Joel Sherzer
Biographic Data
| ID | 102 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joel Sherzer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joel |
| FAMILY NAME | Sherzer |
| SIGNATURE | SHERZER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Rochester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4353-956X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 121 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1172 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 118 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
G and the digital imagination
This article explores the ways in which 5G networks are imagined in the Pacific Islands nations of Fiji and Papua New Guinea. What promises, anxieties and futures have the prospects of 5G provoked, and for whom in particular? To answer this question, we consider how current mobile network users, corporate techno-elites and state actors such as regulators and politicians imagine 5G futures. We argue that 5G deployment is challenged by the cosmolog…
Uneven Connections
In the first years of the 21st century, economic liberalisation began to transform telecommunications services throughout the Pacific Islands. Government regulators, corporate executives and everyday consumers hopefully imagined that opening mobile phone markets to competition would result in greater access, lower costs and accelerated development
Tenuous Connectivity
This paper addresses what Akhil Gupta calls the ‘temporality of infrastructure’ or ‘infrastructure as an open-ended process’ by examining changes in the spatiotemporal configuration of a telecommunications network in Papua New Guinea (PNG). It describes the arrival of Digicel Group Ltd, a privately owned foreign company, in response to the PNG government's 2005 decision to allow competition in the market for mobile communications, and it charts t…
Nancy D. Munn (April 13, 1931–January 20, 2020)
grapher, a creative theorist, and a dedicated teacher. Bridging anthropological generations and national styles over the course of her long career, she was a key figure in the development of symbolic anthropology at its most sophisticated conceptually, and most grounded empirically. One of the first to bring phenomenology to bear on anthropological analysis, she was an early and important contributor to practice theory and an instigator of the ne…
From the Tropical Forest to Caribbean Islands to Cities and Beyond
Travel, migration, and displacement have characterized most of Kuna history, beginning with their arrival in the Darién jungle in Panama and their subsequent move to the Caribbean coast and adjacent islands. Travel to other parts of Panama was formerly largely temporary, for work, education, or visiting other Kuna-speaking communities; recently, however, larger-scale migrations to the major cities of Panama have taken place, with migrants remaini…
Moments among the Kuna
In "Moments among the Kuna: An Autobiographical Account," Joel Sherzer offers a deeply personal reflection on his five decades of ethnographic research with the Kuna people of Panama. Spanning from his initial fieldwork in the 1960s to more recent interactions, the article interweaves key moments and encounters that shaped his understanding of Kuna language, culture, and political organization. Sherzer highlights the evolving relationship between…
The Politics of Media Infrastructure
Recent work in anthropology proposes that the ethnographic study of infrastructure offers a productive way to think about how states and corporations, citizens and consumers, all define their relations and obligations to each other. This article considers the politics of media infrastructure in Papua New Guinea (PNG) by tracing the moral economy of mobile phones. It focuses on (1) how mobile phone users have taken to social media to express dissa…
Top-Up
The term 'moral economy' inevitably evokes Thompson memorably described how the clock time of methodical wage labour required a new and severe form of thrift -a continuous effort at eliminating wasted seconds and minutes for the sake of discipline and productivity; in short, a Protestant ethic. This historical transition in both time sense and work habits was protracted, conflicted and, probably, never fully accomplished.
