Taking a spatial and pragmatic approach to markets, this chapter develops an understanding of small trade and its logistics in markets at the periphery of global capitalism. Based on field surveys carried out in Senegal, it examines the day-to-day interactions between wholesalers, resellers and logistics intermediaries that organize the circulation of goods within and between distributed marketplaces and spaces. The research question addresses the process of ‘scaling up’ that transforms a multitude of small hawker transactions into mass consumer markets. The analysis reveals a reticular structure interconnecting individual and informal cross-border traders and shopkeepers, resellers of differing sizes and capacities, and the interconnection of these parties by ‘coxers’ and drivers, who are actors in both micro-logistics and hawking. It shows that the daily circulation of a multitude of small batches of goods relies on logistics assemblages recomposed on a day-to-day basis, based on kinship (interpersonal alliances), tech-ship (micro-technologies) and a credit chain. It shows how this socio-technical circulation infrastructure is a key driver of market access for small traders, allows for the conquest of spatial scales, and provides a flexibility of hierarchies and trajectories as a form of market organization.

This book unsettles regular accounts of knowledge about language in several ways. The idea of assemblages allows for a flexibility about what languages are, not just in terms of having fuzzy linguistic boundaries but in terms of what constitutes language more generally. Languages are assembled from different elements, both linguistic elements as traditionally understood as well as items less commonly included. This is to approach language not as a pre-existing or circumscribed entity but rather as something produced in social action. Language from this point of view is embedded in diverse social and physical environments, distributed across the material world and part of our embodied existence. Once we ask whose version of language counts, we have to base any practical theory of language on what language is within a local ontology. This necessitates an engagement with language ideological assemblages and an understanding that languages are inevitably locally made assemblages (linguistic, semiotic and material). Applied linguistics as a practical assemblage is one way we can start to address the needs for a practical theory of language that can remain both plural and political.

Transnational policy networks (TPNs) participate in global governance by formulating ideas and policy options around and through formal and informal intergovernmental organizations. They illustrate the third type of informal governance introduced in Chapter 1, informal governance that exists in the spaces around these institutions. TPNs are constituted by individuals who share a common expertise, a common technical language, and broadly shared normative concerns, but not a common institutional setting nor agreement on specific policy goals. This chapter contrasts TPNs with other institutional forms in the literature – advocacy networks, epistemic communities, transgovernmental networks, public–private partnerships, multistakeholder initiatives, and transgovernmental initiatives – and argues for their integrative advantages and ability to address individual agency and power. A heuristic case illustrates how a TPN functioned to create the Office of the Ombudsperson at the UN – securing rights protection for individuals targeted for UN sanctions – despite the initial opposition of all five Permanent Members of the Security Council. The chapter concludes with reflections on the potential benefits of applying the concept to other emergent policy domains.

In order to explore translinguistic precarity in greater depth, we need to do three things: First, move towards a sufficiently complex understanding of what precarity means (and does not mean). Is it a general condition of our times, a longstanding effect of capitalist exploitation or an emergent property of unequal social relations? Second, we need to think through ways of relating precarity to language. It is not enough to predefine precarious lives in terms of marginalisation, poverty, struggle or discrimination and then to assume that the language used by or towards such speakers is necessarily precarious or produces precarity. We need instead to understand the co-articulation of translingual practices and lived experiences of precarity, asking how one informs the other. So third, it is important to understand the dynamic interactions among material relations, language ideologies and linguistic resources, where precarity may be an emergent feature as much as a pre-condition, of a local assemblage. Drawing on data from our longitudinal metrolingual project we make a case for understanding translanguaging and precarity in relational terms, entangled with family and friendship support structures, contingencies of the local economy, gender norms, cultural and religious practices, and local language policies and possibilities.

This chapter brings the sensory potentialities of material objects used in Roman ritualized activities into discourse concerning the nature and production of ancient religious knowledge. By combining perspectives derived from lived religion and material religion it is argued that religious agency should be understood as the product of the intertwining of human and more-than-human things within assemblages. Lived experiences of this production of agency, in turn, cause people to feel and consequently think in certain ways, ultimately producing what can be categorized as distal and proximal forms of religious knowledge. The chapter uses the example of the frieze of the Vestal Virgins from the Ara Pacis Augustae to argue that different forms of ancient religious knowledge were actively created through a multiplicity of lived experiences of ritualized action that brought human and more-than-human material things together, rather than existing only as something that was expressed through ritual behaviours. Exploring the Vestals’ experience of ritualized encounters with material things makes it possible to establish new understandings of the real-world lived experiences and identities of these priestesses, offering significant insights into how individualized forms of religious knowledge could be sustained even in the context of shared communal or public rituals.

The essay sketches the development of W.G. Sebald’s poetry from its beginnings in the mid-1960s through the unpublished writings of the 1970s, the 1980s long poem Nach der Natur (After Nature), and the poems written for the volumes For Years Now and Unerzählt (Unrecounted) shortly before his death. The first section introduces Sebald the poet with several general remarks, touching on a poem from the 1960s, passages from Nach der Natur (After Nature) and two poems from the 1990s. This is followed by sections illustrating effects of the non-simultaneous reception of After Nature in German and English and considering the influence of Southern German, Austrian and Swiss prose on the language of Sebald’s poetry. The final section visits the poet’s ‘lyrical workshop’, in other words the development of his poetry in manuscript form between the 1960s and mid-1980s, and the integration of a significant part of the manuscript ‘Across the Land and the Water’ into the final two sections of After Nature. The essay concludes that Sebald wrote poems throughout his life, and that it is likely he would have published further volumes of poetry had he lived longer.

