Anthropology of Things

Climate and ecological crisis, inequalities, the pandemics, migrations, different faces of digitisation, etc. In this day and age, modern world forces us to pose new questions about the ways in which the world is organised, organises itself, and is manage within its many fields, but, above all, about the associated relations and entanglements between various human and non-human, animate and inanimate, virtual, biological, geological, technological etc. actors. Scholars in management sciences have become accustomed to the fact that cognitive efforts allow only for partial insight which makes the human perspective a privileged one, not only based on the dominant exploitation-oriented trends towards anything that makes it easier for a (human) organisation to achieve goals, but also within the progressive trends, like Humanistic Management or Critical Management Studies, which focus on the good or the emancipation – of a human being. There are too little questions about how the world created by myriads of other-than-human beings organises itself without actual humans, and how more-than-human actants arrange and enact the reality, stand up for their rights, and manifest their agency, strength, and dignity, undermining the foundations of Enlightenment humanism, anthropocentrism, and even the Anthropocene, which mistakenly takes the generalised and omnipotent anthropos as a starting point.
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For this issue of Culture Management, we would like to invite all the interested authors to submit paper proposals presenting their fresh take on management where a human being is no longer automatically ascribed a decisive and leading role. Below is a non-exhaustive list of topics that are of particular interest to us:
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What does management in the world of non-human agency mean?
What are the roles of humans and non-humans in such management? Should these roles be separated?
Who actually manages whom and how?
What does it mean for the creation of knowledge about management?
What does organising and managing without a human being involve?
How do non-human and inanimate beings organise themselves? Does the theory of organisation apply to them?
Do we need a new, non-human theory of management and organisation?
How do the foundations of management change when actors who, according to humans, play the roles of “resources” and “organizational environment” acquire a new meaning enriched with agency and dignity?
How can we raise awareness of the agency and dignity of all management actors, not only the ones who are human?
What measures could be taken to strengthen such agency and dignity (e.g. through empowerment, animation, humanisation, or inclusion in the community)?
With whom (instead of with what) does a human being manage? Who/what performs the managing person and how?
Can responsible and solidarity-based managing and organising on the verge of, during, and after climate and ecological catastrophe draw from posthumanist reflection, and if so, how?
What are justice and care in management in the posthuman optics?
What new research methods and techniques are needed to identify and validate more-than-human beings in management and organising?
Is recognition and validating non-humans in management tantamount to the end of existing organisational practices, or does it have the potential for a positive change? 
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We are open to radical theses, avant-garde research, unpredictable case studies, fresh methods, and all things motivated by the desire to open management and research to the so-called new humanities, posthumanities, and ecological humanities. Authors are more than welcome to refer to such reflections as critical posthumanism, new materialism, anthropology of things, relations and object-oriented ontologies, actor–network theory (ANT), etc. 
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The editorial team: Prof. Barbara Czarniawska (Gothenburg Research Institute, University of Gothenburg), Dr. Małgorzata Ćwikła (Department of Culture Management, Jagiellonian University in Cracow), and Dr. Michał Pałasz (Department of Contemporary Culture, Jagiellonian University in Cracow).
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The deadline for articles written in Polish or English, consistent with the publishing guidelines of “Zarządzanie w Kulturze”, is November 30, 2021. Address for correspondence: czasopismo.zwk@uj.edu.pl. http://www.ejournals.eu/Zarzadzanie-w-Kulturze
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Recommended references

