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There are many reasons why the work of Gabriel Tarde might appeal to contem- porary social scientists, not least his interest in the general principle of vitality that resonates so strongly with current research at the interface of the biological and the human sciences.1 _{And the drama of his confrontations with Durkheim are}

spectacular – both in terms of Tarde’s ousting from the sociological scene by the Durkheimian conceptual apparatus, and the subsequent moment of reinstatement, aided by Latour’s rhetorical prowess: Durkheim’s time is over; the concepts of ‘so- ciety’ and ‘culture’ have lost their power to energize and now appear only as spent forces – too static, too inflexible, incapable of capturing the dynamic uncertainties and destructive desires that characterize our contemporary world.

As ethnographers with a keen interest in social theory, yet lodged firmly within an anthropological rather than sociological tradition, we find the drama intriguing. Durkheim has had a hugely influential presence in the formation of modern British social anthropology, but it would be fair to say that until Deleuze (2004), and sub- sequently Latour (2001, 2004, 2005), brought him to our attention, nobody had thought much about, and much less with, Tarde. His minute empiricism, coupled with an interest in psychology, was enough to deter all but the most specialist inter- est, but most people simply hadn’t come across him. The question thus emerges as to what it is that Tarde has to offer a contemporary anthropology, when we had been getting over Durkheim on our own for the past few decades.

Getting over Durkheim is of course not a straightforward task. His determination to build a social science that would allow us to account for social norms without recourse to the non-social remains central to the anthropological endeavour. His questions about coercive, moral forces that shape human endeavour, the sense of collectivity expressed in ritual, social institutions and enduring traditions, and the patterned regularities that statistical devices and longitudinal or comparative studies reveal, remain enduringly fascinating. And for this reason Tarde’s altern- ative approach to these matters is intriguing, for it makes explicit all that had to be forgotten for the Durkheimian paradigm to prevail. Durkheim’s social science hinged on the establishment of the possibility of studying ‘social facts as things’, entities in the world that exist beyond, and external to, the individual. Tarde’s notion of ‘things as social entities’ relocates society as integral to all entities. This relocation has a radical potential in relation to established, positivist social science,

for it foregrounds the processual, and captures the importance of relational dy- namics of becoming, the open-endedness of all things, the potential of all things to transform through their inherent situated relationality. Latour highlights Tarde’s interest in relationality as the key site of contention between our two protagonists: ‘[Tarde] vigorously maintained that the social was not a special domain of reality but a principle of connections’ (Latour 2005: 13). Thus, while for Durkheim the social is the external force that holds things together, Tarde approaches the social from another angle. As Alliez points out, for Tarde ‘everything is a society, in which every phenomenon is a social fact’.2 _{In Strathern’s terms we are faced with}

a contrast between ‘relations between things’ and ‘things as relations’ (Strathern 1996: 19).

These contrasting approaches to the social are visible in the history of ethnographic writing, and emerged in debates concerning the ways in which eth- nographers appear to shift scales between the detailed precision of their everyday observations and the kinds of theoretical and/or descriptive entities that emerged from the analytic process. The ‘writing culture’ debates of the 1980s opened up a new critical awareness of the ways in which generalizations were habitually made in the discipline3 _{– and at issue was precisely the connection between specifics}

and generalities, parts and wholes. For Durkheim, the details of specific interac- tions were necessarily subordinated to the ‘bigger’ picture. Contingency, error, uncertainty were simply not relevant in his view of the social, where the whole was necessarily more than the sum of its parts, and thus beyond the detail. But for Tarde, as for many contemporary ethnographers, the detail is not approached as less than the whole, for it is through attention to the detail that we can find different kinds of collectivity in formation.

Attention to this formative process is what Durkheimian sociology put aside. The attraction of Tarde today is thus not simply the focus on relationality (for as we have seen Durkheim was also interested in the relation), but rather his further probing into the forces that motivate specific relations of imitation – and his re- fusal to assume established (and unquestioned) social entities as a starting point. Tarde approaches social entities as relations that are made and remade in specific circumstances that guarantee that no repetition is ever exact. For this sociology the mechanistic metaphors of social cohesion no longer suffice. Contingency and variability, passion and desire are recognized as integral to the social.

This perspective resonates with approaches that have been developed in various empirical and theoretical quarters over the past century.4 _{For ethnographers it is}

interesting as it creates a new visibility for an approach which is premised on atten- tion to the detailed study of specific interactions, and in which any kind of apparent stability or continuity has to be accounted for rather than assumed. The ‘situational’ or ‘processual’ analysis that grew out of the Manchester School provides a good example: ‘If situational analysis brings the social structure to life, it does so by obliging the analyst to view the social structure, whatever its relative stability, as essentially an open dynamic. It entails that the situation must be grasped more fun- damentally in its temporal openness than in its substantive definition and design. Put another way, it reminds the analyst that the substantivity of social structure is,

though necessary and efficacious, if not exactly a fiction, at least both more and less than a thing’ (Evens, 2006: 56).

