Traces of Social Binding : Interpretive Tracing as a Bridging Concept

This chapter continues the recent debate on the epistemological dimension of traces and tracing. Following our own preliminary work and in confrontation with an explicitly non-Western epistemology—namely, the case of “First Australians”—the chapter proposes the perspective of interpretive tracing. It calls for the systematic reflection of practices and underlying epistemologies of traces as objects of interpretation in a cross-cultural, i.e., cosmopolitan, perspective. It is a perspective that is sensitive to the tacit assumptions of objectivity and linear inferencing that underlie many Western approaches. Further, it is an open perspective that is sensitive to various embedded notions of time and temporality (not just time as a linear approach to the world) in particular. Furthermore, this perspective we advocate can eventually show that trace and tracing entail different social, cultural, and societal notions of social binding.