This paper explores the ways in which maritime labor, maritime risk, and seafarers’ survival are embedded in the financial logics and practices of the global shipping industry. By employing the ...notion of “existential arbitrage,” the ethnography moves through the pursuit of global profit to the value of labor as a commodity, human and financial risk, and ultimately the value of human lives, all of which are arbitraged. Arbitrage is a profit strategy that is based on a belief in the equalizing power of the market yet is predicated on and creates difference among commodities in order to create opportunities to generate profit. Existential arbitrage brings anthropological studies of security and conflict and trade and finance together. By taking the interdependence of these subfields seriously and showing how the relationship between them manifests itself in practice, the notion of existential arbitrage uncovers a brutal financial trading strategy that requires and forces the oscillation between notions of valuable life and the valuation of labor commodities in a competitive global market.
Just as containerized goods appear to flow seamlessly across the planet’s oceans, internationalized and standardized certificates present seafaring labor as uniform and seamless. But underneath these ...certificates are the intimate and unequal entanglements of local masculinity norms, age, and kinship ties that sustain the maritime labor supply chain. In this article, we follow how three young, male seafarers from eastern India find ways to contain piracy risks at work and poverty risks at home, and their sense of obligation as men, sons, husbands, and fathers. By delving into the unequal conditions for industrial male workers from the Global South, this article demonstrates how containerized maritime labor commodities are not uniform but are dependent upon economic inequality and intimate kinship ties to be productive.
Ideal-Real-Actual Jessen, Jonas Falzarano; Mannov, Adrienne; Andersen, Astrid Oberborbeck
Anthropology in action (London, England : 1994),
12/2023, Letnik:
30, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Abstract Based on our experiences from ongoing collaborations with computational engineers over the course of six years and two interdisciplinary research projects, with this article we suggest that ...the building of collaborations between anthropology and computational sciences that alter disciplinary boundaries and bridge epistemic differences can be accomplished through three levels of engagement: a shared research project, becoming involved in each other's theoretical universes, and crafting physical spaces for shared intellectual practice. Taking an empirical point of departure in our colleagues’ attempt to cross the methodological and epistemic divide between engineering and anthropology through game theory, we introduce how the distinction between the ideal , the real and the actual serves not only as a model of our collaborations but also as a generalisable model for future collaborations across anthropology and computational sciences.
Antropologer har længe undersøgt fremtider og arbejdet metodisk med, hvordan man kan undersøge endnu ikke eksisterende verdener etnografisk. Nu kan man ved hjælp af virtual reality (VR) bygge ...virtuelle verdener, som folk kan bevæge sig rundt i. I et metodisk eksperiment har vi brugt VR til at undersøge, hvordan intelligente systemer, der optimerer elforbrug og samtidig beskytter vores data, kan påvirke fremtidigt socialt liv. Eksperimentet skabte også et rum, hvor samarbejde på tværs af fagligheder blev muligt.
The authors of this article are engaged in anthropological research on the links between the growing interest in privacy and data security as a technical field and how notions of trust, security and ...accountability are practised in and beyond technical fields of cryptography, specifically a field called multi‐party computation (MPC). They pursue the relationship between trust in different forms of cryptography – academic and activist – and notions of trust as they are articulated in relation to data security and the protection of citizens’ data. There is a tension between the concerns raised in public debates about data security and the promises of emerging cryptographic protocols. In political speeches and public debates, citizens’ trust that governments and tech companies will protect their data is framed as important and essential. In the environments of emerging cryptographic technologies, such as blockchains, bitcoin and MPC, a promise to provide ‘trustless trust’ and abandon the need for trusted intermediaries, authorities and institutions is articulated.
