ORIGINAL PAPER Documentary ethics, ontology, and politics Bernd Frohmann Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 Abstract Recent years have seen a sharp rise of attention to the importance of docu- mentation in various disciplines in the social sciences. Many thinkers have found the concept of assemblages, which emphasizes complexity, heterogeneity, and emergence, fruitful for investigating the role of documents and documentation. This article analyses some examples from anthropology and management studies as contributions to docu- mentary ethics, ontology, and politics. The first pair of case studies reveals a documentary activism of biological and therapeutic citizenship. The second pair shows how docu- mentation works constitutively to bring different kinds of entities into being. Both kinds of cases practice a documentary politics, which is analyzed in terms of Bruno Latour’s ideas of ‘‘reassembling the social’’. Keywords Documentation Á Ethics Á Ontology Á Biopolitics Á Assemblages About a year ago, a faculty colleague with background in anthropology, knowing my interest in documentation, sent me a conference announcement from the American Anthropological Association that included a notice of a special interest group in docu- mentation. That event led to Annelise Rile’s Documents: Artifacts of modern knowledge (Riles 2006), an anthology of papers on ethnographical studies of documents, which fol- lows her own book-length study, The network inside out (Riles 2000). As I’ll show below, anthropologists have also turned to documentation in a wide variety of ethnographic studies with a global dimension, especially the anthology Global assemblages: Technol- ogy, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (Ong and Collier 2005). The document has become a hot topic, not only in anthropology but in other areas of the social sciences. B. Frohmann (&) Faculty of Information & Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5B7, Canada e-mail: frohmann@uwo.ca 123 Arch Sci DOI 10.1007/s10502-008-9073-y