Communication in International Technical Cooperation: An Anthropological Systems Approach

Abstract

This chapter approaches communication across different ethnographic scales in one agricultural technology transfer project between Brazil and four countries in West Africa. It revisits classic Science and Technology Studies (STS) debates on the movement of conceptual and material objects across different contexts from a perspective inspired by systems theory, development ethnography, and post-representational approaches in anthropology. By empirically following one conceptual object—the paysan, or cotton-producing peasant—as it both connects and disconnects scales in the project, this analysis brings to the fore the double issue of multi-scalarity and self-reference, which becomes central when one views communication in a cybernetic rather than semiotic sense.