Topology is a branch of mathematics that studies spaces that remain continuously invariant through distortion. In doing so, it offers tools for the study of the spatial aspects and extent of anthropological processes of identification, individuation, classification, comparison, transformation, similarity, and difference. Foregrounding space as object and analytic, this collection aims to demonstrate topology’s possibilities for methodological innovation in framing various objects of anthropological inquiry. While taking inspiration from topological methods for describing, formalizing, and classifying spaces, the essays collected here are not meant to comprise a single approach or proposal for importing mathematical forms into anthropology. Rather, they remain essentially experimental, drawing on topology as a set of techniques for abstraction in order to highlight, register, or inform specifically spatial structures encountered in the course of ethnographic investigations, employing space as an instrument and method of analysis across a wide variety of cases and themes.
Posts in This Series
Introduction: Topology as Method
Topology is a branch of mathematics that studies spaces that remain continuously invariant through distortion by theorizing invariance as a threshold of samenes... More
Vectoring
Through the open window come,just once and no more,The visiting winds fromthe Infinite, All these wordsI have read a million times—Always the same words. . . Al... More
Doughnut
The London Underground map, designed by Harry Beck in 1931, is one of Britain’s top ten design icons. Graphically innovative, it was the first transport map to ... More
Path
Usage generates shape, paths shape the city. Who has never gotten lost in the maze of streets in the medieval center of our cities, sometimes even in our very o... More
Kink
No doubt many of you will want to dismiss my whole argument as a futile exercise in bogus mathematics. I don’t accept that.—Edmund R. Leach, Rethinking Anthropo... More
Crosscuts
My interest in topology is twofold. First, to discern whether, by analogy or directly, topological thinking might inform how some people arrange spatial relatio... More
Surfacing
None of the Drung women I talked to could draw their facial tattoos on a piece of paper; it was not an image that could be abstracted, detached from its surface... More
Threshold
At the end of July, there was no longer enough water for all the trees.Despite the evidence they had seen, they were not yet angry enough to take a stand.When t... More
Neighborhood
What is the relation between the medium in which we think and the medium in which we talk? This is a question asked by Stephen C. Levinson (2003) in his path-br... More
Contiguity
During fieldwork with Muslim speakers of the Śḥerēt language in Dhofar, Oman, I learned to hang back behind anyone I was with when crossing a threshold into acc... More
