15th Annual Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern Lecture

              15th Annual Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern Lecture                                                                              Dr Ludovic Coupaye (UCL)

                                      Capacities, Containers and Categories: Toward an Anthropology of Technicity

 

The 15th Annual Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern Lecture will be given by Dr Ludovic Coupaye in the Auditorium, Pembroke College (Trumpington Street), at 17:00 on Tuesday 25th November 2025.

In this lecture, I present an exploratory synthesis of my previous works on “objects”. Starting from Anthony Forge’s insights that Abelam images are about relations between things, not about things, I follow and extend Marilyn Strathern’s premise that objects are relations-made-things: material condensations of processes that are not only the effects of relations but also contain, realise, and generate them. Building on my investigations of technical activities, I have proposed that objects are also processes-made-things, entities whose materiality is made of encapsulated temporalities, notably those from which they emerge. On the premise that objects are also contexts-in-themselves, I have now turned to how their functioning (different from their function, role, or use), that is their material and formal structure, act as dynamic operators through which relations are enacted, sustained, and transformed. In dialogue with Melanesian theoretical insights, particularly Strathern’s notion of relational composition, I suggest that objects are not only processes-made-things but also entities capable of making presence by generating relations, which can stabilise or challenge categorical—and thus social and political—orders. 

Through three case studies—the decorated yams and gardens of Abulës-speaking (Abelam) communities and their ceremonial contexts; Sepik anthropomorphic figures as relational containers; and an exploration of Gilbert Simondon’s notion of technicity through the example of the digital printer—I re-examine how objects not only instantiate relations but also serve as containers for potential futures, categories, and orders. Ultimately, the lecture advances an anthropology of technics concerned with how the functioning of objects, whether tubers, figures, machines, or codes, generates relations and mediates between moral, cosmic, and material orders.

Ludovic Coupaye is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology of UCL, where he teaches the Anthropology of Technics and Technology. He has taught history and anthropology of Pacific Arts at the École du Louvre, and worked as curator at the musée du Quai Branly, Paris. He is now the founder and co-director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity.

                                                                                   (Nyamikum, July 2025)

The Strathern Lecture is organised annually by the student-led Cambridge University Social Anthropology Society (CUSAS), which is supported by the Department.