Thus although Tarde has not been a major figure in anthropological worlds, it appears that we continue to rehearse the tensions expressed in the debates between Tarde and Durkheim. Why has this particular mode of repetition had such hold? One obvious possibility is simply that the argument, far from being resolved by Durkheim’s victory, was in fact amplified by the entrenchment of positions which have surfaced in diverse forms in more recent times, in various junctures of dis- ciplinary crisis across the academic landscape. In this chapter we try to make a different kind of position available by working from ethnography. Keen to avoid the battles and stand-offs of the ‘ science-wars’ scenarios,5 _{we do not set out to}

choose between Tarde and Durkheim or to arbitrate between them. By sitting on the fence we get some perspective – not only on what their divergent positions bring into view, but also in relation to what else might be going on that neither of them have noticed. Thus, taking the lead from the sage advice of Isabelle Stengers, who argued that the science wars would have been more interesting from the point of view of political struggle if the scientists had been asked about their practices and about what matters to them as practitioners (Stengers 2007: 12), we decided to follow through by attending ethnographically to a couple of examples where our practitioners might recognize themselves in both Tarde and Durkheim.

In the ethnographic sections that follow we describe two scenarios: one re- lating to the practices of road-building engineers in contemporary Peru, the other relating to the practices of architect-sculptors of Hindu temples and gods. The architect-sculptors and the engineers provide interesting comparative material for a consideration of what is at stake in the contrast between ‘relations between things’ and ‘things as relations’. Both groups of practitioners enjoy expert status. Both are engaged in ordering and fixing the world, in keeping specific entities stable and relevant. Both work in established institutional settings (we focus specifically on the laboratories and the temples in this chapter). Both have clear ideas of correct and incorrect practice. Doing things properly is important to them and knowing how to do things properly is integral to their professional status. They embrace social rules and social facts. They are also explicitly involved in making things, and are thereby engaged in transformational process. In their material engagements with the world they bring things into relation, but, as our ethnographies show, in so doing they also recognize the relationality of things, and the open-endedness of all relational process. What we are interested in is how these apparently contradictory perspectives emerge in practice as mundane and unremarkable continuities.

Thrift’s interest in the ‘ethic of craftsmanship’ offers us an important start- ing point. His invocation of craftsmanship relates to ‘a means of composition and channelling which involves bringing together discipline and concentration, understanding and inspiration, in order to bring out potential: a different model of homo faber, if you like, working both for its own sake and as part of a community of ability’ (Thrift 2008: 15).

To configure the architect-sculptors and the engineers in these terms, to focus on their craft skills rather than their institutional identities, alerted us to how their

practice drew together embodied skills, relational knowledge and the capacity to engage and transform matter in processes which, while open-ended, are also understood to be finite. As craftsmen they can succeed or fail, they recognize and draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable practice, they acknowledge the specificity of their expertise and agency, and they know that their influence on the world is bounded and temporary. In short, if Tarde tried to teach that the process of association is what needs to be studied, these craftsmen add the caveat that in the process some things are disassociated.

The authoritative refusal of certain kinds of association has strong resonance with Strathern’s response to Actor-Network Theory, which is also strongly em- bedded in ethnographic methods. Anthropologists, she reminds us, ‘take their lead from the relations they find themselves in’ (Strathern 1996). Furthermore, ‘the concept of relation can be applied to any order of connection’ (1995: 17). ‘The relation requires other elements to complete it – it summons entities other than itself – whether looking at relations between things or at things as relations. To talk about relations is to make connections explicit’ (1995: 19). And as specific relations are made explicit, others are cut, or simply fall away.6 _{Strathern’s own}

intellectual interests connect the ethnographies of Melanesia to the concerns and preoccupations of Euro-American institutions – including what has become known as ‘audit culture’, that desire to enhance performance by making relations explicit. Her analysis generates a powerful sense of a diversity of network forms, as well as an awareness of the multiplicity of relations that could be followed or described. The particularity of ethnographic work is thus – not its relational form, but its commitment to holding back, at least for the duration of the fieldwork period, to try and find out what relations are in play, and to what effect. In this enterprise neither scale nor mode of connectivity can be assumed in advance.

Road-building in Latin America: Penny Harvey

Our first example is taken from an ethnographic study of road-building practices in Peru, in which the tensions between diverse modes of expertise are examined in relation to practices of material and social transformation.7 _{For the purposes of}

this chapter I pay particular attention to the ways in which the engineers produce the materials from which the road will ultimately be constructed. This focus takes us to the laboratories that, according to those who work in them, lie at the heart of the construction process. Before the construction camps are built, before the bulk of the workforce is recruited and mobilized, the topographers and laboratory engineers can be found tracing the route and testing the soils.

