Kirsch
Biographic Data
| ID | 13659 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kirsch |
| FAMILY NAME | Kirsch |
| SIGNATURE | KIRSCH |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3448-1979 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 664 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
From neoliberalism to compliance capitalism? A view from global supply chains
Compliance capitalism and global supply chains
This article examines the future of the global economy by studying recent changes to supply chains. It argues for the emergence of an alternative economic system that compels producers and suppliers to forge relationships that exceed strictly economic terms. These changes are driven by a broad range of compliance mechanisms that supplement regulation by the state, involving mandatory reporting of conditions of work and environmental impacts, incl…
Capitalismo e as políticas de resignação
Desde a década de 1990, antropólogos têm dedicado mais atenção ao Estado e à governamentalidade do que a uma das formas de poder mais influentes de nosso tempo: a corporação. A desatenção ao papel das corporações revela-se particularmente problemática quando os danos que elas provocam são evidentes e significativos. Propomos uma reorientação do estudo do poder na antropologia, com foco nas estratégias que as corporações utilizam em resposta aos…
The small matter of suing Chevron By SuzanaSawyer. Durham, NC
Peer Reviewed
Future perfect
Fifteen years ago, Jane Guyer (2007) argued that the near future had largely disappeared from collective imaginaries, replaced by longer-term horizons associated with evangelical Christianity and free market capitalism. While not seeking to repudiate Guyer, this article argues that recent developments have radically altered relationships to the future. It points to a previously unrecognized connection between two of the most significant challenge…
Design ethnography
Anthropologists increasingly turn to design research for inspiration. Yet work in design anthropology is frequently cut off from ethnographic research. To some extent this is intentional, given concerns that ethnographic methods have failed to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. But anthropologists should not have to choose between ethnography and design research. This article examines the author's participation in an industrial think tank i…
Scientific Ghostwriting in the Amazon? The Role of Experts in the Lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador
In 2011, lawyers for the Chevron Corporation filed a civil suit against an aqueous geochemist under federal racketeering and corruption laws. They claimed that the geochemist and her colleagues had ghostwritten significant portions of a report attributed to a court-appointed expert in Ecuador, although the accusation was subsequently withdrawn. The original case addressed the environmental impact of Chevron's operations in lowland Ecuador, the su…
Angels in West Papua. In Memoriam Donatus Moiwend
Obituary for Donatus Moiwend, West Papuan artist
Talanoa Dialogue at UN Climate Change Meetings
Introduced to the UN by the Prime Minister of Fiji, the Pacific speech genre of talanoa has become a key frame for international discussion of climate change policy. Traditionally associated with kava‐drinking ceremonies, talanoa includes practices that temporarily mitigate differences in hierarchy and rank, which help to facilitate the formation of consensus, a process sometimes referred to as ‘The Pacific Way’. This capacity has also motivated …
Running out? Rethinking resource depletion
The Role of Law in Corporate Accountability
This special issue addresses the role of law in corporate accountability. Case studies reference people affected by asbestos in Italy, a coal company anticipating closure in Colombia, and both activists and human rights lawyers concerned with the impacts of mining in Ecuador. The afterword considers the significance of temporality in the law, including limits on retrospective claims and efforts to expand the prospective reach of both the law and …
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
Objectivity is widely recognized as a fundamental value in the sciences. Yet objectivity may be deployed as a filter or screen that discourages scientists from reflecting on the political consequences of their work. This article examines the relationship between scientific commitment to objectivity and recent critiques of the influence of corporations on research. It does so by analysing legal documents and examples of 'life writing', including a…
Why Pacific Islanders Stopped Worrying about the Apocalypse and Started Fighting Climate Change
This article questions the hierarchical assumptions of theories of "traveling models" by examining how politicians and environmental activists from the three major regions of the Pacific have contributed to global climate change policy regimes. The Marshall Islands successfully lobbied the international climate change community to ensure that the signatories to the Paris Agreement are committed to keeping the global temperature rise during the cu…
Don't worry if you fail to save the world on your first go
During these tumultuous times, many anthropologists want to use their skills and knowledge to help make a difference. This guest editorial offers 12 practical tips on doing engaged research - ranging from 'accept that you won't always be in charge' to 'listen to people with different perspectives