Braidotti, Rosi, (2018), What Are the Posthumanities, Proceedings of the 5th World Humanities Forum, 62–78. Busan, South Korea.
Briyant, Melanie and Julie Wolfram Cox (2014), Beyond authenticity? Humanism, posthumanism and new organization development, British Journal of Management, No. 25, pp. 706-723.
Cochoy, Franck (2014), A theory of “agencing”: On Michel Callon's contribution to organizational knowledge and practice. In: Adler, Paul; du Gay, Paul; Morgan, Glenn; and Reed, Mike (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory, and Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 106–124.
Czarniawska, Barbara (2004), On time, space, and action nets, Organization, No 11 (6), pp. 773–91.
Czarniawska, Barbara and Tor Hernes (eds) (2020), Actor-Network Theory and Organizing, Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin (2018), Nowy materializm – Wywiady i kartografie. Warszawa: Fundacja Machina Myśli.
Domańska, Ewa (2013), Humanistyka ekologiczna, Teksty Drugie, No 1–2, pp. 13-32.
Ferrando, Francesca (2016), Posthumanizm, transhumanizm, antyhumanizm, metahumanizm oraz nowy materializm. Różnice i relacje, Rocznik Lubuski, Vol. 42, part 2, pp. 13–27.
Fox, Nick J. and Pam Alldred (2018), Mixed methods, materialism and the micropolitics of the research assemblage, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, No 21(2), pp. 191–204.
Hayles, N. Katherine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kissmann, Ulrike Tikvah and Joost Van Loon (eds), Discussing New Materialism Methodological Implications for the Study of Materialities, Wiesbaden:  Springer.
Kociatkiewicz, Jerzy and Monika Kostera (2013), Zarządzanie humanistyczne. Zarys programu, Problemy Zarządzania, No. 44 (11), pp.  9–19.
Law, John (2009), Actor Network theory and material semiotics, In:  Turner, Bryan S. (ed.) The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 141-158.
Latour, Bruno (2013), An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pałasz, Michał (2019), Algorytm edge rank serwisu Facebook: Narodziny, rozwój i działanie w ujęciu teorii Aktora-Sieci, Humanizacja Pracy, No. 3, pp. 71–84.
Roden, David (2015), Posthuman Life. Philosophy at the Edge of the Human, NY: Routledge.
Wolfe, Cary (2010), What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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Selected special issues:
• Przegląd Kulturoznawczy (Cultural Studies Review): Management in the Anthropocene / 2021 / No. 1 (47) https://bit.ly/2VufvXf
• Organization: Organizing in the Anthropocene / 2018 / No. 25 (4) https://bit.ly/2VneCzU
• Prace Kulturoznawcze: Klimat kultury (The Climate of Culture) / 2018 / No. 22 (1-2) https://bit.ly/3ik5lBF
• Teksty Drugie (Second Texts): Nowa humanistyka (New Humanities) / 2017 / No. 1 https://bit.ly/3xowQhE
• Prace Kulturoznawcze: Kultura nie-ludzka (Non-human Culture) / 2015 / No. 18 https://bit.ly/37fFzbp

The jury is still out on the measurable influence of working from home on worker ‘productivity’. There is a minority of knowledge workers though, who cannot work at home at all. For many, libraries of cafes serve as inclusive, accessible, and virtually free public workplaces. The experience of losing the ability to work in such places under strict pandemic lockdown serves as a point of departure for reflection on sociographic storytelling and a critique of the rising interest in autoethnography. The text is complemented by a photographic essay shot in the Warsaw University Library in May 2021.

The paper includes a reflection on compositional and literary aspects of writing sociology, cases and workshop advice found in seminal works and remarks on recent technological developments in academic tools.
Possibilities of introducing audio-visual research techniques into biographical research are also explored, as well as prospects for taking into account the new audio-visual digital online forms of autobiographical expression.

These remarks will be grounded mainly in a study based on narrative autobiographical interviews on becoming a renown contemporary visual artist. In order to showcase some of the discussed strategies of enhancing sociographic story-telling, the paper includes fragments of an autoethnographic account as well as a photographic essay on doing research and teaching during the pandemic lockdown.

