This text began as a final paper for a graduate anthropology course. It is published here as a reflection on grammar, structure, and authorship—questions that shape how Field Work Project approaches writing, collaboration, and documentation. Rather than offering conclusions, the text stays with uncertainty, refusing extraction and closure as methodological positions.

Against Structure:

Notes Toward a Decolonial Grammar

Hadi Nasiri

Anthropology has always trusted structure. It builds with it the way engineers build bridges: calculating load, distributing force, assuming stability. Structure promises that social life will hold. That if the equations are correct, the span will not collapse. Yet structures do not simply support; they channel pressure. They decide where force travels and where it is absorbed. In anthropology, structure does not only organize societies. It organizes sentences. It determines who speaks from the control room and who appears as material below.

This paper begins from the suspicion that anthropology’s most enduring colonial inheritance is not a theory, but a grammar. A grammar that functions like an industrial frame: steel beams of coherence, bolts tightened by objectivity, joints designed not to creak. Grammar makes authority feel infrastructural. It hums beneath the prose, steady and reliable, like an electrical system you are not meant to notice until it shorts.

I argue that to write against structure is to intervene at this grammatical level—to treat language itself as infrastructure and to refuse the ways it stabilizes hierarchy while pretending to describe the world.

Grammar, here, is not metaphor alone. It names the operational logic of anthropological writing: how explanation moves forward, how uncertainty is compressed, how contradiction is rerouted so the argument can continue without interruption. Grammar stabilizes knowledge the way a machine dampens vibration. It smooths irregular motion. It filters noise. Structure names the analytic logic; grammar is how that logic becomes operational, sentence by sentence. But vibration is not always error. In some environments, it is the only signal that something is alive.

Structure entered anthropology as a technology of legibility. Early twentieth-century anthropologists sought to render social difference readable by modeling societies as systems. Kroeber’s “The Superorganic” elevated culture above individuals like a governing mechanism, while Radcliffe-Brown’s functionalism mapped social relations as interlocking parts whose value lay in their contribution to equilibrium (Kroeber 1917; Radcliffe-Brown 1952). These were not only analytical moves. They were design decisions. They imagined the social world as something that could be diagrammed, calibrated, and explained from a distance.

That distance mattered. Structure allowed anthropology to speak with the confidence of an engineer overlooking a factory floor. The anthropologist could see relations others could not. Grammar followed suit. Declarative sentences. Totalizing claims. Social life rendered as an operating system rather than a lived terrain—stable, legible, and externally observable.

This desire for coherence aligned easily with colonial governance. To structure a society was to make it administrable. To explain was to translate difference into manageable units. In regions shaped by colonial and postcolonial infrastructures—checkpoints, pipelines, communication grids, surveillance towers—structure is never abstract. It arrives as poured concrete, as steel barriers, as cables buried underground. It determines who can pass, who must wait, and who remains uncounted. Grammar

echoes these infrastructures when it insists on clarity at all costs, when it treats legibility as virtue rather than imposition.

I write this from within such conditions. What follows is not autobiography, nor ethnographic evidence, but epistemic positioning—an account of how structure is lived before it is theorized. In the Middle East, structure is not a metaphor; it is a daily negotiation. Bureaucratic forms govern movement. Political and religious grammars dictate what can be said aloud and what must remain coded. Surveillance does not announce itself. It calibrates. It listens. It waits. One learns quickly that coherence is not neutral. It is enforced. And that opacity is not ignorance, but survival.

This refusal of neutrality is not a rejection of rigor, but a commitment to fairness—understood as accountability to relations rather than balance between abstractions.

Anthropology’s structural grammar often fails to register this. Structure appears as analytical necessity rather than as an apparatus with consequences. The discipline rarely asks what its grammar trains us to ignore—what vibrations it filters out, what forms of life become statistical noise, what cannot survive translation into system.

This brings us to the central counterpoint: without structure, anthropology risks collapse. Without structure, there is no comparison, no accumulation of knowledge, no way to speak across difference. Structure promises rigor. It promises that anthropology will not dissolve into anecdote or art. This is not a weak defense. It is the strongest argument structure has, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

But structure, like any machine, carries assumptions. It assumes stable inputs. Repeatable conditions.