Entropy, alchemy and negative pigs
The labour theory of value is the lynchpin of classical political economy, the modern science of wealth. And the idea that labour is the source of all value, and hence the wealth of the nation, is our uneasy inheritance from Adam Smith. The flipside of the labour theory of value is a yearning for a life without labour and a form of wealth that defies the law of entropy. This fantasy informs various strategies for escaping the exigencies of wealth…
The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones
The moral economy of mobile phones implies a field of shifting relations among consumers, companies and state actors, all of whom have their own ideas about what is good, fair and just. These ideas inform the ways in which, for example, consumers acquire and use mobile phones; companies promote and sell voice, SMS and data subscriptions; and state actors regulate both everyday
The Corporation in Anthropology
I weigh my words, when I say that in my judgment the limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times, whether you judge it by its social, by its ethical, by its industrial, or, in the long run – after we understand it and know how to use it, – by its political effects. Even steam and electricity are far less important than the limited liability corporation, and they would be reduced to comparative impotence without …
The Undersea Network
If you have ever wondered why infrastructure has suddenly become a buzzword in cultural anthropology and science and technology studies, then follow the signal. That is precisely what The Undersea
Earth Beings
Corporations as Partners
For-profit corporations increasingly promote themselves as potential partners with government (state actors) and community (NGOs and civil society groups) in addressing social problems. These partnerships enact what the former CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, Neville Isdell, calls "connected capitalism"-collaborations in which businesses must do good in order to maximize shareholder value. How should we understand the self-qualification of corporati…
Things to do with brands
How is the dollar value of commercial brands calculated and marks of distinction thus paradoxically made commensurable? And what does this calculation assume and enact with regard to, in Marx’s terms, the creation of value and surplus value? I discuss the emergence of brand valuation as a market device that has recently become more prominent and standardized. I use the annual Interbrand/BusinessWeek survey to demonstrate how global brands such as…
Art/Artefact/Commodity
This article documents some of the experimentation in museum installation designs for the exhibition of non‐Western objects during the 1930s and 1940s. This is a period in which ethnographic artefacts were being displayed as artworks in natural history museums and in which the exhibition of such objects in art museums drew on techniques characteristic of not only natural history museums, but also commercial urban window displays (which were thems…
Big men and business
Notes for a Networked Biography
In 1938, the Buffalo Museum of Science acquired some 62 hundred objects collected between 1886 and 1916 by and for P. G. Black, a branch inspector for Burns, Philp & Company Ltd., the famous Sydney‐based mercantile and shipping firm. Despite the collection's size, breadth, and significance as a product of the colonial encounter in northern Australia and Melanesia, its history is still largely unrecorded. This article begins to trace the social li…
Langage et culture
L'hypothèse Sapir-Whorf, telle qu'elle est formulée habituellement, cherche des isomorphismes entre grammaire et culture, et considère le langage comme donnant des moyens à la pensée et la perception, ou alors, dans sa forme la plus poussée, comme conditionnant la pensée, la perception et la vision du monde. Dans cet article je considère le discours comme l'expression concrète des relations entre langage et culture. C'est le discours qui crée, re…
Corporate oxymorons and the anthropology of corporations
Dell H. Hymes
We are all saddened by the death of Dell Hymes. Hymes was one of the leading figures in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, a pioneer who took the field in many new directions. These include the study of
The Social Life of Worldly Things
M ention Coca-Cola and Papua New Guinea in the same breath and you might very well elicit a reference to The Gods Must Be Crazy . In the opening scenes of that enormously popular 1980 film, a Coke bottle tossed from a passing airplane lands amidst a band of hunters and gatherers (the !Kung, or San) living in the Kalahari Desert, whom the voice-over describes as perhaps “the most contented people in the world” (for a critical discussion of the fil…
Coca-Globalization
This book explores globalization through a historical and anthropological study of how familiar soft drinks such as Coke and Pepsi became valued as more than mere commodities. Foster discusses the tra
Show and Tell
Commodities, brands, love and kula
Can Marcel Mauss's insights into the relations between persons and things help make sense of the nature of branded commodities and the operation of long distance commodity chains? Can these insights, when coupled with Marxist critiques of fetishism and labor exploitation, underwrite a politics of value that mobilizes the practices of knowing consumers? This article reconsiders gift giving in order to understand how brands operate as media of exch…
Making National Cultures in The Global Ecumene
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Earth Beings
Discourse-Centered Approach to Language and Culture
