ABSTRACT
The term “assemblage” is generally used in anthropology to mean assemblages deliberately constructed by people or groups of people, sometimes in competition with others, for a specific purpose. The assemblage always includes people, often includes discourses, and may also include “things”: specific technologies or their components. I will use Tania Li, whose analysis uses Foucault, and Timothy Mitchell, whose analysis uses Latour, to examine this sort of assemblage. I argue that when these assemblages are successful and an intervention occurs, the effects of the intervention, typically unplanned and unanticipated, also constitute an assemblage: effects are interrelated, though the connections between them may defy explanation. I will use Mitchell to illustrate assemblages of effects that include the non-human. Acknowledging that heterogeneous things shape one another is important to conservation, in which the interactions of things like existing ecologies and economies with expert plans is so often a surprise.