Variance that can be managed. When structure hardens into grammar, these assumptions become invisible. The sentence closes its circuit. Explanation completes itself. The anthropologist emerges as the operator who knows when equilibrium has been reached.

Lila Abu-Lughod’s Writing Against Culture interrupts this closure. Her critique does not merely challenge culture as a concept; it unsettles the grammatical habits that allow culture to appear bounded, coherent, and whole (Abu-Lughod 1991). Writing against culture is also writing against a sentence that wants to end too cleanly. Abu-Lughod’s prose lingers. It fractures. It allows contradiction to remain unresolved.

What matters here is not only what Abu-Lughod argues, but how her writing behaves. It introduces friction into anthropological prose. It resists the industrial efficiency of explanation. It treats opacity not as failure, but as ethical limit. In doing so, it reveals grammar as a site of power rather than a neutral medium.

James Clifford’s notion of “Partial Truths” extends this destabilization by foregrounding ethnography as constructed rather than transparent (Clifford 1986). George Marcus and Michael Fischer further insist that anthropology must turn reflexively on its own categories if it is to function as cultural critique rather than colonial description (Marcus and Fischer 1986). These interventions exposed the myth of neutrality. They named knowledge as assembled, contingent, and situated. Yet reflexivity often stops short of dismantling grammar itself. The author reflects, discloses position, and then resumes control. The machine is recalibrated, not disassembled. Grammar remains intact. Structure becomes self-aware, but it still governs the flow of meaning.

At a moment when anthropology increasingly circulates through algorithmic systems, institutional archives, and extractive infrastructures, the discipline’s inherited grammar has consequences it can no longer afford to ignore.

Reflexivity, Affect, and the Limits of Self-Awareness

If structure once functioned as anthropology’s primary machine, reflexivity arrived as its diagnostic tool. Reflexivity promised to open the casing. To expose the wiring. To name the position of the observer and the contingencies of knowledge. Anthropology could now speak about itself while continuing to speak about others. The system would no longer claim innocence, only awareness.

James Clifford’s insistence on “partial truths” marked a decisive shift. Ethnographic authority was no longer transparent or natural; it was produced—through narrative conventions, editorial choices, and historical positioning (Clifford 1986). Truth became provisional, situated, and relational. This was not the collapse of rigor, but its recalibration. The anthropologist was no longer a neutral operator, but a participant in the making of meaning.

George Marcus and Michael Fischer extended this shift by reframing anthropology as cultural critique. Reflexivity, for them, was not confession but method—a way to turn anthropology’s analytical tools back onto the conditions that produced them (Marcus and Fischer 1986). Anthropology could interrogate capitalism, modernity, and power precisely because it acknowledged its own entanglements. The discipline learned to look at itself looking.

Yet reflexivity, once stabilized into disciplinary norm, began to resemble a software update rather than a system redesign. The interface changed; the operating logic did not. Authors disclosed positionality, named asymmetries of power, acknowledged limits. Then the analysis proceeded as usual. Grammar absorbed critique without yielding control. The system learned how to speak about its own biases while continuing to function.

This is the second major counterpoint my argument must address: that anthropology has already done this work. That reflexivity solved the problem of authority. That the discipline has moved beyond mastery. There is truth here. Anthropology is no longer blind to its colonial entanglements. But blindness is not the only danger. Automation is another.

In contemporary technological systems, bias often persists not because it is hidden, but because it has been normalized into architecture. Machine learning models are trained on datasets that already encode hierarchy. The system appears self-correcting because it acknowledges error, even as it reproduces structure at scale. Reflexivity in anthropology risks functioning in the same way. It names power while allowing the grammar that distributes power to remain intact.

The anthropological sentence still wants to resolve. It still seeks coherence. It still privileges explanation over interruption. Reflexivity often produces a more careful authority, not a less authoritative one. The author remains the one who decides when the account is sufficient, when ambiguity has been adequately acknowledged, when the circuit can be closed.

Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer pushes against this closure by insisting that vulnerability is not a weakness, but an epistemic condition (Behar 1996). Behar writes from within anthropology while refusing its emotional distance. Affect enters the text not as embellishment, but as data. Vulnerability introduces tremor into the apparatus. It disrupts the fantasy of control.

Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects radicalizes this move further. Stewart does not explain social life; she tracks its intensities. Her writing accumulates moments rather than arguments. Meaning emerges through rhythm, repetition, and proximity rather than systematization (Stewart 2007). Structure loosens. Grammar breathes. The sentence no longer claims to contain the world; it brushes against it.