Recent discussions on digitalization, and autonomous ships provide a disruptive picture of how the maritime industry may be transformed in this process. The magnitude of this digitalization trend is ...very different from the one of implementing e-Navigation initiated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in 2006 to harmonize, integrate, exchange, present and analyze marine information on board and ashore by electronic means. A rapid speed of digitalization of ship operation is causing controversy. For example, the maritime industry has not yet come to a consensus about agreed definitions of “autonomous ship”, “unmanned ship” and a “remote-controlled vessel”. Some pioneering industry developers, invest in the digitalization of ship operation to make the maritime transport more reliable, safe and efficient. Whilst such technological developments promise safe and efficient business models to a greater extent, it has not been much discussed how people on board will be affected by digitalization with a particular attention to the notion of leadership. Command of vessels has been traditionally considered as a human domain. The ways in which leadership is displayed on board and how each task is dedicated to the members of a shipboard organization will be radically different in the era of digitalization. Based on the qualitative data obtained from semi-structured interviews, group interviews and participant observation with maritime experts in Norway, the paper discusses the impact of digitalization on organized work in ship operation, implications of digitalization for leadership, and leadership required in the era of digitalization. It concludes that human-automation coordination as well as human-human coordination are the key to support the future operation of ships.
Based on ongoing interdisciplinary research about advances in a cryptographic technique called Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC), this article explores how research commonalities are carved out ...among mathematicians, engineers and anthropologists. STS scholars and anthropologists are increasingly engaged in research about and with data scientists and engineers, particularly as this relates to discrimination, surveillance and rights. Cryptography - a sub-genre of mathematics and often-invisible infrastructure enabling secure digital communication has received less attention. The article argues that the ubiquity of digital computing in our lives necessitates the creation of socio-mathematical vocabularies. Such vocabularies have the potential to lead to new situated data security practices based on local perceptions of rights and protection. STS scholars and anthropologists are uniquely situated to do this work. The article follows three anthropologists in their endeavors to find “cryptic commonalities” by “tacking back and forth” (Cf. Helmreich 2009) between mathematicians’, engineers’ and their own scientific vocabularies. Despite these attempts, however, the parties often “talk past each other”. Instead of shying away from the awkwardness that such moments produce, the authors embrace “epistemic disconcertment” (Cf. Verran 2013a), carving out a space in which they can communicate productively with each other. This space does not turn mathematicians into anthropologists or STS scholars into engineers, but it does make space for a shared scientific “pidgin” that enables collaboration (Cf. Galison 2010). With this pidgin, the authors walk the reader through the logics of MPC, and specifically, a cryptographic technique called “Shamir Secret Sharing” (Shamir 1979). In doing so, we join emerging voices in the crypto-community in an effort to develop cryptographic techniques for social good. This requires not just an understanding of the math, but also the social worlds impacted by these techniques.
Based on ongoing interdisciplinary research about advances in a cryptographic technique called Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC), this article explores how research commonalities are carved out ...among mathematicians, engineers and anthropologists. STS scholars and anthropologists are increasingly engaged in research about and with data scientists and engineers, particularly as this relates to discrimination, surveillance and rights. Cryptography - a sub-genre of mathematics and often-invisible infrastructure enabling secure digital communication has received less attention. The article argues that the ubiquity of digital computing in our lives necessitates the creation of socio-mathematical vocabularies. Such vocabularies have the potential to lead to new situated data security practices based on local perceptions of rights and protection. STS scholars and anthropologists are uniquely situated to do this work. The article follows three anthropologists in their endeavors to find “cryptic commonalities” by “tacking back and forth” (Cf. Helmreich 2009) between mathematicians’, engineers’ and their own scientific vocabularies. Despite these attempts, however, the parties often “talk past each other”. Instead of shying away from the awkwardness that such moments produce, the authors embrace “epistemic disconcertment” (Cf. Verran 2013a), carving out a space in which they can communicate productively with each other. This space does not turn mathematicians into anthropologists or STS scholars into engineers, but it does make space for a shared scientific “pidgin” that enables collaboration (Cf. Galison 2010). With this pidgin, the authors walk the reader through the logics of MPC, and specifically, a cryptographic technique called “Shamir Secret Sharing” (Shamir 1979). In doing so, we join emerging voices in the crypto-community in an effort to develop cryptographic techniques for social good. This requires not just an understanding of the math, but also the social worlds impacted by these techniques.
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