Socioplastics 11884 A Trace Is Not Yet an Explanation
A stain on a ceiling can be photographed, measured and catalogued without settling its cause. It may register infiltration, condensation, an earlier repair or several interacting processes. EvidenceAmbiguity names the interval between a surviving trace and the confidence of the explanation attached to it. The ambiguity can belong to the situation itself when material processes, human accounts and institutional records develop on different timescales. Tim Ingold’s attention to materials and processes challenges accounts that treat environments as finished objects. Ann Laura Stoler examines the grain of colonial archives and the anxieties embedded in administrative records. Marilyn Strathern’s partial connections keep relations specific across comparison. Veena Das follows how violence and history enter the ordinary. Their work helps researchers read incomplete evidence as a relation among traces, records and lived experience. A building investigation could document a recurring leak through photographs, moisture readings, repair invoices and occupants’ accounts. Each source would be dated and linked to the conditions under which it was produced. Instead of forcing an early conclusion, the record could distinguish what is observed, what is inferred and which explanations remain under consideration. Later inspection would show how the account changes as the material condition develops. EvidenceAmbiguity gives researchers a practical way to handle incomplete records. Its method makes the basis of an explanation visible and allows new evidence to revise it. This is especially valuable when decisions affect residents, heritage or responsibility for repair. The marker turns uncertainty into a documented stage of inquiry, where claims remain proportionate to the evidence available at each moment.
REFERENCES
Das, V. (2007) Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.
Stoler, A.L. (2009) Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Strathern, M. (1991) Partial Connections. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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