Social and Cultural Anthropology

Feminine Transformations: Gender Reassignment Surgical Tourism in Thailand

by Aren Aizura

Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 28: 4 (2010), 424-443.

The Romance of the Amazing Scalpel: 'Race', Labor and Affect in Thai gender reassignment clinics

by Aren Aizura

In Peter A. Jackson, (ed), Queer Bangkok. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011. Page proofs only.

La pesadilla del homúnculo

by José Manuel Rodríguez

Rodríguez, J.M. 2012. La pesadilla del homúnculo. Semanario Universidad No. 1929: 24 Opinión.

publications and presentations

by Michael Elmore-Meegan

Visualising Communities. Possibilities of Network Analysis and Relational Sociology for the Survey and Analysis of Medieval Communities (in German)

by Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

Working Paper for a presentation for the SGB "Visions of Community" (http://www.univie.ac.at/viscom/index_viscom.php?seite=events) and the FSP "Gemeinschaftskonzepte, Identitäten und politische Integration", University of Vienna; slides online: http://oeaw.academia.edu/JohannesPreiserKapeller/Talks

Der Begriff des Netzwerkes erlebt spätestens seit der rasanten Verbreitung von „social
networks“ wie Facebook... more Der Begriff des Netzwerkes erlebt spätestens seit der rasanten Verbreitung von „social
networks“ wie Facebook einen fast inflationären Gebrauch in der öffentlichen Diskussion,
aber auch in verschiedenen Wissenschaftsdisziplinen, darunter der Geschichtsforschung.
Dabei ist es oft schwer zu entscheiden, wo dem Netzwerk-Begriff auch eine analytische
Aussagekraft zugrunde liegt und wo es sich nur um eine „Metapher“ oder ein „Schlagwort“
handelt, das Vergleichbarkeit mit Phänomenen der Gegenwart suggeriert, ohne
Wesentliches für den historischen Erkenntnisgewinn zu leisten.
Ein Ziel der sozialen Netzwerkanalyse ist es, Geflechte von Akteuren und Beziehungen in
strukturell und quantitativ fassbarer Form darzustellen. Darüber hinaus betrachtet aber die
„relationale Soziologie“ Akteure nicht nur als in soziale Netzwerke eingebettet; vielmehr
werden ihre Verhaltensweisen und Identitäten durch Interaktionen und Kommunikationsakte
im Netzwerk geprägt, ja überhaupt definiert. Die strukturell-quantitative Perspektive wird
damit wesentlich um qualitative Aspekte ergänzt; sowohl die Verknüpfungen zwischen
Akteuren als auch deren Rollen und Identitäten werden als Ergebnisse dynamischer
Prozesse verstanden.
In den letzten Jahren wurden diese Ansätze auch mit Konzepten der Systemtheorie (Niklas
Luhmann) und der Komplexitätsforschung verknüpft, um die Emergenz und Dynamik von
Gemeinschafts- und Identitätsbildungen von der individuellen Ebene über Gruppen bis hin zu
großen sozialen Formationen besser erfassen zu können. Diese Konzepte werden im
Vortrag präsentiert, diskutiert und durch auf der Grundlage mittelalterlicher Quellen erstellte
Fallbeispiele illustriert. Einige Ansätze und Beispiele wurden bereits in diversen Beiträgen
und Working Papers näher ausgeführt, die unter
http://oeaw.academia.edu/JohannesPreiserKapeller auch im Internet frei zugänglich sind.

Mathematics in Structural Theory

by Dwight Read

Emir Mahieddin, « Vingt-cinq ans après Writing Culture. Retour sur un "âge d'or" de la critique en anthropologie » ; James Clifford, « Vérités partielles, vértiés partiales »

by Emir Mahieddin

Traduction de l'introduction de Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) en langue française. Précédée d'un article et préfacée par James Clifford. Publié dans le "Journal des Anthropologues" 126-127 (2011).

How to Become an Iconic Social Thinker: The Intellectual Pursuits of Malinowski and Foucault

by Dominik Bartmanski

Published in European Journal of Social Theory

The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure... more The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic reputation. What does it take to become ‘a founding father’ of a humanistic discipline? How do social thinkers achieve the status of a trans-disciplinary star? Why some intellectuals attract tremendous attention and ‘go down in history’ despite personal and professional failures, while others enjoy only limited recognition or simply sink into oblivion, even if they have met all the standards of their day? Quite a few sociologists have tackled this elusive issue. Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont and Randall Collins are among those who fleshed out strong explanatory frameworks. This project adds to this body of knowledge by emphasizing cultural factors that these authors downplayed in their seminal accounts, despite being aware of their significance. By showing why these underdeveloped aspects of their works need to be incorporated into the debate and how this can be achieved, this article introduces a new theorization of the iconic, lasting intellectual reputation substantiated by evidence from the lifeworks of Bronislaw Malinowski and Michel Foucault. As such, it aims, minimally, to make sociology of knowledge decisively ‘cultural’. Maximally, it seeks to demonstrate that the iconic success of intellectual intervention in social theory depends on carefully performed and contingently mediated engagement with the binary systems of symbolic classification.

