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“Postdualist” approaches, such as the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, represent understandable reactions to the humanist and idealist traditions in Western thought, but tend to be deluded by a focus on individual artifacts rather than on the global, material relations on which their existence depends. The attribution of agency and even desires to abiotic objects, championed by posthumanist researchers such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, is cognate to the category mistakes recurrently identified by social theorists as fetishism and anthropomorphism. Paradoxically, given their subversive ambitions, proponents of the new concern with materiality and artifactual agency are offering an ideology that ultimately buttresses the capitalist world order by ignoring the materiality of world trade and the causality inherent in the artifact of money. The concerns with distributed agency also tend to displace responsibility and accountability from humans to artifacts. Moreover, in converging with a deep genealogy of ideas that blur the boundary between nature and artifice, the material turn depoliticizes technology by naturalizing it. The article proposes a new anthropology of technology that acknowledges the reliance of modern technology on asymmetric global resource flows orchestrated by money and the fictive reciprocity of market prices. [material turn, posthumanism, fetishism, technology, postdualism]
Alf Hornborg. Objects Don't Have Desires: Toward an Anthropology of Technology beyond Anthropomorphism. American Anthropologist 2021, 1 .
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Objects Don't Have Desires: Toward an Anthropology of Technology beyond Anthropomorphism. American Anthropologist. 2021; ():1.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2021. "Objects Don't Have Desires: Toward an Anthropology of Technology beyond Anthropomorphism." American Anthropologist , no. : 1.
Public discussion of the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic has reproduced several recurrent and interrelated topics in discourses on sustainability and the Anthropocene. First, there is an ambiguous concern—sometimes ominous, sometimes hopeful—that the pandemic will precipitate radical social transformation or even collapse. Second, there is widespread reflection over the risks of economic globalization, which increases vulnerability and undermines local food security. Third, the pandemic is frequently imagined as nature’s revenge on humankind. This metaphor reflects a fundamental conceptual dualism separating nature and society that continues to constrain our efforts to understand the challenges of sustainability. To help transcend the epistemological and ontological dichotomy of nature versus society, the article proposes an epidemiological approach to all-purpose money. Conventional money is an artifact with far-reaching repercussions for global society as well as the biosphere. To approach it as the source of behavioral algorithms with severely detrimental consequences for both social and ecological systems might provide a middle ground for natural and social science.
Alf Hornborg. Beyond the Image of COVID-19 as Nature’s Revenge: Understanding Globalized Capitalism through an Epidemiology of Money. Sustainability 2021, 13, 5009 .
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Beyond the Image of COVID-19 as Nature’s Revenge: Understanding Globalized Capitalism through an Epidemiology of Money. Sustainability. 2021; 13 (9):5009.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2021. "Beyond the Image of COVID-19 as Nature’s Revenge: Understanding Globalized Capitalism through an Epidemiology of Money." Sustainability 13, no. 9: 5009.
Alf Hornborg; Gustav Cederlof. System boundaries as epistemological and ethnographic problems: assessing energy technology and socio-environmental impact. Journal of Political Ecology 2021, 28, 1 .
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg, Gustav Cederlof. System boundaries as epistemological and ethnographic problems: assessing energy technology and socio-environmental impact. Journal of Political Ecology. 2021; 28 (1):1.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg; Gustav Cederlof. 2021. "System boundaries as epistemological and ethnographic problems: assessing energy technology and socio-environmental impact." Journal of Political Ecology 28, no. 1: 1.
Alf Hornborg. A pandemic can do what a movement cannot. Social Anthropology 2021, 29, 210 -212.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. A pandemic can do what a movement cannot. Social Anthropology. 2021; 29 (1):210-212.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2021. "A pandemic can do what a movement cannot." Social Anthropology 29, no. 1: 210-212.