The technical dynamics of road-building revolve around three key elements – human labour and expertise; the machines and tools deployed by these people; and the characteristics of the physical environment that they aim to transform. The associations between these three elements are always specific and frame what can be known, the measurements that can be taken, the properties assessed. But this specificity is itself unevenly acknowledged. For this reason, I do not intro- duce the engineers by name, for while my relationships with individuals were of

course specific, it is important to hold to their sense that the technical procedures in which they are engaged should not be understood in relation to their personal circumstances and biographies. Indeed, technical practices are by definition gen- eric, and the disassociation of the personal from the technical is the achievement of the professional worker. However, these same workers need to attend in minute detail to the specificity of the materials that are brought to them for analysis. These moves between an appreciation of the relative importance of generic and specific knowledge are what interest me here.

The road we are studying will run for approximately 750km between the city of Cusco in the Peruvian Andes and the border with Brazil in the Amazon forest. Even before the final route is decided upon, soil samples are taken and transported to the labs. Here they are sorted, measured and tested in various ways and sub- sequent decisions about where the final route should go, where building materials should be drawn from, where waste materials disposed of, are made in relation to the results of these tests. In the laboratory the soil is made to reveal its capacities, to show its potential for the work it has in store – its density, porosity and plasticity are all assessed. Knowing the soil thus involves analytic procedures – composite materials are broken down to reveal their constitutive elements, and capacities are measured and documented in carefully controlled conditions. In this respect laboratory work is built upon procedures of systematic disconnection. In order to clearly apprehend the relations between things, the intrinsic relationality of things has to be both recognized and held in abeyance. Such is the power of abstraction. In the laboratories the engineers produce the earth as epistemic object by isolating it from the more complex relational worlds on the side of the road.

But this is just the first step. Having found what the soil is made of, the laboratory engineers set about transforming it – modelling its capacities in virtual form to start with, and then with the help of more machines and other materials brought from elsewhere they reassemble the components into a more appropriate substance, one that maximizes its capacity. At this point the choices that are being made in the analytical process become explicit. What is the most appropriate substance? Or ra- ther, appropriate to what? Well – appropriate to the functions designated elsewhere and by others, in relation to all kinds of decisions about what kind of road this is going to be, in relation to projections and calculations as to what kind of traffic, with what cargo, travelling how fast and how frequently. The most appropriate substance turns out to be the best that can be produced ‘in the circumstances’, given the inevitable compromises, the difficulties in finding materials, the fluctuations in prices, the unstable political and social agreements. Indeed, as I got to know them better, I found the engineers to be thoroughly open about their inability to achieve ‘proper form’. They know that these projects are compromised from the start by both social and environmental contingencies. They measure and label the land but they know that the land moves. They sample meticulously but they know that the spatial and temporal gaps between sample points are crucial unknowns in what become overtly speculative calculations. Entangled in classic ‘actor net- works’, they muster the allies they can find: the webbings, the concrete, the stones, the machines, the politicians, accountants, bankers, lawyers, anthropologists,

archaeologists, economists – but they know such allies to be intrinsically unstable social elements, none of which can entirely be trusted, although they are all needed for things to hold together in the end.

Meanwhile local people watch and wonder. They know that there are qualities to the soil that the engineers take no notice of. For example, the road passes through an area which has for several decades been the site of widespread artisanal gold mining. There is gold in the mountains, washed down the valley floors, leaving res- idues in the water courses and traces in the soil. It is hard to find, but the engineers must know where there is gold, or they could use their analytical procedures to find out. But they do not appear to act on this information. People wonder whether this is because the information is simply irrelevant to them, or whether perhaps they just keep it to themselves. And then there is the more general problem that the engineers ignore, indeed are often ignorant of the earth’s more fundamental capacities and energies. The Andean people who live along the edges of this road in the mountains and the forest lowlands understand that the earth requires relations of a different kind – it needs feeding, it needs attention. For them the earth is fundamentally a relational and sentient being. The transformations required to produce generic sub- stance in the labs, and to reconfigure the materials to build a road entail a violation of these relations – as the earth is cut into, dislocated, reconfigured.

When these violations are not acknowledged or compensated in some way, fatal accidents occur. The earth demands a return of vital force. Many people die on the roads, and all these deaths link back to the voracious and unpredictable capacities of the earth itself. Accounts of the vengeful taking back of life are very common in relation to mining and construction work – but also characterize a more wide- spread understanding of the inter-dependence of human and non-human powers in this area. I spent a whole day hearing about the ghosts who occupy the house where the engineers were staying. But when my enthusiastic local friend attempted to engage one of the engineers with the details of these spectral beings, he cut her short declaring that he did not believe in ghosts, he believed in maths.

This response was typical. Ghosts are irrelevant, maths is foundational. On the whole the engineers refuse to engage with these elusive powers, except when