ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 25 NO 2, APRIL 2009 27 are also acted upon. Their force is compli- cated. Elaborations on the reality of agency along the lines of the analyses of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour fit them quite well. What they do not quite tol- erate is reduction to a single drive (be it human greed, bad science or internal contradiction). Controversies on the attribution of agency are not only issues of scholarly appraisal: financial objects configure worlds in which struggles to elucidate the imputation of profits and losses or the distribution of fault and recognition are a part of ordinary work. To describe such financial objects in both an anthropological and a political manner may call for at least two precautions – these are both suggested, in a sense, by Hart and Ortiz. The anthropological has to do with paying attention to the affects and percepts these objects provoke, that is, to how they are articulated in human experience. The political lies in the consideration of asymmetries in the practices of distribution and appropriation of gain, perhaps also in a focus on conflict (actual or potential) and on the critical analysis of deictics (‘us’ and ‘them’ in particular – also in reference to anthropologists, it should be noted). But in all cases political anthropology of finance may not go very far without consid- ering objects and their force. Quotation marks are most welcome, of course. But it should be made clear whether they are used in the name of the sociological debunking of some bewildered delusion, or rather to indicate that a remarkable matter has been brought back from fieldwork for examination. l Fabian Muniesa Mines ParisTech fabian.muniesa@mines-paristech.fr conference AAA eNCoUNTerS: CHAlleNGiNG boUNDArieS AND reTHiNkiNG eTHiCS American Anthropological Association 107th Annual Meeting, 19-23 November 2008, San Francisco The theme of the AAA’s 107th meeting was ‘Inclusion, Collaboration, and Engagement’. The conference, crowded into a downtown Hilton, offered a space to engage critically and creatively with anthropology’s objects and methodologies. The panels we attended often turned, in a self-reflexive but decidedly forward-looking move, to the ‘encounters’ of the anthropological enterprise, addressing, among a myriad of topics, the complexity of transnational encounters, the politics of human-animal encounters, and the ethics of fieldwork encounters. * * * Several panels tackled the methodological and conceptual difficulties posed by migra- tion and transnationalism. Speakers such as Stephen Lubkemann touched on the ways that studies of migration should be inclusive of diverse transnational experiences, including the experiences of those who do not migrate. For some within migrant households, Lubkemann suggested, transnational mobility may be wielded as a weapon to reproduce (often gen- dered) power relations. Other panels urged a rethinking of ‘the border’ and borderlands. Instead of a geographic or political line, presenters argued for an expanded notion of borders as places of convergences, frictions, agencies and absences, in order to expose the ironies, contradictions and inequalities of transnational spaces. Federico Besserer, for instance, addressed transnational urban border zones that exist miles ‘inland’ from the political border, such as Netza York in Mexico. His paper raised methodological concerns about how to do fieldwork on the absences or discon- nections endemic in the lives of the urban poor, offering the image of a mirror which distorts and deflects images, to imagine how we might envision such transnational urban border zones. Other panellists addressed the complexity of transnational economic relations. Aida Hernandez explored the transformation of not just families but entire village landscapes in rural Guatemala and Mexico, and the ways in which family migration networks are now competing with organized ‘trafficking’ rings that include travel agencies, smugglers, docu- ment forgers and myriad others offering serv- ices to clandestine migrants. Finally, many of these papers conveyed a desire for engagement with all aspects of policy and expertise that affect migrants’ lives. The panel on ‘Latino Migrant Health in the US’, in particular, offered insights into the structural vulnerabilities, xenophobia and mis- understandings that Latino migrants face when seeking health care in the US. Corporations depend on the embodied energy of migrants’ labour, yet these migrants are treated as non- persons – as opposed to the legal ‘person’ of such corporations. Philippe Bourgois’ discus- sion highlighted the challenges migrants face in terms of health care, and ended with a call for greater engagement and collaboration of anthropologists with medical practitioners and policy-makers – what he called ‘building theory with stakes’. * * * The focus here on revising understand- ings of borders and boundaries – as well as Bourgois’ implicit emphasis on the respon- sibility of those who inform and work with policy-makers – found an interesting echo in a series of panels questioning the tradi- tional boundaries of anthropology’s ‘others’. Speakers in two sessions – ‘The Multispecies Salon II’ and ‘Species at Sea: Aqueous Anthropologies of Nonhuman Strangers and Companions’ – presented new research on anthropology’s engagement with the non- human, and specifically with non-human animals. In the latter panel, a creative and stimulating set of papers took the ‘recent “animal turn”’ within the discipline ‘under water’, as Stefan Helmreich, the session organ- izer, explained, turning the anthropological gaze towards lives of and in the ocean. Here, the fluidity of water suggested the satura- tion of the human by the non-human and the permeable boundaries of species and specie. Karen Barad, for instance, offered the brittle- star – a creature that ‘sees’ through a network of microlenses built into its body – as a model for an ontology of knowing that does not sepa- rate materiality and epistemology. Similarly, Helmreich presented a conceptualization of the ‘biological ocean’ as a realm suffused by microbial beings, challenging the rigid genea- logical distinctions of the species concept (‘not a natural kind but a slippery sort’). For Bill Maurer, who transposed the theme of entangle- ment to the economic, evoking a connection between human exchanges with animals and with money (species and specie), the ocean became a metaphor for the international pay- ments space, where definitions of ‘money’ are destabilized and its possibilities played with. The final paper by Astrid Schrader on the gene-swapping of algae blooms, and Donna Haraway’s rousing comments, reasserted this theme of entanglement and enmeshing, bringing the intimacies between human and non-human other to the fore. This theme was also prevalent in the second session, held in co-ordination with an off-site event in which ‘bioartists’ working at the inter- section of organic and inorganic media dis- played their work. Agustín Fuentes addressed the ‘multispecies arena’ of human/non-human primate interaction as a potential site of ‘bio- cultural hope’, Jake Kosek drew attention to the uses of the honey bee as a tool and meta- phor in the ‘war on terror’, and S. Eben Kirksy described human/non-human interaction in a Costa Rican cloud forest preservation project and tourist destination. 1 In his talk, Kirksy emphasized the active acculturation of nature through forms of bio- logical management glossed as ‘regimes of care’. This attention to practices of manage- ment and care formed a second important theme – present in Maurer’s concern for legal regimes structuring monetary transfer and in Helmreich’s proposal for a conception of symbiopolitics as the governance of entan- gled living things. The focus on the ethics of systems of administration leads to an attempt to envision alternative possibilities of care and responsibility, a concern most clearly articulated in the papers by Sarah Franklin and Donna Haraway. Franklin described her involvement with a school art and sci- ence project, detailing students’ imaginative interventions into discourses of futurity and ‘biological control’ around regenerative sci- ence and medicine, cloning and synthetic