Mafiacraft, witchcraft, statecraft, or the politics of mafia knowledge and the knowledge of mafia politics
Mafiacraft, witchcraft, statecraft, or the politics of mafia knowledge and the knowledge of mafia politics While praising Deborah Puccio-Den’s proposal for its invitation to a more reflexive kind of mafia…
Staying with the subtlety of life in the oil complex
Staying with the subtlety of life in the oil complex Go to Source
Iron bubbles: Exploring optimism in China’s modern ghost cities
Iron bubbles: Exploring optimism in China’s modern ghost cities Financial bubbles are generally understood retrospectively as ruptures or bursts, indexing some form of radical change. Conversely, this article proposes that…
A time of peace: Divergent temporalities in Jewish–Palestinian peace initiatives
A time of peace: Divergent temporalities in Jewish–Palestinian peace initiatives This article considers the conflicting temporal models of peace among Jewish Israelis, specifically between liberal Zionists who populate the traditional…
The reality of inchoateness
The reality of inchoateness Deborah Puccio-Den, working from long ethnographic experience, has provided an intriguing and challenging account of how the mafia effect—which she approaches through her own coinage of…
Mafiacraft: How to do things with silence
Mafiacraft: How to do things with silence How to construct an ethnography about such a phenomenon as “the mafia,” shrouded in silence? What methods might anthropologists use to investigate silence…
Crafting “mafia”: Performative and material practices
Crafting “mafia”: Performative and material practices Go to Source
Headless queues: Disorder and disorientation in a Zimbabwean market, 2007–2008
Headless queues: Disorder and disorientation in a Zimbabwean market, 2007–2008 In this paper, I analyze Zimbabweans’ efforts to make sense of ubiquitous queues for basic goods during a period of…
Calling through the water jar: Domestic objects in Nahua emotional assemblages
Calling through the water jar: Domestic objects in Nahua emotional assemblages This article re-examines human–object relations in an Indigenous Nahua context in Mexico. Inspired by the Deleuzian notion of assemblage,…
Deception in practice: Hunting and bullfighting entanglements in southern Spain
Deception in practice: Hunting and bullfighting entanglements in southern Spain Deception is a recurrent strategy deployed in the relations between human beings, between humans and animals, and even between animals,…
Brand displaced: Trademarking, unmarking, and making the generic
Brand displaced: Trademarking, unmarking, and making the generic In this paper, I examine the creation of prop “non-brands” in the United States movie and television industry. In taking up the…
Material deceptions and the qualities of time
Material deceptions and the qualities of time Go to Source
Life and its inflections in Kilimanjaro: Becoming and being beyond the metaphoric
Life and its inflections in Kilimanjaro: Becoming and being beyond the metaphoric This article explores a set of vernacular notions used by the Chagga-speaking people of Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro Region to…
Contemporary counterconduct
Contemporary counterconduct In this lecture delivered at Stanford University in February 2019, I explore—in a writing style that I call, following Adorno, “late style”—a conduct that counters pressures to behave…
Amerindian political economies of life
Amerindian political economies of life Elaborating on the notion of “political economy of life,” first developed in a 2009 book on indigenous forms of slavery and servitude, I argue that…
Life, domesticated and undomesticated: Ghosts, sacrifice, and the efficacy of ritual practice in early China
Life, domesticated and undomesticated: Ghosts, sacrifice, and the efficacy of ritual practice in early China This article explores classical Chinese conceptions of and practices surrounding life and vitality. Focus is…
Karma and grace: Rivalrous reckonings of fortune and misfortune
Karma and grace: Rivalrous reckonings of fortune and misfortune Karma and grace are grammars for material and moral being, each offering onto-cosmological justification for the vicissitudes of destiny. Beyond their…
Climaxing in other ways and other places: From plant spasms to psychopomp pillows
Climaxing in other ways and other places: From plant spasms to psychopomp pillows Taking as a point of departure the status accorded to sexual orgasm in Western societies, we take…
Greek divination from an Amerindian perspective: Reconsidering “nature” in mantike
Greek divination from an Amerindian perspective: Reconsidering “nature” in mantike This article explores and reconfigures certain epistemological patterns of oracles and divination (mantike in ancient Greek), concepts of relevance in…
Valueless value: The question of production in Cofán shamanism
Valueless value: The question of production in Cofán shamanism In this essay, I analyze the production of value in the shamanic complex of the indigenous Cofán people of eastern Ecuador.…