Jia Hui Lee (Universität Bayreuth): Counterhuman: People, Rats, and an Anthropology of Technology

In medias res. From between the pages of a monograph in manufacture, this talk plunges the audience into the middle of a book project. It describes how the process of writing has compelled the author to make an analytical about-turn. What once began as multispecies anthropology is quickly becoming an anthropology of technology. Lee will share ethnographic moments from a research project whose monograph is being written in the context of anthropological discussions and cultural developments in Germany. These ethnographic moments show how people in Tanzania draw on their own experiences with various rodents to mobilize political critiques about race and inequality, what the author calls “counterhuman” politics. In these contexts, the talk suggests that rodents should be treated as technology—as analytical tools and environmental sensors—rather than organism. This shift (from multispecies anthropology to anthropology of technology) can better explain ongoing political contestations in East Africa and in the wider global South, which as the talk’s conclusion will show, increasingly take on the “counterhuman.”