Anthropologists have generally found it reasonable to understand the Industrial Revolution in Britain as a product of global historical processes including colonialism and the structure of world trade. The extent to which the industrialization of British textile production was contingent on global processes has been illuminated in detail by historians such as Joseph Inikori. Andre Gunder Frank proposed that we should reconceptualize technological development as a ‘world economic process, which took place in and because of the structure of the world economy’. Yet the theoretical implications of understanding industrial technological systems as global and unevenly distributed phenomena have, by and large, not contaminated mainstream conceptions of technologies as politically neutral and fundamentally innocent manifestations of enlightenment, detachable from the societal contexts in which they have emerged. Social theory nevertheless offers perspectives for a radical rethinking of this conventional ontology of modern technology. If the premises of actor–network theory, material culture studies, Marxism and poststructuralist critiques of power and inequalities are combined with the perspectives of ecological economics on global social metabolism, the fossil-fuelled textile factories of 19th-century Britain can be reinterpreted as social instruments for appropriating embodied human labour and natural space from elsewhere in the global system. A renewed ‘anthropology of technology’ might focus on the observation that technology is not simply a matter of putting nature to work, but a strategy of putting other sectors of global society to work. 1
Alf Hornborg. Machines as manifestations of global systems: Steps toward a sociometabolic ontology of technology. Anthropological Theory 2020, 21, 206 -227.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Machines as manifestations of global systems: Steps toward a sociometabolic ontology of technology. Anthropological Theory. 2020; 21 (2):206-227.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2020. "Machines as manifestations of global systems: Steps toward a sociometabolic ontology of technology." Anthropological Theory 21, no. 2: 206-227.
Alf Hornborg. World-Systems Analysis. Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology 2020, 11347 -11351.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. World-Systems Analysis. Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. 2020; ():11347-11351.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2020. "World-Systems Analysis." Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology , no. : 11347-11351.
This paper attempts to assemble a conceptual framework for understanding to what extent an energy technology is simply a way of putting nature to work, and to what extent it is a way of putting other segments of global society to work. The turn to fossil energy reversed the relation between energy and space, as fossil fuels henceforth propelled new transport technologies that provided access to increasingly wider spans of space. Velocity is a measure of the amount of time required to traverse a given space, and given a certain mass and amount of friction, it can be physically expressed as the dissipation of a given quantity of energy. Technological progress has cognate implications for labour productivity and velocity: both entail an increase in exosomatic energy dissipation that is contingent on the appropriation of embodied labour time and natural space. In concealing the dependency of industrial technology on asymmetric resource transfers, general-purpose money continues to distort the conventional understanding of technology even in Marxist theory. Given that technology is a manifestation of capital, a fundamental paradox of Marxism is its aspiration to combine a critique of capital accumulation with a vision of technological progress.
Alf Hornborg. Energy, space, and movement: toward a framework for theorizing energy justice. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 2019, 102, 8 -20.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Energy, space, and movement: toward a framework for theorizing energy justice. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography. 2019; 102 (1):8-20.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2019. "Energy, space, and movement: toward a framework for theorizing energy justice." Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 102, no. 1: 8-20.
Tim Ingold’s critique of mainstream modern experiences of human–environmental relations is highly persuasive but almost completely disconnected from considerations of social relations of power and inequality. His emphasis on the phenomenology of local relations seems inevitably detached from the logic of abstract economic and political systems. This article proposes that the distortions of experience that Ingold identifies tend to be produced by the social and ecological conditions of modern society, to which economic and political inequalities are fundamental. The experiential and the political dimensions of modernity are thus two sides of the same coin, and Ingold’s critical reflections on the phenomenological repercussions of the modern condition converge with the kind of critiques articulated within political ecology. This convergence is particularly intriguing in relation to our understanding of modern technology. Building on ideas and intuitions that have emerged repeatedly through the history of the philosophy of technology, Ingold’s ‘anthropology of technology’ focuses on the experiential aspects of modern engagements with artefacts or material culture, while a political ecology of technology could be expected to unravel how its dependence on asymmetric resource flows illuminate its global, distributive dimension. To reconceptualize modern technology as a means of redistributing human time and natural space is to grasp that it is a phenomenon that straddles the conventional dichotomy of Nature and Society.
Alf Hornborg. Relationism as revelation or prescription? Some thoughts on how Ingold's implicit critique of modernity could be harnessed to political ecology. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 2018, 43, 253 -263.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Relationism as revelation or prescription? Some thoughts on how Ingold's implicit critique of modernity could be harnessed to political ecology. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 2018; 43 (3-4):253-263.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2018. "Relationism as revelation or prescription? Some thoughts on how Ingold's implicit critique of modernity could be harnessed to political ecology." Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 43, no. 3-4: 253-263.
