About Amrita
Dr. Amrita Kurian is a Non-Resident Visiting Scholar with the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Faculty at Ashoka University, Sonepat. She has previously taught sociocultural anthropology at UC San Diego. Dr. Kurian holds a PhD in Anthropology from UC San Diego and an M.Phil. in Sociology from Delhi University. Her research interests include expertise, agricultural markets, and agrarian relations in India. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Cultural Anthropology, India in Transition, and Scroll.in.
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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Amrita's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
Thinking with Epistemic Things: Quality and its Consequences in Agri-Commodities Markets
This is a thought experiment on the consequences of technical rationality, the dominant epistemology of practice that tells us that “professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique” (Schön 2017, 22). My aim is not to demonize technical rationality at the outset. Instead, I attempt to lay out the stakes of such a project when scaled beyond the confines of the spaces where experts conceive them. What happens when an “epistemic thing”—an unstable, experimental object of scientific research—is taken out of the controlled confines of the lab or the pages collated from a scientific symposium and introduced into the real world (Rheinberger 1997)? To borrow Anna Tsing’s phrasing, what happens when you increase the scale of an experiment without altering its frame for the differences encountered in the real world (Tsing 2015, 38; 2019, 506)? (more…) (read more...)