Mathematical Modeling Issues in Analytical Representations of Human Societies

by Dwight Read

Published in Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal
Volume 35, Issue 2-3, 2004

The application of mathematical models to anthropology has had a long history, with examples as varied in their... more The application of mathematical models to anthropology has had a long history, with examples as varied in their content as is the field of anthropology. Although models borrowed from other disciplines have been effectively applied, these models often do not fully take into account the implications of the cultural aspect of human social systems. A cultural construct provides organization for, and representation of, the external world. The implications for mathematical modeling of human systems are threefold: modeling of a cultural construct as a symbol system, modeling of the process of instantiation whereby abstract symbols and relations are provided with more concrete content, and modeling of the ongoing set of behaviors and relationships of one individual to another.

Comparative strategies: dialectics of the gift

by Rena Lederman

Mendi, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea

by Rena Lederman

Interests in exchange: increment, equivalence and the limits of big-manship

by Rena Lederman

Anthropology of big men

by Rena Lederman

IRBs and oral history

by Rena Lederman

Unchosen grounds: cultivating a cross subfield accents for a public voice

by Rena Lederman

IRB Advisor interview with Lederman

by Rena Lederman

Review - James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven, 2009)

by Uday Chandra

Religion and Society: Advances in Research, Vol. 2 (2011), pp. 194-96.

Rethinking Human Nature and the Place of (Wo)Man in the world: Anthropology between Philosophy and Science. A Manifesto

by Giacomo Pezzano

We are knowing more and more about (Wo)Man, but the determination of her/his nature is still problematic: asking «What... more We are knowing more and more about (Wo)Man, but the determination of her/his nature is still problematic: asking «What is (Wo)Man?» is paradoxically possible only in the space left open by (wo)man’s erasure. Whatever human nature is, (wo)man wants to know her/himself, because if (s)he does not know who (s)he is, (s)he can not know where to go: moving from hominitas to humanitas requires a definition of (wo)man’s nature, of her/his «place» in the world, in view of describing ex-istence as a modulation of the «World Openness» and an attempt to find a way of articulate the possibilities, as intrinsically «medial» and «modal» since it is founded on «referral» and «relationship with the outside»

Beyond Kurdistan? The Mesopotamia Social Forum and the appropriation and re-imagination of Mesopotamia by the Kurdish Movement.

by Marlies Casier

Published in the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 13:4, 417-432, December 2011.

Drinking with Vova: SME in Ukraine between informality and illegality

by Abel Polese

This is going to be a chapter in a collection Jeremy Morris and myself are editing on informal economic practices in post-socialism

This chapter is intended to illustrate practices on the boundary between legality and illegality in order
to shed... more This chapter is intended to illustrate practices on the boundary between legality and illegality in order
to shed a different light on some of those engaging in diverse transactions. Challenging the vision of a "culture of corruption" (Miller et al 2001) and that “no discount” should be applied to corrupt practices (Papava and Khaduri 2001), the starting question of this chapter is: what makes a practice “corrupt” or
illegal? In this respect I suggest the need to contextualise and de-normativise illegal practices, since they depend on both social and legal norms. From a juridical standpoint a law is a law, but the value and applicability of a law is ultimately decided by people in social practice. What if there is a law and
the state is unable to enforce control or punish anyone because a substantial number of citizens do not follow it? There is a growing body of literature challenging the very significance of a written law in a context where other rules may apply. For instance, Wanner has remarked how a new moral order may
be applied to some spheres of Ukrainian life where the state’s protection is felt to be lacking. How illegal or immoral is it to try to bribe a court if the same court is issuing an order on the basis of false evidence produced against you? (Wanner 2005)

The present chapter raises questions about the validity of international reports and policy analysis on Ukraine, and possibly on the rest of the former Soviet world, that see illegal practices only as a social evil to eradicate. This is the position of a number of strands of developmentalist thought which
uncritically reject possible alternatives (Nederveen Pieterse 2006), positing that it is only a matter of time before transitional countries will adopt a functioning neoliberal model. In contrast to this, it has been argued that that monetary transactions do not encompass or explain economic activity – this is evident from the work of the growing school of diverse economies (Community Economies Collective 2001, Gibson Graham 1996, 2008). In addition, economic effectiveness might not mean the end of non-market oriented transactions (Williams 2005), which may also serve to partially challenge the de-personalisation of power relations in the labour market and the separation between the social and economic sphere predicted by Polanyi (1946, see also Hann and Hart 2009). Empirical evidence has showed that ‘success’ may also be measured by satisfaction of spiritual obligations, being active in social life (Pardo 1996) and that even the meaning of money differs depending on the social and
economic norms of a society (Parry and Bloch 1989).