This is Part 2 of an article arguing for an extended application of Karl Marx’s insight that the apparent reciprocity of free market exchange is to be understood as an ideology that obscures material processes of exploitation and accumulation. Rather than confine this insight to the worker’s sale of his or her labor-power for wages, and ground it in the conviction that labor-power is uniquely capable of generating more value than its price, the article argues that capital accumulation also relies on asymmetric transfers of several other biophysical resources, such as embodied non-human energy, land, and materials. Such a shift of perspective extends Marx’s foundational critique of mainstream economics by focusing on the unacknowledged role of ecologically unequal exchange, but it requires a critical rethinking of the concept of “use-value.” Part 2 of the article briefly reviews the history of debate in ecological Marxism, discusses the peculiar semiotics of money, outlines the implications of ecologically unequal exchange for a reconceptualization of modern technology, and concludes with the conviction that the proposed theoretical modifications are both indebted to and congruent with the pioneering insights of Karl Marx.
Alf Hornborg. The Money–Energy–Technology Complex and Ecological Marxism: Rethinking the Concept of “Use-value” to Extend Our Understanding of Unequal Exchange, Part 2. Capitalism Nature Socialism 2018, 30, 71 -86.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. The Money–Energy–Technology Complex and Ecological Marxism: Rethinking the Concept of “Use-value” to Extend Our Understanding of Unequal Exchange, Part 2. Capitalism Nature Socialism. 2018; 30 (4):71-86.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2018. "The Money–Energy–Technology Complex and Ecological Marxism: Rethinking the Concept of “Use-value” to Extend Our Understanding of Unequal Exchange, Part 2." Capitalism Nature Socialism 30, no. 4: 71-86.
This is Part 1 of an article arguing for an extended application of Karl Marx’s insight that the apparent reciprocity of free market exchange is to be understood as an ideology that obscures material processes of exploitation and accumulation. Rather than to confine this insight to the worker’s sale of his or her labor-power for wages, and basing it on the conviction that labor-power is uniquely capable of generating more value than its price, the article argues that capital accumulation also relies on asymmetric transfers of several other biophysical resources such as embodied non-human energy, land, and materials. It proposes that the very notions of “price” and “value” serve to obscure the material history and substance of traded commodities. Such a shift of perspective extends Marx’s foundational critique of mainstream economics by focusing on the unacknowledged role of ecologically unequal exchange, but requires a critical rethinking of the concept of “use-value.” It also suggests a fundamental reconceptualization of the ontology of technological progress, frequently celebrated in Marxist theory. Part 1 of the article introduces the argument on unequal exchange, the ideological function of money, some concerns of ecological Marxism, and the conundrum posed by three contradictory understandings of “use-value.”
Alf Hornborg. The Money-Energy-Technology Complex and Ecological Marxism: Rethinking the Concept of “Use-value” to Extend Our Understanding of Unequal Exchange, Part 1. Capitalism Nature Socialism 2018, 30, 27 -39.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. The Money-Energy-Technology Complex and Ecological Marxism: Rethinking the Concept of “Use-value” to Extend Our Understanding of Unequal Exchange, Part 1. Capitalism Nature Socialism. 2018; 30 (3):27-39.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2018. "The Money-Energy-Technology Complex and Ecological Marxism: Rethinking the Concept of “Use-value” to Extend Our Understanding of Unequal Exchange, Part 1." Capitalism Nature Socialism 30, no. 3: 27-39.
Persson, J., A. Hornborg, L. Olsson, and H. Thorén. 2018. Toward an alternative dialogue between the social and natural sciences. Ecology and Society 23(4):14. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10498-230414
Johannes Persson; Alf Hornborg; Lennart Olsson; Henrik Thorén. Toward an alternative dialogue between the social and natural sciences. Ecology and Society 2018, 23, 1 .
AMA StyleJohannes Persson, Alf Hornborg, Lennart Olsson, Henrik Thorén. Toward an alternative dialogue between the social and natural sciences. Ecology and Society. 2018; 23 (4):1.
Chicago/Turabian StyleJohannes Persson; Alf Hornborg; Lennart Olsson; Henrik Thorén. 2018. "Toward an alternative dialogue between the social and natural sciences." Ecology and Society 23, no. 4: 1.
