What is “(un)making” STS ethnographies? Reflections (not exclusively) from Latin America

In a recent article published in a Colombian Journal, Cristóbal Bonelli invites us to “build on the ontological interest of ANT regarding the ‘politics of things’ by developing the politics of ‘where’” (2016, 24). It involves producing a conceptual space allowing the features of ethnographic materials to establish the conceptual terms used to ethnographically describe them. He draws on Annemarie Mol’s invitation to rethink politics, as usual, concerned with who can speak and act. Mol and Bonelli encourage to redirect our attention towards what is enacted in every specific context of practice. Thereby, for Mol, politics is open to things in the process of its emerging existence. Bonelli elaborates this distinction for the case of concepts by avoiding the usual differentiation between meanings and materiality. Concepts, inasmuch as empirical objects of the world, are the outcome of the onto-epistemic practices that produce them. Hence, it is plausible to revisit their politics, not only regarding “who” and “what,” but also by reflecting on “where.” The article offered by Bonelli speaks, in its own way, to the provocations of several scholars about the need to “provincialize” STS concepts. According to Law and Lin (2015), it is necessary to exert a “postcolonial symmetry” given that STS is a “critter gestated in Euro America” to an important extent. There, at the very center of our disciplines, several entities emerge apparently without a place. Some of those entities include “boundary objects,” “multiple realities,” “sociomaterial networks,” “coproductions,” or “nature-culture hybrids.” Whenever we use our STS lens, we often overlook how things, including concepts, emerge somewhere, and how every new location transforms those curious entities. The question about what a concept can make is importantly related to the location of its production and circulation. Consequently, its location should be included in our consideration of any concept at the core of our research from our own locations. Bonelli puts forward a reflection that echoes the famous quote: “it matters what thoughts think thoughts; it matters what knowledges know knowledges; it matters what relations relate relations; it matters what worlds world worlds” (Haraway 2016). “It matters” then, not only in the sense of what but also where. Indeed, we might argue that the ideas, knowledge and relations that we often use are also the outcomes of their localities of production. Such localities are most of the times overlooked precisely

due to how and where they were made. It is precisely those places, those whereabouts the US or Europe expressed in the English language, that make objects produce the world in their terms even in empirical contexts radically different from those where they were gestated.
"Politics of where" is in itself a concept. In Bonelli's article, this onto-epistemic object emerges from a game of tensions between different localities. Bonelli is himself a Chilean author writing, while based in the Netherlands, for a Latin American journal about the agency of a rock located in Chile. The materials of his article include the pages of a Colombian journal, published in Spanish, away from the circles of academic writing where concepts are made and promptly applied elsewhere. Additionally, we cite Bonelli's publication in a journal edited in the UK, printed in English, seeking to address something called Latin American STS. We also do it by writing an introductory piece both in English and Spanish, struggling with making justice to each language, keeping few clauses in Spanish while pushing the extension limits of English clauses.
Most certainly, the list of "where" keeps growing as we consider other locations of production of the concepts used by Bonelli. We understand "place" as the outcome of different and complex topologies that somehow fold into the concept and partially relate to the place as a geographic site. We are not sure whether we can claim that Bonelli produces his concepts in Chile or the Netherlands because concepts and countries are exceeded by, and correspondingly exceed, those complex places where concepts emerge. For instance, Latin America is so big and small, simple and complex, that it is difficult to consider it as a place where or for which Latin American STS is made. Therefore, we are not entirely sure whether we claim that all the articles included in this cluster are reflections from Latin America. All of our authors have clear connections with such a curious geographic entity, but at the same time, they exceed it in diverse and subtle ways. Because of this, none of these articles are "exclusively" from Latin America, although pointing out their partial connections with Latin America is important in empirical and analytical terms.
One of the aspects producing the colonial difference that "postcolonial symmetry" invites us to reconsider is the equivalence between place and geography. The authors of the articles in this cluster express discomfort against such equivalence in a variety of ways. This is remarkable considering the ethnographic attribute of these articles. Indeed, ethnography involves a series of practices that make places that are topologically complex. In its basic form, ethnography is only possible in the relationship between field and writing, traditionally thought as occurring in different places, although this might be an excessive and obvious simplification. For Marilyn Strathern (1999), the ethnographic moment is the outcome of the double and mutual inclusion between field and writing. We might consider this ethnographic moment as the basic onto-epistemic object of the ethnographer's praxis. There is no ethnographic concept that emerges only in the comfort of the writing site, partly because ethnography is only possible in the relation between different sites. Also, because the writing site is the field reproduced and transformed by the object itself.
Thus, one of the core features of ethnography consists of folding any kind of objects and places in its own onto-epistemic procedure. In her provoking invitation, Amade M'charek (2014) argues that objects are political not because of what is written in them but because of the ways they are folded. If this is the case, the task of a postcolonial symmetry should consist of providing a set of foldings in which it is not easy to establish what counts as Latin American or Euro American, resisting the simplistic reduction of place to geography. We consider such reflection particularly important when introducing a special cluster about ethnographies informed and transformed by STS in a journal seeking to discuss and reflect openly for and from Latin America. Only by being careful with the simplistic equivalence between Latin America and its geography in the global context, we avoid and resist a colonial exercise demanded from us: to complete the STS knowledge produced in places that do not need to be geographically situated since they are imagined as central.
The articles included in this special cluster incorporate the kind of complications addressed above. Yet, it is impossible that ethnography as a practice is not interrogated and remade in every piece of work. Because of this, we invite you to think of every contribution as a deployment of STS ethnography, in which they respond to a set of repertoires, questions and sensitivities. Likewise, as you are probably concluding by now, ethnography has effects on STS. For example, making central the questions about the place and its folding into the concepts that we have addressed up to this point. In other words, our interest in this postcolonial symmetry can find creative and interesting answers in the ethnographic practice.
Scholars engaging in the interdisciplinary field of STS have employed ethnographic methods to produce situated knowledge about their research concerns. Likewise, STS has offered a set of discussions permeating ethnographic practice. Hence, STS oriented ethnography consists of an interface or contact surface that continuously unmakes and remakes ethnographic objects, concepts, and descriptions. These processes of cross-pollination are of interest for us. In this special cluster, we address the possibility of rethinking STS engaged ethnographies as experimental in that they destabilize the meaning of knowing. STS ethnographies are made, unmade, and remade. The situated answers of the authors in this special cluster offer insights about how procedures and reflections cannot simply be allocated in other places where we comfortably and traditionally allocate academic production. This game of discomfort about the very idea of placegeographic, disciplinary, and others-inspired the call for papers for this special issue. As editors, 2 we hope to contribute to the complication of this fruitful surface of contact between ethnography and STS. We are convinced that we must expand the folding that makes this connection denser.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Tania Pérez Bustos is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Social Studies of Science, researches on knowledge dialogues and knowledge making practices that interrelate technoscientific knowledge with popular knowledge of different sorts. Her current work is on various textile handmade processes as technologies of knowing and caring.
Santiago Martínez Medina is a postdoctoral researcher at Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute and works in the interface between Anthropology and STS. He is interested in knowledge practices, including scientific practices, with an ontoepistemic approach.
Fredy Mora-Gámez is a postdoctoral researcher in Technology and Social Change. His research revolves around migration control infrastructures, alternative technoscience, and the materiality of affect and memory. His recent projects include "Reparation beyond statehood: assembling rights restitution in post-conflict Colombia" and "Migration in the EU; contrasts between governmental infrastructures and alternative technoscience."