Celem wystąpienia jest opisanie źródeł teorii aktora-sieci, prezentacja wyboru kluczowych w jej nurcie badań, w szczególności na polu technologii, oraz przedstawienie części intuicji, kluczowych pojęć oraz akcentów praktycznych ANT (ang. actor-network theory) rozpoznanych przez autora (a nie narzucanych w jej ramach a priori) w toku jej eksploracji przy pracy nad dysertacją doktorską “Zarządzanie mediami społecznościowymi w perspektywie teorii aktora-sieci” (2018).
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Być może jedynie obsesyjnie szczegółowe rozpoznanie i socjalizacja relacjonistycznych i irredukcjonistycznych intuicji ANT oraz zaakceptowanie zawikłanych kluczowych relacji między często stosowanymi w jej ramach pojęciami (strukturalnymi i procesualnymi), pozwala na zgodne z intencjami nurtu przestrzeganie jego głównej - wymagającej o wiele więcej, niż wydaje się, że wymaga na pierwszy rzut oka - dyrektywy: “podążaj za aktorami”. Pomaga w tym również mapowanie akcentów kładzionych na konkretne praktyki badawcze i wskazówki praktyczne odnoszące się do uprawiania ANT takie, jak pięć źródeł niepewności, obszary stosowania, wskazówki dotyczące pisania, przykłady pytań badawczych, zadania nauk społecznych według Brunona Latoura czy robocze kryteria przynależności badania do analizowanego nurtu.
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W konkluzjach wystąpienia wzmacniana jest propozycja traktowania teorii aktora-sieci nie jako teorii, a jako metody, i proponowana jest argumentacja sprzyjająca pojmowaniu jej jako radykalnej antropologii technologii.

Introduction/Chapter 1. : The Dynamics of Affects and Experiences of the More- and Other-than-Human Bodies

When eroticism and sex are discussed, the attention most often focuses on what takes place between people. In this work, the erotic spectacle is more comprehensive and features non-human actors: things, stuff, objects. I set out from the assumption that objects, such as clothing, undergarments, footwear, and jewellery play an important role in stimulating erotic imagination, becoming participants in that process. The theoretical foundation for acknowledging things as active contributors to social relationships (as one should approach amorous-erotic-sexual relationships) derives from the anthropology of things. This perspective is also tangibly present in my analyses, since I seek to show the (post)human, transversal, liminal bodies as they become fused with other—animate and inanimate—bodies and objects. The attribute of “more- and other-than-human” in the title refers to the human, but a human construed in accordance with the concepts posited by the posthuman, new materialism and anthropology of things; an entity functioning in complex networks that link them inseparably with other beings: things, objects, animals, plants, sand, or water.

Chapter 2. More-than-human Network of Relationality
In this chapter I present theoretical and methodological issues. I show that research, generally referred as study of things, functions in different contexts. The baseline standpoint adopted by Daniel Miller, Peter Pells, Ikuya Tokoro and Kari Kawai is that of social sciences and anthropology, whereas Donna J. Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Rosi Braidotti take into account the outcomes of advances in science, biomedical ones in particular, as well as examine languages and images we employ to convey them. Natural sciences, medicine and biotechnology have long questioned the traditional conceptions of the human as a being apart with respect to other forms of life. Although the main research perspective in this chapter is anthropology of things, I also present here the issues developed in the framework of new materialism, posthumanism and transhumanism.


Chapter 3. Nature as a Phantasm of Culture
In this chapter I focus on the ambivalence of the duality ‘animal sex – human erotica’. I depart from such clear-cut oppositions which juxtapose the animal against the human, nature against culture, and the normative against the non-normative. This owes to reflection inspired by the ideas of the posthuman, new materialism and the concept of posthuman sexuality which grew out of that intellectual background. In the perspective I have adopted, the dichotomy of “animal sex” versus “human eroticism” is hardly tenable. One can still track down and deconstruct such notions as well as suggest new ways of conceiving and presenting the complex relationships between the human and the non-human, or else still—to portray the sphere of eroticism within a nexus of manifold, non-binary but yet mutable, networked relations. What does not reveal directly returns in secret form: in costumes, utility items, design and eaten products.

Chapter 4. The Obsession of Artificial Bodies
The heroes and heroines of this chapter are: mannequins, dolls, androids, cyborgs from literature and science fiction. I showed the gender context of those phenomena, as I am convinced that the aesthetic paragons of male and female physiques with their erotic overtones enact certain models of social relationships, and thus impose roles to be performed due to gender. Stories, novels, films – these are the areas of analysis of this chapter. Analyzing various literary, film, art works, I ask about the attitude of people to technology: its potential, limitations, entanglement in new forms of discrimination and oppression.

