konstruktion von Ethnizität. Eine politische Geschichte Nord-West Ghanas 1870-1990
Sitting in a bar 1
This paper describes a bar in the small Polish border-town of Slubice. The bar is presented as a social space betwixt and between everything. It belongs neither to the past, nor to the present. It belongs neither to here, nor to there, and it most certainly belongs neither to “us” nor to “them”. The bar is described as a social space and time in transformation, where inherited frames of orientation are remade. Three different perspectives will be…
From Socialist Realism To Postmodern Ambiguity: East German Companies In Transition
The transformation of East German companies is presented as a crisis in cor porate reality construction. The socialist system has generated a particular view on what is "real" as opposed to the fictions of the official philosophy. The notion of the "self" and of "solidarity" lay at the core of this "socialist realism." The change to market economy has shaken up many an idea which was previously taken for granted. The same process also exposes cor…
We have to do business as business is done: Zur Aneignung formaler Organisation in einem westafrikanischen Unternehmen
Der Sozialismus braucht den ganzen Menschen“: Zum Verhältnis vertraglicher und nichtvertraglicher Beziehungen in einem VEB
„Volkseigene Betriebe“ der DDR mußten wie alle Organisationen darum ringen, ihre Interessen mit jenen der Mitarbeiter in Einklang zu bringen. Die von der Organisationsumwelt vorgeschriebenen formalen Strukturen verhinderten hier allerdings ein selbstorganisiertes Zusammenspiel zwischen den vertraglichen und den nichtvertraglichen Aspekten der sozialen Organisation der Arbeit. Gleichzeitig bewirkte das Versagen des Plans, daß die Aufrechterhaltung…
Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid
A fictionalized ethnographic study of development aid in sub-Saharan Africa that focuses on technologies of inscription in the interactions of development banks, international experts, and local managers. In 1996, the sub-Saharan African country of Ruritania launched a massive waterworks improvement project, funded by the Normesian Development Bank, headquartered in Urbania, Normland, and with the guidance of Shilling & Partner, a consulting firm…
Social and public experiments and new figurations of science and politics in postcolonial Africa1
In this essay I argue that in certain contemporaneous African contexts the boundary between laboratory and life outside the laboratory is being transgressed in specific ways resulting in the emergence of novel forms of social and public experiments. The main focus of the essay is on biomedical research and its relation to health care, both of them being situated in a larger frame of biopolitics, recent reconfigurations of neoliberal regimes of go…
Der Sozialismus braucht den ganzen Menschen“: Zum Verhältnis vertraglicher und nichtvertraglicher Beziehungen in einem VEB
„Volkseigene Betriebe“ der DDR mußten wie alle Organisationen darum ringen, ihre Interessen mit jenen der Mitarbeiter in Einklang zu bringen. Die von der Organisationsumwelt vorgeschriebenen formalen Strukturen verhinderten hier allerdings ein selbstorganisiertes Zusammenspiel zwischen den vertraglichen und den nichtvertraglichen Aspekten der sozialen Organisation der Arbeit. Gleichzeitig bewirkte das Versagen des Plans, daß die Aufrechterhaltung…
Measures of future health, from the nonhuman to the planetary
Rethinking institutional orders in Sudan Studies: The case of land access in Kordofan, Blue Nile and Darfur
All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse …
Experimental Engagements and Metacodes
This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article "Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science" (Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 [Spring 2014]: 337 - 62), which concerns the "postcritical" work of Richard Rottenburg, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Helen Verran. Rottenburg's response clarifies the key argument of his book Far-Fetched Facts (2002 in German, 2009 in English), situates it in a bi…
From Socialist Realism To Postmodern Ambiguity: East German Companies In Transition
The transformation of East German companies is presented as a crisis in cor porate reality construction. The socialist system has generated a particular view on what is "real" as opposed to the fictions of the official philosophy. The notion of the "self" and of "solidarity" lay at the core of this "socialist realism." The change to market economy has shaken up many an idea which was previously taken for granted. The same process also exposes cor…
Der Sozialismus braucht den ganzen Menschen“: Zum Verhältnis vertraglicher und nichtvertraglicher Beziehungen in einem VEB
„Volkseigene Betriebe“ der DDR mußten wie alle Organisationen darum ringen, ihre Interessen mit jenen der Mitarbeiter in Einklang zu bringen. Die von der Organisationsumwelt vorgeschriebenen formalen Strukturen verhinderten hier allerdings ein selbstorganisiertes Zusammenspiel zwischen den vertraglichen und den nichtvertraglichen Aspekten der sozialen Organisation der Arbeit. Gleichzeitig bewirkte das Versagen des Plans, daß die Aufrechterhaltung…
From Socialist Realism To Postmodern Ambiguity: East German Companies In Transition
The transformation of East German companies is presented as a crisis in cor porate reality construction. The socialist system has generated a particular view on what is "real" as opposed to the fictions of the official philosophy. The notion of the "self" and of "solidarity" lay at the core of this "socialist realism." The change to market economy has shaken up many an idea which was previously taken for granted. The same process also exposes cor…