Here a third counterpoint emerges: that affective and fragmentary writing risks aestheticization. That without clear structure, anthropology slides into art, losing its analytical edge. This concern is not trivial. Aesthetic pleasure can obscure power. Opacity can become indulgence. Fragmentation can excuse irresponsibility.

But this critique rests on an assumption worth questioning—that clarity is the only path to accountability. In technological systems, we know this assumption fails. A system can be fully legible and deeply violent. Transparency can serve extraction. Optimization can intensify harm. Clarity does not guarantee ethics.

Affective and fragmentary forms do not abandon rigor; they relocate it. They demand attentiveness rather than control. They force the reader to linger rather than consume. They resist the speed at which knowledge is typically extracted, summarized, and circulated. In this sense, they function as a brake rather than an escape.

Anthropology’s engagement with experimental ethnography makes this relocation visible. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage refuses explanatory voice-over. The film withholds synthesis. Sound and image fracture, so observation becomes encounter rather than mastery (Trinh 1982). Jean Rouch’s Chronique d’un été destabilizes the ethnographic frame by exposing filming itself as negotiation, authorship as process rather than position (Rouch 1961). The Sensory Ethnography Lab’s Leviathan overwhelms the viewer with sensory immersion, refusing the stabilizing perspective of the human observer altogether (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel 2012).

These works are often labeled experimental, but experimentation is not their primary stake. What they share is a refusal of grammatical closure. They do not translate experience into system. They allow noise, rhythm, and opacity to remain. Authority disperses. Meaning becomes relational.

From a technological perspective, this redistribution matters. In contemporary AI systems, authorship is already unstable. Text appears without origin. Voice circulates without accountability. Yet the grammar remains familiar. Coherence is optimized. Fluency is rewarded. Refusal is rare.

This is why form matters now more than ever. If anthropology does not attend to grammar, it risks collaborating—unintentionally—with the same logics that animate algorithmic systems. Reflexivity without formal disruption becomes cosmetic. Vulnerability without structural consequence becomes

style.

A decolonial grammar must therefore do more than acknowledge power. It must interfere with its smooth operation. This does not mean abandoning structure entirely. It means treating structure as provisional, revisable, and accountable to the relations it organizes.

What Behar, Stewart, and experimental ethnographers offer is not an exit from anthropology, but a reorientation. Knowledge no longer arrives fully assembled. It accumulates through proximity. It hesitates. It leaves room for what cannot be resolved. In technological terms, this hesitation is not inefficiency. It is safeguard.

The question is no longer whether anthropology can afford to loosen its grammar, but whether it can afford not to. In a world increasingly governed by automated coherence, anthropology’s ethical task may be to cultivate forms of writing that resist stabilization—to write in ways that listen, interrupt, and remain open to being altered.

The next section turns directly to this problem through contemporary technologies of authorship, asking how AI both intensifies anthropology’s grammatical inheritance and opens unexpected possibilities for its undoing. If reflexivity exposed anthropology’s wiring, automation reveals what happens when that wiring runs without a human hand.

Automation, Authorship, and the Persistence of Mastery

If reflexivity loosened anthropology’s grip on authority, contemporary technologies threaten to dissolve the figure of the author altogether. Yet dissolution does not necessarily mean liberation. In algorithmic systems, authorship disappears even as structure intensifies. Language continues to speak fluently—often more fluently than before—while responsibility becomes harder to locate. The sentence arrives without a hand. Authority hums without a face.

Artificial intelligence makes anthropology’s grammatical inheritance newly visible because it externalizes it. Large language models do not invent grammar; they ingest it. They are trained on sedimented archives of writing, reproducing dominant syntactic patterns, rhetorical habits, and epistemic assumptions with extraordinary efficiency. Coherence is rewarded. Ambiguity is minimized. The sentence resolves itself before doubt has time to intervene.

From a technical standpoint, this is not accidental. Predictive systems optimize for likelihood. They privilege what has already been said, and said often, in stable and recognizable forms. Difference appears only insofar as it can be absorbed into pattern. In this sense, AI performs structure at scale. It is structure without memory of its construction.

