Numbering As Landscape-making.

• In Event: How Do STS Studies Translate Numbers: Economics, Markets Value/Valuation and Policy

Abstract

This paper draws on an ethnographic study on sheep and wool production in Patagonia, South America, which includes fieldwork on measuring wool in a laboratory. This measuring implies translating the quality of woollen fibres into numbers, in turn read as exact data – facts – about the wool. Early STS caught issue with how scientific facts are made into ‘objective’ and ‘universal’ knowledge in practice by drawing on ethnographies of laboratory studies. In much thanks to this, facts have been localized (Law and Mol 2001). We now accept that facts are always produced somewhere; that they are situated (Haraway 1991). This paper is driven by a search for the wheres of the numbering activities and the wheres of their impact. It shows that the meticulous numbering of woollen fibres (the quantification of its quality) while explained as a mere translation of what is already in the fibre, also shapes the wool, and subsequently, makes the geopolitical landscape where the wool grows. Yet, for the data to be taken as facts, there is an expressed conflict between the numbering activities and the shaping and making of wool and landscape. What stands out is how this conflict is not taken as problematic by the lab technicians. Instead, there is room for ‘double visions’ on wool as ‘subjectobject’. The paper argues that, in the practice of wool measuring, acts of numbering links quantitative and qualitative versions of wool; that these versions are sometimes allowed to work together; and that when they do, they form part of landscape-making.

Author

• Annika Capelán