Social Analysis

This special issue moves beyond an understanding of diagrams as mere inscriptions of objects and processes, proposing instead to re-evaluate diagrammatic reasoning as the work that is carried out with, on, and beyond diagrams. The introduction presents this issue's focus on ‘working with diagrams’ in a way that goes beyond semiotic, cognitive, epistemic, or symbolic readings of diagrams. It discusses recent research on diagrams and diagrammatic reasoning across disciplines and approaches diagrams as suspended between imagination and perception—as objects with which work is done and as objects that do work. Contributions to this issue probe diagrams for the work they do in the development of disciplinary theories, investigate their reworking of questions of time and scale, and ask how some diagrams work across fields and disciplines. Other authors shift the perspective to their own work with diagrams, reflecting on the practice and performative nature of diagrammatic reasoning in their respective fields and disciplines.

One of the original uses of the word ‘interior’ was to describe that which belongs to or exists in the mind or soul, that is, the mental or spiritual, as opposed to that which is bodily. The etymology of the term gives a clue as to how interior space functions in a manner that is different from the architecture that contains it. This article explores the analogy of architecture as body and the interior as mind through the act of drawing out Sigmund Freud's study and consulting room, with reference to Freud's diagrams of the mind. Working with diagrams, the article will demonstrate a relation between Freud's conceptual shift from descriptive anatomy to hypothetical structures of psychoanalysis and the diagrammatic ordering of the spatial arrangement of his practice.

Standard diagrammatic tools in ethnographies, locational maps, and kinship trees are supposed to help make fieldwork and its findings intelligible to readers. This article explores how, to the contrary, they obscure locals’ lived worlds and the fieldwork process when they are used cross-culturally and cross-scalarly in studies of minuscule indigenous societies, anthropology's traditional study subject. I draw on my experience of producing and using these visuals, from fieldwork through to writing ethnography, in my work with foragers who live in South India in order to show the effect of these diagrammatic tools on our understanding of nanoscale communities and their intimate worlds.

This article reflects on the power and dangers of diagrams as a mode of anthropological exposition, comparing this particular form of non-text to the brief dalliance of mid-century anthropology with algebraic and logical formulae. It has been claimed that diagrams, like formulae, are clearer, simpler, or less deceptive than textual argument. By contrast, this article argues that diagrams are just as slippery and tricky as words, but that images and words slip and slide in different ways. Holding both diagrams and words together when building an argument enables not only a specific kind of rigor, but also moments of unexpected theoretical invention. This technique of holding together contrasting heuristics scales up as a productive epistemic device for anthropology more broadly.

Diagrams are found at the heart of the modern history of epidemiology. Epidemiologists used spatial diagrams to visualize concepts of epidemics as arrangements of biological, environmental, historical, as well as social factors and to analyze epidemics as configurations. Often, they provided a representation of the networks of relationships implied by epidemics, rather than to offer conclusions about origin and causation. This article will look at two spatial diagrams of plague across a period in which an epidemiological way of reasoning stood in stark contrast to arguments provided about plague in the rising field of bacteriology and experimental medicine. This historical genealogy of epidemiologists working with diagrams challenges perceptions of epidemic diagrams as mere arguments of causality to emphasize diagrammatic notions of uncertainty, crisis, and invisibility.

The idea of the diagram as a ‘working object’ is used to discuss the biologist C. H. Waddington's epigenetic landscape (EL) diagrams. This article investigates the diagrams’ history and discusses their usages in relation to Stengers's idea of the ‘nomadic concept’. What is it about these diagrams that have made them a tool for transdisciplinary research? The article argues that it is useful to distinguish between the diagram and the illustration, and that it is in part because the EL diagrams retain an illustrative graphic character that they have been apt for imaginative adaptation and reuse. The diagram in this case becomes an ‘ontological go-between’ that is thereby able to function in different contexts, such as sociology and anthropology.

When drawings are copied repeatedly in sequence by different people, they tend to undergo characteristic processes of change. Parts of an image become separated out, the whole design is flattened, the outline is emphasized, and perspective occlusion is removed. The drawing becomes more abstract, more schematic—in a word, more diagrammatic. This article focuses on such drawing processes and on the results of experiments in repeated copying by anthropologists, psychologists, architectural students, and Surrealists. The tentative conclusion is that designs are represented mentally in a ‘diagrammatic’ way that affects not only how they are seen but also how they are changed when reproduced.

Philip Steadman's epilogue suggests that the copying of drawings (and its study) by anthropologists, psychologists, architectural students, and Surrealists is revealing not only of processes of diagrammatization but also of the fact that there is something ‘diagrammatic’ about the way in which designs are represented mentally, which affects how they are seen and altered when they are reproduced. The work of diagrams, not only as visual objects but also as mental processes, is shown by the articles in this special issue to play a central role in fields as diverse as psychoanalysis, anthropology, epidemiology, and biology. More often than not, the synergy between these fields is facilitated, and sometimes catalyzed, by shared diagrammatic practices. As the studies examined in the epilogue demonstrate, diagrams form a privileged visual field of interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange. But importantly, they also facilitate a way of information processing—what the editors of this special issue call ‘diagrammatic reasoning’—through which data are processed, presented, and reconfigured in clear and easily assimilated forms.