The Sapir- Whorf hypothesis, as usually formulated, searches for isomorphisms between grammar and culture and views language as either providing the means for thought and perception, or, in its stronger form, conditioning thought, perception, and world view. In this article I consider discourse to be the concrete expression of language-culture relationships. It is discourse that creates, recreates, focuses, modifies, and transmits both culture an…
The Work of the New Economy
My goal in this article is to apprehend claims about person-product relationships now circulating in the world of business. I take up approaches that presuppose the embeddedness of economic action in shifting networks or assemblages of people and things (human and nonhuman actors), and that call attention to the agency distributed within such networks. I discuss the work of Michel Callon and his colleagues and specifically their notion of "the ec…
Nationstates and Indians in Latin America
Kuna Ways of Speaking
This article offers an ethnographic perspective on Kuna (Panama) ways of speaking, focusing on the sociolinguistic rules and practices that govern verbal interaction. It examines how Kuna speakers use language to create and maintain social relationships, emphasizing the importance of context, performance, and cultural values in shaping communication. The authors analyze various speech events, including everyday conversations, ritual chanting, and…
The Ethnography of Speaking
The ethnography of speaking has had a relatively brief history as a named field of inquiry, dating back only to 1962 and the appearance of Dell Hymes' seminal essay, The Ethnography of Speaking (66). As with any such field of inquiry, however, many precursors can be identified, together with much work that is complementary to or convergent with the ethnography of speaking itself. For the purposes of this review, we have construed the field as nar…
Commodities, brands, love and kula
Can Marcel Mauss's insights into the relations between persons and things help make sense of the nature of branded commodities and the operation of long distance commodity chains? Can these insights, when coupled with Marxist critiques of fetishism and labor exploitation, underwrite a politics of value that mobilizes the practices of knowing consumers? This article reconsiders gift giving in order to understand how brands operate as media of exch…
The Commercial Construction of 'New Nations
This article considers the instrumental role of commodity marketing and mass consumption in producing nationality as a dimension of personal and collective identities. It asks: if nation-ness and nationality no longer necessarily refer to political identities, then to what sort of imagined communities, if any, do they refer? It addresses this question in part through a discussion of commercial images from Papua New Guinea, one of the 'new nations…
Discourse Forms and Processes in Indigenous Lowland South America
In indigenous lowland South America there are several discourse forms and processes that are shared by groups of people of distinct genetic linguistic affiliations; this leads us to posit this large region, which we label greater Amazonia, as a discourse area, a concept that parallels the notion of linguistic area. The discourse forms and processes we examine are ceremonial dialogue, dialogical performance, templatic ratifying, echo speech, cerem…
Nurture and force-feeding
This article concerns the performative efficacy of mortuary feasting in constructing matrilineages as transcendent collective individuals. Melanesian mortuary symbolism commonly assimilates death and decay to forms of consumption epitomized by eating. In Tanga, giving food dialectically relates the guests and hosts of mortuary feasts as "eaters" and "noneaters," or as consumers and agents impervious to consumption. Exchanges of cooked pigs and sh…
Poetic structuring of Kuna discourse
A central feature of the oral discourse of the Kuna Indians of Panama is the line. The nature of lines, verses, and other poetic and rhetorical units has recently emerged as a significant topic within the study of Native American languages and discourse generally. Investigation of the structuring of Kuna lines requires attention to the intersection and interplay of linguistic, sociolinguistic, and poetic structures, patterns, and processes
Bargains with modernity in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere
Current ideas of alternative or multiple modernities promise to overcome Eurocentric assumptions about personhood and culture as well as gross binary oppositions between global and local, the West and the Rest. They rightly direct attention to the complex imbrication and dialectical refashioning of indigenous and exogenous practices, that is, to contingent social processes with unpredictable outcomes. Does pluralizing Modernity then serve primari…
Commodity futures
The Brazilian Thumbs-Up Gesture
The thumbs-up gesture, of probable European origin, is extremely common in Brazil where it has a variety of uses. A combined social interactional and ethnographic approach is used to show that the various uses of the thumbsup gesture are systematically related. The core paradigmatic meaning of the thumbs-up gesture is "good," "positive," or "OK," and the core syntagmatic meaning is "social obligation met." Other meanings emerge from particular co…
Native American Discourse
Value Without Equivalence
From Trobriand cricket to rugby nation
This paper seeks to revise and enlarge the received understanding of Trobriand cricket, a game made famous by Leach and Kildea's 1975 documentary film. Looking at the political and economic goals of the Kabisawali Association who staged the visually stunning cricket matches for the documentary, the game is re-examined in the context of Papua New Guinea's colonial history. Trobriand cricket embodies not only the assertion of Trobriand cultural val…