Anthropology, when it relies uncritically on inherited grammatical norms, risks a similar automation. Even critical texts can become predictable in their arc: positionality declared, power acknowledged, analysis delivered, conclusion secured. The critique functions, but the grammar remains unchanged. Authority becomes distributed but not dismantled. The machine runs more politely.

Here a crucial counterpoint emerges that AI destabilizes authorship and therefore aligns naturally with decolonial aims. If no single author controls the text, does mastery not dissolve? The promise is seductive. But distributed authorship does not automatically undo hierarchy. Systems without clear authors can reproduce domination more efficiently precisely because responsibility is diffuse. Power does not vanish; it relocates.

Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery sharpens this diagnosis. Singh argues that mastery is not merely a position of dominance, but a relational posture—a way of organizing how subjects understand themselves in relation to others (Singh 2018). Mastery persists even when it disavows itself. It hides in care, in protection, in the desire to know fully and to explain well. Crucially, mastery does not disappear through good intentions. It must be unthought.

Singh’s intervention, though not anthropological in origin, resonates deeply with anthropology’s struggle over grammar. Structure, when treated as necessary and inevitable, becomes a technology of mastery. Grammar reassures the writer that the world can be held—carefully, ethically, reflexively— without slipping out of grasp. The sentence becomes a soft enclosure.

What Singh makes visible is that mastery often survives critique by changing its style. It becomes selfaware. It becomes ethical. It learns to speak in the language of care. But it continues to organize relations asymmetrically. In writing, this asymmetry appears when the author retains the power to frame, conclude, and resolve. Grammar performs this power quietly, reliably, sentence after sentence.

Anthropological writing that aims to be decolonial must therefore do more than diversify voices or complicate representation. It must interrogate the mechanics of its own authority. This is where form becomes inseparable from ethics. The question is no longer only what we say about others, but how our sentences move, where they pause, and where they refuse to land.

AI intensifies this question by making grammar visible as artifact. When a machine produces fluent prose, we are forced to confront how much authority anthropology has historically invested in smooth language itself. Coherence becomes suspect. Fluency no longer guarantees thought. What once passed as rigor now appears as repetition. In this sense, AI does not threaten anthropology; it exposes it.

This exposure does not demand rejection of technology, nor a retreat into humanist nostalgia. On the contrary, technological literacy allows anthropology to see its own structures more clearly. Anyone who has worked closely with generative systems knows that what appears creative is often recombinatory, what appears neutral is trained, and what appears objective reflects the archive that shaped it.

The task, then, is not to oppose AI, but to refuse its default grammar. This refusal mirrors a broader decolonial move not rejection, but interruption. To write otherwise is to resist the automatic completion of meaning. It is to design texts that cannot be easily optimized, summarized, or extracted.

Anthropology already holds precedents for this refusal. Experimental ethnography, collaborative authorship, and multimodal practices have demonstrated that knowledge can emerge without totalization. What has been missing is an explicit articulation of these practices as grammatical interventions rather than stylistic alternatives. Form has been treated as supplement, not structure.

A decolonial grammar would take seriously Singh’s call to unthink mastery by refusing the comforts of resolution. It would allow writing to remain unfinished. It would acknowledge that not all relations can be stabilized into structure. It would treat opacity not as failure, but as ethical restraint.

This restraint is not passive. It is demanding. It asks the writer to relinquish control over interpretation. It asks the reader to work—to listen, to linger, to accept uncertainty as condition rather than obstacle. In technological terms, it resists optimization. It slows the system down.

The risk, of course, is that such writing will be dismissed as unclear, indulgent, or insufficiently analytical. This is a familiar charge. But clarity has never been innocent. In colonial contexts, clarity served extraction. It made territories legible, populations classifiable, and governance efficient. Anthropology must reckon with this history when it defends clarity as unquestioned virtue.

The next section turns from theory to practice—not as illustration, but as experiment. I describe an audio project that fractures authorship through collaboration, AI intervention, and infrastructural refusal, treating writing itself as a site of negotiation rather than mastery. If grammar now operates automatically, method becomes the last place where refusal can still be designed.

Method as Refusal: Writing Through Infrastructure

If grammar is where authority hides, then method is where it can be deliberately unsettled. What follows is not an illustration of theory but an intervention in practice: a way of treating writing, sound, and computation as sites where mastery can be interrupted rather than refined. Here, method is not neutral procedure. It is an ethical design choice.

