Orin Starn is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He is the author of
Writing matters if objects of analysis are to be understood as emergent forms with qualities, intensities, and trajectories that can be described or evoked. Writing is not epiphenomenal to thought but its medium. As it sidles up to worlds, disparate and incommensurate things throw themselves together. As it attunes, spatial and temporal dimensions come into play; writing skids over surfaces, pauses on a detail, grows capacious or pinched. This chapter offers four very different scenes of precarity as a form that accretes, accrues, and wears out and one that takes place through attachments, tempos, materialities, and states of being. Such objects of analysis register the tactility and significance of something coming into form through an assemblage of affects, routes, conditions, sensibilities, and habits.
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