In this lecture I argue that anthropology can grasp the cultural peculiarity of modernity by critically scrutinizing its foundational categories of “economy” and “technology” and its particular ways of detaching exchange and production from morality. Economic and technological developments in nineteenth-century Britain are interpreted as local manifestations of global processes of unequal exchange and accumulation. The so-called Industrial Revolution reconfigured both the material circumstances and the worldview of the people at its imperial core. This modern worldview continues to shape contemporary aspirations to deal with global inequalities and environmental change, but remains incapable of grasping the interfusion of social and natural aspects of economic and technological development. Its delineation of the categories of “economy” and “technology” is conducive to a specific modality of exploitation that can be understood as a modern form of magic, defined as contingent on the unacknowledged material efficacy of human beliefs. Dans ce cours, je montre que l’anthropologie peut saisir la spécificité culturelle de la modernité en interrogeant les catégories fondatrices de l’“économie” et de la “technologie,” ainsi que la manière particulière dont ces catégories séparent les échanges et la production du domaine de la moralité. Les développements économiques et technologiques de l’Angleterre du 19e siècle sont interprétés comme des manifestations locales de processus globaux d’échanges inégaux et d’accumulation. La soit-disant révolution industrielle a reconfiguré à la fois les circonstances matérielles et la vision du monde des individus de son centre impérial. Cette vision du monde moderne continue de déterminer les aspirations contemporaines à résoudre les inégalités globales et le changement climatique, mais demeure incapable de saisir la fusion des aspects sociaux et naturels du développement économique et technologique. La délimitation des catégories économiques et technologiques donne lieu à une modalité spécifique d’exploitation qui peut être comprise comme une forme de magie, tributaire de l’efficacité ignorée des croyances humaines.
Alf Hornborg. Fetishistic causation: The 2017 Stirling Lecture. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2017, 7, 89 -103.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Fetishistic causation: The 2017 Stirling Lecture. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 2017; 7 (3):89-103.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2017. "Fetishistic causation: The 2017 Stirling Lecture." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 3: 89-103.
Comment on de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Alf Hornborg. Mistranslating relationism and absolving the market. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2017, 7, 19 -21.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Mistranslating relationism and absolving the market. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 2017; 7 (2):19-21.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2017. "Mistranslating relationism and absolving the market." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 2: 19-21.
Modern money is a peculiar sign system in several respects. Its lack of connection to any conceivable material referent, such as gold or energy, has been much deplored over the course of history. Modern, neoclassical economics has abandoned the concerns of classical political economy with the material substance as well as the morality of exchange. The chapter argues that a sustainable, just, and resilient economy will require the establishment of a complementary currency that distinguishes between values pertaining to local human survival, on the one hand, and the exchange values in which financial institutions speculate, on the other.
Alf Hornborg. Redesigning Money to Curb Globalization: Can We Domesticate the Root of All Evil? The Anthropology of Sustainability 2017, 291 -307.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Redesigning Money to Curb Globalization: Can We Domesticate the Root of All Evil? The Anthropology of Sustainability. 2017; ():291-307.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2017. "Redesigning Money to Curb Globalization: Can We Domesticate the Root of All Evil?" The Anthropology of Sustainability , no. : 291-307.
Alf Hornborg. Dithering while the planet burns: Anthropologists’ approaches to the Anthropocene. Reviews in Anthropology 2017, 46, 61 -77.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Dithering while the planet burns: Anthropologists’ approaches to the Anthropocene. Reviews in Anthropology. 2017; 46 (2-3):61-77.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2017. "Dithering while the planet burns: Anthropologists’ approaches to the Anthropocene." Reviews in Anthropology 46, no. 2-3: 61-77.
Comment on De la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Alf Hornborg. Convictions, beliefs, and the suspension of disbelief. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2017, 7, 553 -558.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Convictions, beliefs, and the suspension of disbelief. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 2017; 7 (1):553-558.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2017. "Convictions, beliefs, and the suspension of disbelief." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 1: 553-558.
For several centuries, the dominant worldview in industrial societies has held that various problems --such as those recently identified as relating to sustainability-- can be solved through technological progress. Technological progress has been conceived as the fruits of engineering science, new knowledge, and innovation. While knowledge of the principles of physics is certainly a necessary condition for technological development, it is not a sufficient condition. Technology is not only a product of engineering, but, ultimately, also of asymmetric transfers of biophysical resources. In other words, the feasibility of technological progress is contingent on world market prices. The history of technology has been written from the perspective of advancing ingenuity, rather than that of unequal global exchange. The implicit world view underlying dominant historiography and economic science ignores the deepening global inequalities which are prerequisite to what some sectors of world society can celebrate as technological progress, including visions of replacing fossil fuels with biofuels and other renewable energy sources. This observation should prompt us to conceptualize technological progress as an inherently unequal capacity to locally save time and space at the expense of human time and natural space lost elsewhere. It implies that the physical agency of technology ultimately rests on prices, i.e. subjective human conceptions about the value of market commodities, and thus finally on the magical artifact we know as money. The purpose of this article is to show how current deliberations on biofuels illustrate the insufficiencies of mainstream understandings of the phenomenon of technology, and to indicate why an adequate understanding of technology must be interdisciplinary, combining insights on both Nature and Society.