Chapter 5. The “Beloved” Objects
This chapter looks at things closest to one’s body (in the literal sense): clothes, underwear, footwear and considers the affects engendered by those objects. These roles are perpetuated (and much less often undermined) not only by dedicated systems of laws, morality, and customs, but also by a plethora of items, things, and objects by means of which we assume certain roles. The main category organizing the analysis of eroticism and sexuality in this approach is “obscenity”. I show ambivalent and related this term in the contemporary culture.


Conclusion/ Chapter 6.
This work is concerned with bodies, items, and substances in the material sense, as well as in the relationships between humans and nonhumans, other-than-humans, more-than-humans. The ties and associations with the things we produce, use, watch, and touch are by no means straightforward and limited to mere functionality. I perceive them rather as complex relationships of interwoven ingenuity, impulses, and affects. The goal I strove to accomplish was to show that in the erotic sphere the relationships are multilayered and exceedingly intricate. The eroticism of arch-non-human bodies spans affects and conscious modes of (self)creation, while things, objects do take part in these “dealings”. In the afterword, I showed that thinking about our-human, relationships with stuff, objects, and no human, more-than-human, finding non-human in ourselves, opens up new cognitive, emotional and social/community perspectives.

Krótkie studium na temat relacji ludzi i przedmiotów w światach przedstawionych XIX-wiecznej prozy realistycznej. Tekst opublikowany w tomie „Sploty kultury", red. Agnieszka Karpowicz, Paweł Rodak, Igor Piotrowski, Anna Gronowska, WUW, Warszawa 2010.

Things expelled, things tamed, things exhibited:
An attempt to pre-categorize
Abstract
The article aims at analyzing the status of material things whose function has changed due to changes of borders between Poland and Germany and the population transfer (i.e. repatriation and expulsion) after 1944. By using the Greimas semiotic square, I categorize artefacts along two axes: familiarity–otherness and mobility–immobility. I mainly focus on the musealization of things at the exhibitions in Poland and Germany concerning war and postwar resettlements.
Keywords: resettlement of Poles and Germans after WWII, museum exhibitions, semiotics analysis, anthropology of things

Książka, którą trzymają Państwo w ręku, stanowi próbę antropologicznego opisu na podstawie informacji zebranych w latach 2012-2014 w trakcie badań terenowych w wielkopolskiej Gąsawie (pow. żniński, woj. kujawsko-pomorskie). Jest to jednocześnie studium poświęcone specyficznemu rodzajowi pamięci kulturowej, która wytwarza się w obliczu obcowania człowieka z materią domowego poddasza: jego przestrzenią, a także zalegającymi w niej, zawieszonymi jak gdyby „w czasie”, przedmiotami. Wprowadzenie archeologicznej metafory „warstw temporalnych” oraz próba spojrzenia na strych jako reprezentację ustratyfikowanej pamięci uczyniły z niniejszego opracowania osobliwą opowieść o relacji mieszkańców Gąsawy z ich przeszłością: rodzinną, domową, a także tą posiadającą wymiar lokalny; przeszłością dającą się poznać za pośrednictwem pamiątek, jak również na poły zwyczajnych „rupieci”. Przestrzeń strychu ujęta została tym samym jako swoisty kalejdoskop historii i przestrzeń palimpsestowa, przekazująca swe własności wszystkiemu, co jest jej przynależne. W rozdziale I zawarto rozważania poświęcone
antropologiczno-filozoficznym podstawom opracowywanego tematu; rozdział II jest z kolei wprowadzeniem do zagadnienia symboliki domu w oparciu o najważniejszą literaturę oraz próbą ujęcia przestrzeni domowego strychu w porządku mitu. Analiza
materiału narracyjnego przeprowadzona została w rozdziale III, którego struktura stanowi zarazem ilustrację aktu doświadczenia „poddasza”, począwszy od przestrzeni i rzeczy jako reprezentacji historii, aż po sam moment dotarcia do istoty zaklętej w nich przeszłości. Rozdział 󰀴 streścić mogę jako krótkie studium poświęcone kilku odnalezionym na jednym z gąsawskich strychów „milczącym” przedmiotom, którym nie towarzyszyły opowieści informatorów. Wszystko to jest zarazem moją osobistą podróżą w przeszłość – niosącą możliwość jej odkrycia
i uwiecznienia w postaci etnograficznej narracji.