In a recent audio project, I began with a short text written in my own voice. Instead of revising or stabilizing it, I displaced authorship intentionally. I invited two nonbinary friends to intervene. One rewrote the text through their own cadence and sensibility. The other passed the original text through a generative AI system, shaping its output into a final form. The aim was not synthesis. It was divergence. Authorship was fractured rather than shared, loosened rather than redistributed.

The resulting work did not settle into a single voice. Meaning emerged through misalignment— through the friction of multiple grammars passing over the same material. The text behaved less like a statement and more like a signal, altered by each system it moved through. Grammar loosened.

Authority dispersed. No version could claim primacy.

This displacement was not symbolic. It extended into infrastructure.

The final work did not reside on local hardware or a physical device. It existed as a cloud-based computational process—hosted temporarily rather than stored, activated rather than possessed. The audio was not a file to be owned but a process to be encountered. Playback was conditional. Access was finite. After a predetermined number of activations, the system introduced programmed glitches that progressively degraded the sound until it could no longer function.

The work was designed to disappear.

This disappearance was not failure. It was refusal. By denying permanence, the project resisted the gravitational pull of accumulation that governs both artistic and anthropological production. Nothing remained to be archived indefinitely. Nothing could be stabilized into data. No residue could be indexed, extracted, or monetized. The work denied institutions the comfort of preservation just as it denied capital the promise of durability.

From an anthropological perspective, this refusal matters. Anthropology has long aligned itself with practices of documentation, storage, and archival care. These practices are often framed as ethical goods. Yet archives also serve power. They render lives legible, sortable, governable. In many colonial and postcolonial contexts, to leave a trace is to invite surveillance. Preservation is not always protection. Designing a work to self-destruct was therefore not an aesthetic gesture. It was an infrastructural ethic.

Glitch played a central role in this ethic. The glitches that degraded the audio were not accidents. They were programmed interruptions. They disrupted fluency. They exposed the seams of the system. Listening became uneven, effortful, incomplete. The work resisted smooth consumption.

Here, glitch functioned as counter-grammar. Where grammar smooths vibration, glitch reintroduces it. Where grammar dampens noise, glitch amplifies it. The work did not resolve; it frayed. Meaning did not arrive whole; it eroded.

James Clifford’s notion of “partial truths” helps clarify this operation, but partiality here was not only representational; it was temporal and infrastructural (Clifford 1986). The work could never be fully accessed, fully heard, or fully known. Knowledge remained incomplete by design. Authority dispersed not only across voices, but across time.

The involvement of nonbinary collaborators further destabilized authorship. Their interventions altered tone, rhythm, and direction in ways that could not be reconciled into a single narrative arc. Meaning emerged relationally, not hierarchically. Grammar no longer served coherence; it served encounter.

Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity is instructive here. Opacity does not refuse relation; it refuses capture (Glissant 1997). In this project, opacity protected the work from becoming fully legible to systems that demand clarity in order to extract value. The cloud did not become an archive. It became a passage.

Ruth Behar’s insistence on vulnerability as an epistemic condition resonates here, but vulnerability in this context was not emotional exposure alone. It was infrastructural fragility (Behar 1996). By allowing the work to disappear, I relinquished control over its circulation and afterlife. The text could not be perfected, replayed endlessly, or stabilized. Each encounter was singular.

A counterpoint must be addressed directly: that ephemerality risks aestheticizing disappearance, turning refusal into gesture while avoiding accountability. This concern is real. Disappearance alone does not undo power. But here, ephemerality functioned as constraint rather than escape. It limited accumulation. It resisted optimization. It slowed circulation. It forced attention rather than consumption.

From a technological perspective, this matters. Cloud infrastructures are typically designed for persistence, scalability, and extraction. By working against these affordances—introducing degradation, interruption, and failure—the project repurposed the cloud as a site of refusal rather than efficiency. Infrastructure became part of authorship.

This practice does not propose ephemerality as solution. It does not offer a model to be replicated universally. It functions instead as a methodological provocation. It asks what anthropology might become if it treated grammar, platform, and infrastructure as ethical choices rather than neutral supports.

Anthropology cannot critique extraction while relying unquestioningly on infrastructures that enable it. If grammar is a technology of mastery, then method must intervene at the level of design. Writing does not end at the sentence. It extends into where knowledge lives, how long it persists, and who is allowed to claim it.

