Making ‘Technology’ Visible: Technical Activities and the Chaîne Opératoire

Abstract

This chapter presents the chaîne opératoire (‘operational sequence’), an ethnographic method which aims at revealing the fundamental relationality of artefacts, practices, and networks, often black-boxed within the concept of ‘technology’, by making visible the fundamental material, social and cultural heterogeneity, of technical activities, their relational intricacy, the interweaving of human and non-human actors, causalities, choices, and contingencies. It gives empirical grounding to contemporary analytical concepts such as ‘agency’, ‘network’, and ‘materiality’, as well as revealing how and when technical processes are interlaced with questions of knowledge, kinship, economics, religion, or politics. After presenting the chaîne opératoire method, I examine the analytical purchase of the term ‘technical’, which not only emphasises the performative dimensions of practices but is also less loaded with contemporary associations with, and assumptions of, linear progress and determinism than ‘technology’. I then situate the study of technical activities within material culture studies, before clearing up some misconceptions about the method’s potentials and its limits. I end the chapter with an illustration of the analytical potential of the chaîne opératoire in two different ethnographic case settings: the first, laptop computer use in France; the second, yam cultivation in Papua New Guinea.