Engaged Anthropology
Does anthropology have more to offer than just its texts? This book discusses different forms of engaged research practices, which it defines in terms of their constructive intervention into politics. It draws on the author’s experiences working with indigenous peoples fighting for their environment, land rights, and political sovereignty. Describing both short interventions and collaborations spanning decades, it recounts interactions with lawye…
The Risks of Intervention
A striking feature of debates concerning the disposition of Native American human remains is their invocation of the conventional domains of science, property, and kinship. Strong political claims about repatriation tend to assert the primacy of one domain over the others. Yet in contemporary North American social contexts, these domains have heterarchical relations, in which no single perspective dominates, rather than hierarchical relations org…
Conclusion
The conclusion takes up the questions raised by the cases discussed here, including the false dichotomy between basic science and engaged research, by showing how their findings are of value beyond their initial objectives and contexts. Engaged anthropology offers new sites for research and identifies novel topics. It also suggests caution when writing from a distance, when seeking solutions to problems, and when debates are polarized. It can gen…
How Political Commitments Influence Research
This chapter is based on long-term research with people affected by the Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea, including involvement in a lawsuit seeking to halt its destructive environmental impact. It considers examples of ethnographic refusal, when anthropologists do not write about events that might harm their informants. It also examines relationships between engaged anthropologists and colleagues, lawyers and law, corporations, nongovernmental o…
When the Intervention Fails, Does the Research Still Matter?
This chapter discusses a consultancy on property and pollution associated with a legal action representing indigenous landowners against the owners of a gold mine outside Honiara in the Solomon Islands. After the lawsuit against the mine failed and the country was overtaken by civil conflict, I was unable to return for fifteen years. During archival research conducted in 2014, I learned that my earlier work on land rights helps to explain the civ…
When Contributions are Elusive
This chapter examines the West Papuan independence movement. It describes long-term research with West Papuan refugees living in Papua New Guinea and exiled political leaders. It discusses a shift in the late 1990s from paramilitary opposition to Indonesian violence to human rights activism. It also describes how negative representations of West Papuans, including claims about lost tribes, undermine their pursuit of sovereignty. The author discus…
The Search for Alternative Outcomes
This chapter examines a conservation and development project in Papua New Guinea in the mid-1990s. These projects were intended as alternatives to more destructive forms of resource extraction, including logging and mining. In this case, the four sociolinguistic groups living in the area could not agree on a shared agenda, forestalling the project. This suggests the importance of understanding regional history before establishing conservation are…
How Analysis of Local Contexts Can Have Global Significance
This chapter considers claims about culture loss at hearings of the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in the Marshall Islands, including the impact of nuclear weapons testing on the people of Rongelap Atoll. The concept of cultural property is used to identify the referents of discourse about culture loss, including local knowledge, subsistence production, and connections to place. For example, the absence of breadfruit and pandanus trees on the atolls whe…
Dilemmas of an Expert Witness
This chapter presents two affidavits submitted to the Inter-American Court. The first case was concerned with the negative consequences of Suriname’s refusal to recognize indigenous land rights, including the establishment of a nature reserve that become a de facto open-access zone on indigenous land. The second addressed problems associated with indigenous land tenure in Guyana under the Amerindian Act of 2006. Comparing the two cases allows the…
Mining
Since the mid‐1950s, the anthropology of mining has tracked and theorized major shifts in capitalism. The classic literature, grounded in Africa and Latin America, explored the transformation of labor regimes and economic development. Renewed interest in the industry accompanied the worldwide mining boom of the 1990s, which was facilitated by the rise of neoliberal economic policies and new mining methods, as capital‐intensive open‐cut mines repl…
Capitalist Corporation, the
The capitalist corporation is a central institutional form in modern society. Early work in economic anthropology focused on labor and production. In the 1980s, research shifted to new questions about consumption and identity. Two distinctive aspects of the interaction between corporations and consumers are advertising and branding, which are central to corporate reputations. Anthropologists increasingly study the globalization of the capitalist …
Capitalism and the Politics of Resignation