As the configuration of global environmental governance has become more complex over the past fifty years, numerous scholars have underscored the importance of understanding the transnational networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations that comprise it. Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE) is a relational methodology that aims to capture the dynamics of these constantly shifting networks. CEE draws on multisited, team, and institutional ethnography to assemble teams of researchers to study major international conferences, which offer important political spaces where these networks can be observed. Drawing on more than ten years of experience with CEE, we argue that strong approaches to collaboration offer rich opportunities for analyses of global environmental governance. In CEE, researchers collaborate on all aspects of the research process, from research design to analysis to writing. The aim of this chapter is to introduce CEE, providing a history of its development, reviewing the benefits and challenges of CEE, reflecting on the theoretical insights generated through CEE in relation to understanding environmental agreement-making, and offering practical guidance for researchers interested in using the methodology. Going beyond CEE, the chapter also considers collaboration in the context of the broader scholarly landscape.

This chapter examines the complex physical relations that characterized a range of eighteenth-century literary, visual, and material objects that attached small fragments together into a new larger form. Arguing that these created a dynamic dialogue of part and whole, it explores how the process of joining allowed small fragments, displayed and placed together, to materialize emotional connection. It focuses on four key material forms: the production of herbaria; a series of collaged stained-glass windows at Plas Newydd, the home of the “Ladies of Llangollen,” Lady Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), in Llangollen, North Wales; the interior decoration and furnishings of A la Ronde, in Exmouth, Devon, home to cousins Jane and Mary Parminter (1750–1811 and 1767–1849); and the creation of eighteenth-century patchwork.

Drawing on various distributive frameworks – distributed cognition, distributed agency, distributed language – this paper makes a case for understanding identity along similar lines. While poststructuralist approaches to identity usefully undermined monological cognitive approaches to identity (where identity is a characteristic of the individual) – emphasizing instead the discursive construction of subjectivity as multiple, conflictual and flexible – many failed by and large to escape the constrictions of methodological individualism, or to account adequately for non-discursive factors, the place of agency or the material world. Distributive frameworks, by contrast, seek to break down the barriers between inside and outside, between humans and their surrounds, between language and context. From this point of view, language, cognition and agency are not solely properties of individuals bur rather operate through larger networks, assemblages or entanglements. In this paper we draw on recent data from our ten-year metrolingualism project to explore ways in which identity may be understood as a relational quality of an assemblage of people, places, things and linguistic resources.

During the slave trade, Signares kept domestic slaves and accumulated considerable wealth. As Signares walked to Midnight Mass, their dresses were illuminated by the light of lanterns made and carried by their slaves, highlighting their wealth. This chapter examines the historical origins of the lantern festival or Fanal, as it is known in Saint-Louis, and its continuous performance as cultural heritage in the city. Celebrated as Creole legacy by President Senghor, he made it a national heritage. This chapter examines the assemblages the festival establishes between the patrons and their craftspeople as their relations are mediated by the materiality and performativity of the lanterns paraded at the festival. Although the heirs of the Signares left Saint-Louis at national independence and the festival has been appropriated by African citizens, it continues to celebrate forms of difference and distinction reminiscent of domestic slavery. Furthermore, by celebrating the achievements of the patrons, the lantern festival still establishes the status of patrons as ‘shining lights’ of the nation. This suggests that the African citizens who act as patrons have accepted the responsibilities with which their colonial predecessors have endowed them. Through colonial nostalgia they have assumed the legacy of colonialism.

Chapter 3 presents an ethnographic case study of Chrislam, a series of religious movements that mix Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices, in its sociocultural and political-economic setting in Lagos. In contrast to conventional approaches that study religious movements in Africa as syncretic forms of ‘African Christianity’ or ‘African Islam’, I suggest that ‘syncretism’ is a misleading term to describe Chrislam. In fact, Chrislam provides a rationale for scrutinizing the very concept of syncretism and offers an alternative analytical case for understanding its mode of religious pluralism. To account for the religious pluralism in Chrislam, I employ assemblage theory because it proposes novel ways of looking at Chrislam's religious mix that are in line with the way in which its worshippers perceive their religiosity. The underlying idea in Chrislam's assemblage of Christianity and Islam is that to be a Christian or Muslim alone is not enough to guarantee success in this world and the hereafter; therefore, Chrislamists participate in Christian as well as Muslim practices, appropriating the perceived powers of both.

This chapter outlines “more-than-human” approaches being used in the social sciences, and explores their implication and use in environmental sociology. Considering how non-human elements influence human society is one way that we can center ecological life in our sociological work. Moreover, it provides theoretical tools to do so without being deterministic; that is, without assuming that the effects of particular ecological elements in society are inevitable, essential, or one-dimensional. Nor does it assume that those effects are entirely social, discursive, or immaterial. We discuss concepts in actor-network theory, assemblage theory, and new materialism, in the context of environmental sociology and sociological thought more generally. We use the case of apples in agriculture to further elaborate the use and implications of a more-than-human approach to the social life of plants.