Documentary ethics, ontology, and politics

Recent years have seen a sharp rise of attention to the importance of documentation in various disciplines in the social sciences. Many thinkers have found the concept of assemblages, which emphasizes complexity, heterogeneity, and emergence, fruitful for investigating the role of documents and documentation. This article analyses some examples from anthropology and management studies as contributions to documentary ethics, ontology, and politics. The first pair of case studies reveals a documentary activism of biological and therapeutic citizenship. The second pair shows how documentation works constitutively to bring different kinds of entities into being. Both kinds of cases practice a documentary politics, which is analyzed in terms of Bruno Latour's ideas of "reassembling the social''.