Anthropologists since the 1990s have paid greater attention to the state and governmentality than to one of the most consequential forms of power in our time, the corporation. The lack of attention to corporations is especially problematic when the harm they cause is readily apparent and substantial. We propose to reorient the study of power in anthropology to focus on the strategies corporations use in response to their critics and how this faci…
Indigenous movements and the risks of counterglobalization
Many contemporary indigenous movements deploy strategies of counterglobalization that make innovative use of the architecture of globalization. This article examines an indigenous political movement that took legal action to gain compensation and limit the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Even though the campaign sought to balance the desire for economic benefits with the protection of local subsistenc…
Reverse Anthropology
While ethnography ordinarily privileges anthropological interpretations, this book attempts the reciprocal process of describing indigenous modes of analysis. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with the Yonggom people of New Guinea, the author examines how indigenous analysis organizes local knowledge and provides a framework for interpreting events, from first contact and colonial rule to contemporary interactions with a multinational mi…
Lost Worlds
Indigenous claims about "culture loss" pose a problem for contemporary definitions of culture as a process that continually undergoes change rather than something which can be damaged or lost. This issue is examined in the context of hearings at the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in the Marshall Islands, which was established to adjudicate claims regarding damage and loss to persons and property resulting from United States nuclear weapons testing durin…
Anthropology and Advocacy
■ What are the responsibilities of anthropologists towards the communities with whom they work? This article examines debates on anthropology and advocacy in relation to the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Since the early 1990s, the indigenous communities living downstream from the mine have carried out on an international political and legal campaign to reduce the mine's environmental impact and gain compensation for the damage…
Rumour and Other Narratives of Political Violence in West Papua
This article addresses the neglected subject of political violence in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, known locally as West Papua. It asks how this regime of political violence is reproduced in and through representations of culture, gender and difference. It argues that rumours about state-sponsored violence contribute to both the experience and expression of terror. It examines how West Papuans understand, subvert and imagine alternative…
Engaged Anthropology
Social Relations and the Green Critique of Capitalism in Melanesia
In this article, I explore what a critical environmental perspective would look like in Melanesia, where the distinction between nature and culture, and the expectation that science interprets the former in terms of the latter, may not apply. I consider changes in scientific knowledge production and the shift from cultural ecology to political ecology in Melanesian anthropology, including the argument that Melanesians are neither conservationists…
Imagining Corporate Personhood
Peer Reviewed
Ethnographic Representation and the Politics of Violence in West Papua
■ This article examines how ethnographic representations of violence inflect contemporary understandings of West Papua and influence its politics. It describes how colonial depictions of perpetual warfare in the highlands became paradigmatic for the region. Recent forms of extreme tourism draw on these images in offering encounters with 'lost tribes' that undermine the credibility of West Papuan political actors. Similarly, an American mining com…
Lost Tribes
How should one make sense of contemporary sightings of lost tribes in the marginal spaces of the world system? The European myth model (Obeyesekere 1992) of the lost tribe is drawn from accounts of the ten lost tribes of ancient Israel. It was invoked by colonial powers and missionaries in their efforts to remake the histories of indigenous peoples, and is the basis for continuing efforts to locate descendants of the missing ten tribes. When appl…
Why Pacific Islanders Stopped Worrying about the Apocalypse and Started Fighting Climate Change
This article questions the hierarchical assumptions of theories of "traveling models" by examining how politicians and environmental activists from the three major regions of the Pacific have contributed to global climate change policy regimes. The Marshall Islands successfully lobbied the international climate change community to ensure that the signatories to the Paris Agreement are committed to keeping the global temperature rise during the cu…
Experiments in Engaged Anthropology
Experiments in Engaged Anthropology Stuart Kirsch (bio) Engaged anthropology. Anthropology as advocacy. Ethnography-as-activism. Collaborative anthropology. Militant anthropology. Public anthropology. Despite their differences, all of these projects share a commitment to mobilizing anthropology for constructive interventions into politics. Prior understandings of anthropology as objective science might be seen as giving way to new concerns about …
Future perfect