Alf Hornborg. The magic of money and the illusion of biofuels: toward an interdisciplinary understanding of technology. The European Physical Journal Plus 2017, 132, 82 .
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. The magic of money and the illusion of biofuels: toward an interdisciplinary understanding of technology. The European Physical Journal Plus. 2017; 132 (2):82.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2017. "The magic of money and the illusion of biofuels: toward an interdisciplinary understanding of technology." The European Physical Journal Plus 132, no. 2: 82.
Continual environmental degradation and an unfair distribution of environmental burdens and benefits are two great challenges for humanity. Economic growth is often taken for granted when planning for the future. However, it is often argued that maintaining economic growth conflicts with keeping human activities adjusted to ecological boundaries and finite resources, at least for the more-developed countries. With this paper, we present sustainability goals for building and planning in Sweden to be achieved by 2050 in a context of limited or even negative economic growth. These goals should ensure that all groups in society have sufficient resources and a good life within planetary boundaries. We select four goals in a participatory process: two environmental goals related to climate change and land use and two social goals related to welfare and participation. Our results show that achieving the environmental goals will require significant reductions of Sweden’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and land use compared to today’s levels. Regarding the social goals, these are, in many aspects, reasonably well fulfilled in Sweden today, although disparities remain between groups of citizens. The main challenge, however, is to ensure that these goals are fulfilled even within environmental limits and if economic growth should halt.
Eléonore Fauré; Åsa Svenfelt; Göran Finnveden; Alf Hornborg. Four Sustainability Goals in a Swedish Low-Growth/Degrowth Context. Sustainability 2016, 8, 1080 .
AMA StyleEléonore Fauré, Åsa Svenfelt, Göran Finnveden, Alf Hornborg. Four Sustainability Goals in a Swedish Low-Growth/Degrowth Context. Sustainability. 2016; 8 (11):1080.
Chicago/Turabian StyleEléonore Fauré; Åsa Svenfelt; Göran Finnveden; Alf Hornborg. 2016. "Four Sustainability Goals in a Swedish Low-Growth/Degrowth Context." Sustainability 8, no. 11: 1080.
Daniel Cunha misreads us as suggesting that climate change has been a conscious and deliberate strategy of a global elite. This was very clearly not our suggestion. He proposes that the Marxian concept of fetishism is applicable to anthropogenic climate change, apparently unaware of our recurrent use of precisely this concept in a number of publications over the past decades. We thus fundamentally agree with his position, but find his critique of our own interpretation of the Anthropocene unfair and misdirected.
Alf Hornborg; Andreas Malm. Yes, it is all about fetishism: A response to Daniel Cunha. The Anthropocene Review 2016, 3, 205 -207.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg, Andreas Malm. Yes, it is all about fetishism: A response to Daniel Cunha. The Anthropocene Review. 2016; 3 (3):205-207.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg; Andreas Malm. 2016. "Yes, it is all about fetishism: A response to Daniel Cunha." The Anthropocene Review 3, no. 3: 205-207.
This article challenges the urge within Actor-Network Theory, posthumanism, and the ontological turn in sociology and anthropology to dissolve analytical distinctions between subject and object, society and nature, and human and non-human. It argues that only by acknowledging such distinctions and applying a realist ontology can exploitative and unsustainable global power relations be exposed. The predicament of the Anthropocene should not prompt us to abandon distinctions between society and nature but to refine the analytical framework through which we can distinguish between sentience and non-sentience and between the symbolic and non-symbolic. The incompatibility of posthumanist and Marxist approaches to the Anthropocene and the question of agency derives from ideological differences as well as different methodological proclivities. A central illustration of these differences is the understanding of fetishism, a concept viewed by posthumanists as condescending but by Marxists as emancipatory.
Alf Hornborg. Artifacts have consequences, not agency. European Journal of Social Theory 2016, 20, 95 -110.
AMA StyleAlf Hornborg. Artifacts have consequences, not agency. European Journal of Social Theory. 2016; 20 (1):95-110.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlf Hornborg. 2016. "Artifacts have consequences, not agency." European Journal of Social Theory 20, no. 1: 95-110.