We have to do business as business is done: Zur Aneignung formaler Organisation in einem westafrikanischen Unternehmen
Sitting in a bar 1
This paper describes a bar in the small Polish border-town of Slubice. The bar is presented as a social space betwixt and between everything. It belongs neither to the past, nor to the present. It belongs neither to here, nor to there, and it most certainly belongs neither to “us” nor to “them”. The bar is described as a social space and time in transformation, where inherited frames of orientation are remade. Three different perspectives will be…
Carola Lentz, Die Konstruktion von Ethnizität. Eine politische Geschichte Nord-West Ghanas 1870-1990
Crossing Gaps of Indeterminacy: Some Theoretical Remarks
Report on the current research programme Biomedicine in Africa
This research programme examines how the science and practice of biomedicine is shaped through its engagements in various African contexts. We regard biomedicine as a circulating set of technologies, practices, and ideas that -as a by-product of prevention and healing -links individual bodies to the political order. We take Africa to be central for understanding global shifts in the making of bodies and subjectivities as well as of social, politi…
Relatório sobre o programa de pesquisa atual “Biomedicina na África”
individuais ordem poltica. Consideramos a frica como um ponto central para entendermos as mudanas globais na
Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid
Interstitial Spaces
Johannes von Moltke believes that in the three Ruritanian regional capitals, Baridi, Mlimani, and Jamala, the share of the produced water that is paid for is so low that the waterworks could not survive financially. Julius C. Shilling identifies script-switching as the main cause of project’s problem, whereas Martonosi believes that difficulty in development cooperation results from its reduction to a technical game with facts and figures. The wa…
Prologue
This book focuses on the practices of organizing development cooperation, experimental ethnographic writing, and anthropological works. Its six chapters examine the various aspects of a water supply project in Ruritania (a fictional country located in sub-Saharan Africa) and the functions of a development bank. Usually, a development bank reviews the application for a rehabilitation measure and then commissions a private contractor, a so-called c…
Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid
A fictionalized ethnographic study of development aid in sub-Saharan Africa that focuses on technologies of inscription in the interactions of development banks, international experts, and local managers. In 1996, the sub-Saharan African country of Ruritania launched a massive waterworks improvement project, funded by the Normesian Development Bank, headquartered in Urbania, Normland, and with the guidance of Shilling & Partner, a consulting firm…
Social and public experiments and new figurations of science and politics in postcolonial Africa1
In this essay I argue that in certain contemporaneous African contexts the boundary between laboratory and life outside the laboratory is being transgressed in specific ways resulting in the emergence of novel forms of social and public experiments. The main focus of the essay is on biomedical research and its relation to health care, both of them being situated in a larger frame of biopolitics, recent reconfigurations of neoliberal regimes of go…
Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging
Travelling Models: Introducing an Analytical Concept to Globalisation Studies
The introductory chapter presents an overview of concepts covered in this book Travelling Models in African Conflict Management . The book examines how travelling models shape global processes of change in the field of conflict management. Two of the principal questions addressed in the book are the following: How is change in one place related to developments in other places? And, why are certain issues that are important in one place taken up i…
Travelling Models in African Conflict Management: Translating Technologies of Social Ordering
Experimental Engagements and Metacodes
This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article "Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science" (Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 [Spring 2014]: 337 - 62), which concerns the "postcritical" work of Richard Rottenburg, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Helen Verran. Rottenburg's response clarifies the key argument of his book Far-Fetched Facts (2002 in German, 2009 in English), situates it in a bi…
The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification
The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for p…
Rethinking institutional orders in Sudan Studies: The case of land access in Kordofan, Blue Nile and Darfur
All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse …
Divining, testing, and the problem of accountabilityRejoinder to Whyte, Sue Reynolds, Michael Whyte, and David Kyanddondo. 2018. “Technologies of inquiry: HIV tests and divination.” Hau : Journal of E…
Measures of future health, from the nonhuman to the planetary
Doing postcolonial gender: An Approach to Justifying Rights, Resources, and Recognition
In this collection, we seek to advance contemporary discussions in postcolonial feminism and science and technology studies (STS) by examining how actors encounter binaries and norms that structure
Political science (13 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · History (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Psychology (4 works)