Fifteen years ago, Jane Guyer (2007) argued that the near future had largely disappeared from collective imaginaries, replaced by longer-term horizons associated with evangelical Christianity and free market capitalism. While not seeking to repudiate Guyer, this article argues that recent developments have radically altered relationships to the future. It points to a previously unrecognized connection between two of the most significant challenge…
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
Objectivity is widely recognized as a fundamental value in the sciences. Yet objectivity may be deployed as a filter or screen that discourages scientists from reflecting on the political consequences of their work. This article examines the relationship between scientific commitment to objectivity and recent critiques of the influence of corporations on research. It does so by analysing legal documents and examples of 'life writing', including a…
Running out? Rethinking resource depletion
Talanoa Dialogue at UN Climate Change Meetings
Introduced to the UN by the Prime Minister of Fiji, the Pacific speech genre of talanoa has become a key frame for international discussion of climate change policy. Traditionally associated with kava‐drinking ceremonies, talanoa includes practices that temporarily mitigate differences in hierarchy and rank, which help to facilitate the formation of consensus, a process sometimes referred to as ‘The Pacific Way’. This capacity has also motivated …
Dilemas del perito experto
Este artículo examina dos informes periciales presentados ante la Comisión y la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos. El primero, sobre la negativa de Surinam a reconocer los derechos a la tierra de los pueblos indígenas, a pesar de sus obligaciones internacionales. El segundo, sobre títulos de tierras de población indígena en Guyana. Comparar ambos casos me permite hacer observaciones sobre la investigación etnográfica a corto plazo para per…
Science, Property, and Kinship in Repatriation Debates
A striking feature of debates concerning the disposition of Native American human remains is their invocation of the conventional domains of science, property, and kinship. Strong political claims about repatriation tend to assert the primacy of one domain over the others. Yet in contemporary North American social contexts, these domains have heterarchical relations in which no single perspective dominates, rather than hierarchical relations orga…
Scientific Ghostwriting in the Amazon? The Role of Experts in the Lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador
In 2011, lawyers for the Chevron Corporation filed a civil suit against an aqueous geochemist under federal racketeering and corruption laws. They claimed that the geochemist and her colleagues had ghostwritten significant portions of a report attributed to a court-appointed expert in Ecuador, although the accusation was subsequently withdrawn. The original case addressed the environmental impact of Chevron's operations in lowland Ecuador, the su…
Moral dilemmas and ethical controversies
In his guest editorial, Stuart Kirsch revisits the controversy surrounding Jared Diamond's NEW YORKER essay on vengeance and the state, drawing attention to how anthropologists discuss the ethical responsibilities of ethnographers
Experiments in Progress
History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology
Compliance capitalism and global supply chains
This article examines the future of the global economy by studying recent changes to supply chains. It argues for the emergence of an alternative economic system that compels producers and suppliers to forge relationships that exceed strictly economic terms. These changes are driven by a broad range of compliance mechanisms that supplement regulation by the state, involving mandatory reporting of conditions of work and environmental impacts, incl…
The Role of Law in Corporate Accountability
This special issue addresses the role of law in corporate accountability. Case studies reference people affected by asbestos in Italy, a coal company anticipating closure in Colombia, and both activists and human rights lawyers concerned with the impacts of mining in Ecuador. The afterword considers the significance of temporality in the law, including limits on retrospective claims and efforts to expand the prospective reach of both the law and …
Roots of Acceptance
Melanesian Religion
History and Tradition in Melanesian Anthropology
Images of Memory
Ethnographic Representation In the Shadows of Development
Lost Tribes
How should one make sense of contemporary sightings of lost tribes in the marginal spaces of the world system? The European myth model (Obeyesekere 1992) of the lost tribe is drawn from accounts of the ten lost tribes of ancient Israel. It was invoked by colonial powers and missionaries in their efforts to remake the histories of indigenous peoples, and is the basis for continuing efforts to locate descendants of the missing ten tribes. When appl…
Experiments in Progress
Property effects. Social networks and compensation claims in Melanesia
Property effects. Social networks and compensation claims in MelanesiaThis paper compares the social networks that are mobilised through claims of ownership in property regimes and transaction regimes. 1 I use the categories of 'property' and 'transaction' to denote the differences between exchange practices that emphasise relationships between persons and things (property) in contrast to relationships created between persons through the circulat…