Verbal Art in San Blas
First published in 1990, this linguistic study of the Kuna Indians of Panama is now available only from UNM Press
The Heart of the Pearlshell
Verbal and nonverbal deixis
The pointed lip gesture is a facial gesture in use among the Cuna Indians of San Blas, Panama. It occurs in various contexts with meanings which at first appear to be unrelated. An analysis of the contexts reveals, however, that the meaning 'pointing' is always present and that further meanings are derived from the discourse structures in which the pointed lip gesture is found
The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones
The moral economy of mobile phones implies a field of shifting relations among consumers, companies and state actors, all of whom have their own ideas about what is good, fair and just. These ideas inform the ways in which, for example, consumers acquire and use mobile phones; companies promote and sell voice, SMS and data subscriptions; and state actors regulate both everyday
Nation-states and Indians in Latin America
Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring
Corporations as Partners
For-profit corporations increasingly promote themselves as potential partners with government (state actors) and community (NGOs and civil society groups) in addressing social problems. These partnerships enact what the former CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, Neville Isdell, calls "connected capitalism"-collaborations in which businesses must do good in order to maximize shareholder value. How should we understand the self-qualification of corporati…
Acquiescent response set as a measure of acquiescence
A Factor Analytic Study of Acquiescent and Extreme Response Set
Acquiescent response set as a measure of acquiescence
Athletic participation and perceptual augmentation and reduction
The Current Status of Anthropological Research in the Great Basin
La parole chez les Abipone. Pour une ethnographie de la parole
Sherzer Joël. La parole chez les Abipone. Pour une ethnographie de la parole. In: L'Homme, 1970, tome 10 n°1. pp. 40-76
Talking Backwards in Cuna
The Cuna Indians of Panama play a word game which sheds light on problems involved in the linguistic description of Cuna phonology. Investigation of the game led to the discovery that not all speakers play it the same way; i.e., there is variation in the forms different speakers use when playing. One of the possible interpretations of this variation is that there is more than one model or grammar in use among Cuna speakers. The possibility of the…
Areal Linguistic Studies in North America
Addendum
Vowel Nasalization in Eastern Algonquian
Areal Studies and Culture History
Linguistics has long been recognized as a valuable tool in unraveling culture history. The types of historical linguistic relationships usually focused on, however, are genetic. Diffusional areal relationships provide valuable evidence of communicative contacts among groups and of the nature of this contact. Such relationships can be found in all aspects of language--syntactic-semantic, phonetic, and lexical--as well as in such uses of language a…
Verbal and nonverbal deixis
The pointed lip gesture is a facial gesture in use among the Cuna Indians of San Blas, Panama. It occurs in various contexts with meanings which at first appear to be unrelated. An analysis of the contexts reveals, however, that the meaning 'pointing' is always present and that further meanings are derived from the discourse structures in which the pointed lip gesture is found
Linguistics
Linguistics
Take and Tell
The San Bias Cuna of Panamá classify crops and wild forest products according to the kinds of access people other than their owners may have to them. In addition to a formal analysis of the classification itself and a discussion of its significance for "cognitive anthropology," we show the relevance of the classification to everyday life, in particular to such critical problems in Cuna social and economic organization as theft, generosity, and a …
The Ethnography of Speaking
The ethnography of speaking has had a relatively brief history as a named field of inquiry, dating back only to 1962 and the appearance of Dell Hymes' seminal essay, The Ethnography of Speaking (66). As with any such field of inquiry, however, many precursors can be identified, together with much work that is complementary to or convergent with the ethnography of speaking itself. For the purposes of this review, we have construed the field as nar…
An areal-typological study of American Indian languages north of Mexico
Universals of linguistic structure
W. John Smith, The behavior of communicating. An ethnological approach. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England
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An Areal-Typological Study of American Indian Languages North of Mexico
Linguistics
Oh! That's a pun and I didn't mean it
The Social Use of Metaphor
Reply to Bierhorst
Strategies in Text and Context
This article examines the use of reported speech in Cuna (Kuna) ikar, or chanted narratives, focusing on a single text, kaa kwento. It argues that reported speech in these narratives is a crucial strategy for structuring the discourse, characterizing the actors, and creating narrative suspense and humor. The analysis reveals how the narrator manipulates different levels of reported speech to shift perspectives, embed narratives within narratives,…
Sociology (67 works) · History (47 works) · Philosophy (43 works) · Linguistics (38 works) · Computer Science (37 works) · Political science (36 works) · Anthropology (30 works) · Art (28 works) · Law (28 works) · History (26 works)