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Article ID: CBB001201586

Observing, Collecting and Governing “Ourselves” and “Others”: Mass-Observation's Fieldwork Agencements (2014)

History and Anthropology
Volume: 25
Pages: 227--245
Publication date: 2014
Language: English

DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2014.882835

Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Part of the special issue: “Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities”.

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Field work Collectors and collecting Data collection Science and government Observation Research Research methods Anthropology Everyday life Science and ideology Science and culture Great Britain, colonies 20th century, early Great Britain

This paper explores the relationship between oligoptic visual economies and liberal technologies of government which emerge from a consideration of the field collecting practices of Mass-Observation (MO), a social research movement established in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War which attempted to develop an anthropology of British everyday life. Focussing on MO's fieldwork agencements, the paper shows how the project brought together museological methods of collecting and curating with new mechanisms of collective self-watching, and the ways in which these mechanisms became implicated in technologies of government through its archival operations. In the connections it drew between the liberal subjectivities of collective self-watching and surrealist aesthetic practices, MO played a significant role in shaping new governmental rationalities, with implications for both metropolitan and colonial populations, through its interlinked conceptions of mass and morale. These formed part of a broader scientific--administrative--bureaucratic apparatus which facilitated the classification, ordering and governance of populations and things in this and later periods.

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Description On field collecting practices of Mass-Observation (MO), a social research movement established in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

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Article Bennett, Tony; Dibley, Ben; Harrison, Rodney (2014) Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities. History and Anthropology (p. 137). unapi

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