Lost Worlds
Indigenous claims about "culture loss" pose a problem for contemporary definitions of culture as a process that continually undergoes change rather than something which can be damaged or lost. This issue is examined in the context of hearings at the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in the Marshall Islands, which was established to adjudicate claims regarding damage and loss to persons and property resulting from United States nuclear weapons testing durin…
Rumour and Other Narratives of Political Violence in West Papua
This article addresses the neglected subject of political violence in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, known locally as West Papua. It asks how this regime of political violence is reproduced in and through representations of culture, gender and difference. It argues that rumours about state-sponsored violence contribute to both the experience and expression of terror. It examines how West Papuans understand, subvert and imagine alternative…
Anthropology and Advocacy
■ What are the responsibilities of anthropologists towards the communities with whom they work? This article examines debates on anthropology and advocacy in relation to the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Since the early 1990s, the indigenous communities living downstream from the mine have carried out on an international political and legal campaign to reduce the mine's environmental impact and gain compensation for the damage…
Property Limits
William Hunt Davenport (1922-2004)
Reverse Anthropology
While ethnography ordinarily privileges anthropological interpretations, this book attempts the reciprocal process of describing indigenous modes of analysis. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with the Yonggom people of New Guinea, the author examines how indigenous analysis organizes local knowledge and provides a framework for interpreting events, from first contact and colonial rule to contemporary interactions with a multinational mi…
Property effects. Social networks and compensation claims in Melanesia
This paper compares the social networks that are mobilised through claims of ownership in property regimes and transaction regimes. 1 I use the categories of 'property' and 'transaction' to denote the differences between exchange practices that emphasise relationships between persons and things (property) in contrast to relationships created between persons through the circulation of things (transactions). This distinction attends to the social n…
Indigenous movements and the risks of counterglobalization
Many contemporary indigenous movements deploy strategies of counterglobalization that make innovative use of the architecture of globalization. This article examines an indigenous political movement that took legal action to gain compensation and limit the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea. Even though the campaign sought to balance the desire for economic benefits with the protection of local subsistenc…
The Navajo People and Uranium Mining (review)
Social Relations and the Green Critique of Capitalism in Melanesia
In this article, I explore what a critical environmental perspective would look like in Melanesia, where the distinction between nature and culture, and the expectation that science interprets the former in terms of the latter, may not apply. I consider changes in scientific knowledge production and the shift from cultural ecology to political ecology in Melanesian anthropology, including the argument that Melanesians are neither conservationists…
Anthropological Knowledge, Secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New Guinea
Peer Reviewed
Moral dilemmas and ethical controversies
In his guest editorial, Stuart Kirsch revisits the controversy surrounding Jared Diamond's NEW YORKER essay on vengeance and the state, drawing attention to how anthropologists discuss the ethical responsibilities of ethnographers
Sustainable Mining
Corporate oxymorons
Moral dilemmas and ethical controversies (Respond to this article at http
Experiments in Engaged Anthropology
Experiments in Engaged Anthropology Stuart Kirsch (bio) Engaged anthropology. Anthropology as advocacy. Ethnography-as-activism. Collaborative anthropology. Militant anthropology. Public anthropology. Despite their differences, all of these projects share a commitment to mobilizing anthropology for constructive interventions into politics. Prior understandings of anthropology as objective science might be seen as giving way to new concerns about …
Ethnographic Representation and the Politics of Violence in West Papua
■ This article examines how ethnographic representations of violence inflect contemporary understandings of West Papua and influence its politics. It describes how colonial depictions of perpetual warfare in the highlands became paradigmatic for the region. Recent forms of extreme tourism draw on these images in offering encounters with 'lost tribes' that undermine the credibility of West Papuan political actors. Similarly, an American mining com…
Sociology (44 works) · Political science (42 works) · Law (37 works) · Politics (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Anthropology (18 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Mining and Resource Management (15 works) · Geography (14 works)