What is “(un)making” STS ethnographies? Reflections (not exclusively) from Latin America

In a recent article published in a Colombian Journal, Cristóbal Bonelli invites us to “build on the ontological interest of ANT regarding the ‘politics of things’ by developing the politics of ‘where’” (2016, 24). It involves producing a conceptual space allowing the features of ethnographic materials to establish the conceptual terms used to ethnographically describe them. He draws on Annemarie Mol’s invitation to rethink politics, as usual, concerned with who can speak and act. Mol and Bonelli encourage to redirect our attention towards what is enacted in every specific context of practice. Thereby, for Mol, politics is open to things in the process of its emerging existence. Bonelli elaborates this distinction for the case of concepts by avoiding the usual differentiation between meanings and materiality. Concepts, inasmuch as empirical objects of the world, are the outcome of the onto-epistemic practices that produce them. Hence, it is plausible to revisit their politics, not only regarding “who” and “what,” but also by reflecting on “where.” The article offered by Bonelli speaks, in its own way, to the provocations of several scholars about the need to “provincialize” STS concepts. According to Law and Lin (2015), it is necessary to exert a “postcolonial symmetry” given that STS is a “critter gestated in Euro America” to an important extent. There, at the very center of our disciplines, several entities emerge apparently without a place. Some of those entities include “boundary objects,” “multiple realities,” “sociomaterial networks,” “coproductions,” or “nature-culture hybrids.” Whenever we use our STS lens, we often overlook how things, including concepts, emerge somewhere, and how every new location transforms those curious entities. The question about what a concept can make is importantly related to the location of its production and circulation. Consequently, its location should be included in our consideration of any concept at the core of our research from our own locations. Bonelli puts forward a reflection that echoes the famous quote: “it matters what thoughts think thoughts; it matters what knowledges know knowledges; it matters what relations relate relations; it matters what worlds world worlds” (Haraway 2016). “It matters” then, not only in the sense of what but also where. Indeed, we might argue that the ideas, knowledge and relations that we often use are also the outcomes of their localities of production. Such localities are most of the times overlooked precisely