The Network Inside Out

"Networks" and other artifacts of institutions life such as documents, funding proposals, newsletters or organizational chants, are such ubiquitous aspects of the "information age" that they go unnoticed in most observers of late modern sociality. In this new kind of work in the ethnography of legality, Annelise Riles takes a sophisticated theoretical approach to the aesthetics of these artifacts by analyzing the experiences of one group of adherents-Fijian bureaucrats and activists preparing for and participating in the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995.