In contexts shaped by surveillance, colonial governance, and data extraction, disappearance can be a form of care. To refuse to leave a trace is not to refuse relation. It is to refuse appropriation.

The final section turns from this experiment toward a broader proposition. If anthropology took grammar seriously as infrastructure, what kinds of writing, platforms, and relations might become possible? What would it mean to design anthropological knowledge that listens, degrades, and refuses capture rather than seeking permanence?

Toward a Decolonial Grammar

If anthropology is to reckon seriously with its long dependence on structure, it must finally acknowledge that structure does not live only in theory. It lives in grammar. It lives in the expectation that knowledge should arrive intact, coherent, and preserved. It lives in the infrastructures that store, circulate, and authorize what counts as understanding. To write against structure, then, is not to abandon anthropology, but to redesign its conditions of possibility.

Throughout this paper, I have argued that anthropology’s commitment to structure has functioned as a technology of mastery, even when that mastery presents itself as care, reflexivity, or critique.

Structural coherence promises rigor and comparability, yet it also disciplines uncertainty, filters contradiction, and assigns authority over when explanation may end. Grammar has been the quiet mechanism through which this discipline operates—smoothing vibration, redistributing pressure, allowing meaning to settle into place.

Feminist and postcolonial interventions exposed the violence of totalization. Reflexive anthropology named its own conditions of production. Experimental and multimodal practices fractured the illusion of transparency. Yet in each case, structure often survived by adapting. Grammar absorbed critique.

Authority softened its tone without relinquishing its position. Mastery learned to speak ethically.

What a decolonial grammar demands is not the rejection of structure, but its denaturalization. Structure must be treated as contingent, historical, and revisable rather than inevitable. Grammar must be understood as infrastructure rather than neutral medium. This shift reframes anthropology’s ethical task. Knowledge is no longer something to be stabilized and stored, but something to be encountered, negotiated, and sometimes allowed to fade.

The methodological experiment described earlier—collaborative, cloud-based, designed to glitch and disappear—was not offered as solution, but as refusal. It tested what anthropology might become if it resisted accumulation as value, if it treated disappearance as ethical limit rather than loss. In a discipline historically aligned with archives, preservation, and documentation, such refusal is not incidental. It exposes anthropology’s entanglement with colonial and capitalist logics of extraction at the level of form and infrastructure.

This refusal does not diminish responsibility. It sharpens it. When knowledge cannot be archived indefinitely, the weight of encounter increases. Listening begins to matter more than explanation.

Presence outweighs preservation. Writing becomes an event rather than a product—something that happens between bodies, systems, and moments, rather than something that remains untouched.

In a world increasingly governed by algorithmic systems that reward coherence, optimize clarity, and compress difference into pattern, anthropology faces a choice. It can continue refining its structures— making them more inclusive, more reflexive, more humane—while leaving their grammar intact. Or it can risk allowing its grammar to be altered by those it studies, by the technologies it employs, and by the histories it inherits. The latter path is less secure. It produces friction. It resists summary. But it may be the only way anthropology can remain accountable to lives that cannot be reduced to system.

A decolonial grammar does not offer a new foundation. It offers a practice of hesitation. It accepts fragmentation, rhythm, and opacity as epistemic virtues rather than failures. It understands that not all relations can or should be rendered legible. It shifts anthropology’s epistemic stance from mastery to relation, from explanation to listening, from permanence to care.

To write against structure, finally, is to acknowledge that anthropology’s future will not be secured by better frameworks alone. It will be shaped by how we choose to speak, where we allow language to falter, and what we refuse to leave behind.

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. “Writing Against Culture.” In Recapturing Anthropology, edited by Richard G. Fox, 137–162. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Behar, Ruth. 1996. e Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology at Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, 217–252. New York: Schocken Books.

Castaing-Taylor, Lucien, and Véréna Paravel. 2012. Leviathan. Film. Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard University.

Clifford, James. 1986. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: e Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 1–26. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kroeber, A. L. 1917. “e Superorganic.” American Anthropologist 19 (2): 163–213.

Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1952. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. London: Cohen & West.

Rouch, Jean. Chronique d’un été. 1961. Film.

Singh, Julietta. 2018. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1982. Reassemblage. Film.