Theodor Borrmann: SALSA Webmaster 2026-

Theodor Borrmann

Oxford Department of International Development

SALSA Webmaster 2026-

Theodor Borrmann is currently finishing his doctoral research at the Oxford Department of International Development. He has a wide interest in anthropological questions of technology, life, and the environment as well as in Indigenous ontologies.

Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork among the Yagua people in northwestern Amazonia, his thesis explores how modern technical artefacts are integrated into wider relational ecologies. It highlights how modern artefacts feature in mythologies, ontologies, and everyday life among the Yagua, and shows in particular how machines and screens — just like other beings — are animated by plural, complex, and potentially ubiquitous life forces. On a more sombre note, the thesis notes how modern technical artefacts self-perpetuate through the transformation of human needs, hopes, and desires, and how their spread, while having its advantages, also fosters structures of dependency, reinforces an exploitative capitalist system, and disrupts existing relational ecologies comprising human and non-human beings. Overall, the thesis suggests that the Yaguan adoption of modern technical artefacts parallels their domestication of wild animals, that is, that machines and screens are to be tamed.