Ethnographic Circulations: Space–Time Relations in the Worlds of Poverty Management

Abstract

This essay takes up the challenge of global ethnography. Using the case of poverty expertise and development capitalism, it presents an analysis of what may be understood as an ethnography of circulations. Building on the emergent research on policy mobilities, it calls for an ethnography of the apparatus or dispositif and its constitutive relations and practices. Here ethnography departs from ontologies of immersion and is instead concerned with critique as a mode of defamiliarization. Against the lament of anthropologists that such global ethnography may entail the loss of the subaltern, the essay presents a different ethnographic muse: middling technocrats who negotiate the apparatus of development and who embody the contradictions of market rule.