M A Pedersen
Biographic Data
| ID | 16312 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M A Pedersen |
| GIVEN NAMES | M A |
| FAMILY NAME | Pedersen |
| SIGNATURE | PEDERSEN M A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2850-8661 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1125 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Broad Data
Under the aegis of what we term 'broad data ethnography', we outline four principles for the standardized collection, processing, and analysis of ethnographip data, particularly fieldnotes: compilability, compatibility , counting , and computability . As we demonstrate via examples from an interdisciplinary study at a Danish politics festival: compilability denotes the need for a shared data structure; compatibility refers to the demand for high …
Measuring MAN (incorporating JRAI)
In this paper, we present a foray into the computational study of anthropological texts. Drawing on a corpus of approximately 2,500 articles published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (formerly Man) from 1950 to 2018, we discuss selected findings from the deployment of two methods for computational text analysis, namely word-frequency approaches, and topic modelling. The aim of the paper is exploratory: it asks how computatio…
Fixing Fieldnotes
Ethnographic fieldnotes can contain richer and more thorough descriptions of social phenomena compared to other data sources. Their open-ended and flexible character makes them especially useful in explorative research. However, fieldnotes are typically highly unstructured and personalized by individual researchers, which make them harder to use as a method for data collection in collaborative and mixed methods research. More precisely, the unstr…
La politique de la non-identité
Ce commentaire sur l'article de Marilyn Strathern, « Binary License », examine certaines implications de son affirmation selon laquelle les relations intertribales entre les migrants urbains en Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée ne sont pas « ethniques ». En effet, si ces rencontres sociales n'impliquent pas une politique conventionnelle de l'identité, quelle pourrait être cette politique ? En comparant le cas mélanésien de Strathern avec des exemples eth…
Grøn Genstart
In this study, we build on a recent social data scientific mapping of Danish environmentalist organizations and activists during the COVID-19 lockdown in order to sketch a distinct genre of digital social research that we dub a quali-quantitative micro-history of ideas in real-time. We define and exemplify this genre by tracing and tracking the single political idea and activist slogan of grøn genstart ('green restart') across Twitter and other p…
Affective Publics
In Denmark, as with elsewhere in the world, Twitter has emerged as an important arena of public discussion on issues relating to COVID-19 pandemic, including the handling of the crisis by state authorities and health institutions. Based on approximately 140,000 tweets harvested from Danish Twitter in the period between 24 February and 28 April 2020, this report explores how tweeting about mis/trust on this digital platform can be understood as a …
The Political Economy of Attention
Attention has become an issue of intense political, economic, and moral concern over recent years: from the commodification of attention by digital platforms to the alleged loss of the attentional capacities of screen-addicted children (and their parents). While attention has rarely been an explicit focus of anthropological inquiry, it has still played an important if mostly tacit part in many anthropological debates and subfields. Focusing on an…
Anthropological Epochés
This article has two objectives. In the first part, I present a critical overview of the extensive anthropological literature that may be deemed “phenomenological.” Following this critique, which is built up around a classification into four different varieties of phenomenological anthropology, I discuss the relationship between phenomenological anthropology and the ontological turn (OT). Contrary to received wisdom within the anthropological dis…
Anthropology of/as repetition
Becoming what you are
Based on fieldwork in the Danish protestant movement Tidehverv, this article explores what it means to try to live one's life according to a neo-orthodox Lutheran and explicitly Kierkegaard-inspired theology, whose overarching existential, social and political ideal is always to be true to oneself. Departing from the seemingly paradoxical notion that the essence of living a genuinely Christian life is ‘to become what you are’, as a Tidehverv prie…
Dybere, bedre og mere komplekst
Dybere, bedre og mere komplekst
The Ontological Turn
A new and often controversial theoretical orientation that resonates strongly with wider developments in contemporary philosophy and social theory, the so-called 'ontological turn' is receiving a great deal of attention in anthropology and cognate disciplines at present. This book provides the first anthropological exposition of this recent intellectual development. It traces the roots of the ontological turn in the history of anthropology and el…
Interpreting Strathern's ‘unconscious’ critique of ontology
Stitching together the heterogeneous party
The era of ‘big data’ studies and computational social science has recently given rise to a number of realignments within and beyond the social sciences, where otherwise distinct data formats – digital, numerical, ethnographic, visual, etc. – rub off and emerge from one another in new ways. This article chronicles the collaboration between a team of anthropologists and sociologists, who worked together for one week in an experimental attempt to c…
The Vanishing Power Plant
In a neglected corner of peri-urban Ulaanbaatar’s sprawling post-socialist slums, the livelihood of dozens of households has over recent years been affected by a large infrastructure project that will never be built. ‘Power Plant #5’ was originally tendered to a Chinese construction firm in 2008 as part of a national strategy to develop Mongolia’s energy production to meet new needs. Taking its departure in the story of a poverty-stricken woman l…
Debt as an Urban Chronotope in Mongolia
Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores the spatio-temporal properties of debt relations in urban Mongolia. During socialism, relations of debt were mostly restricted to closed circuits of friends, whose exchange of objects and favours often stretched over a long time. With the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, both the number of debt obligations and the size of loans expanded dramatically, without being subject to similar c…
Complementary social science? Quali-quantitative experiments in a Big Data world
The rise of Big Data in the social realm poses significant questions at the intersection of science, technology, and society, including in terms of how new large-scale social databases are currently changing the methods, epistemologies, and politics of social science. In this commentary, we address such epochal ("large-scale") questions by way of a (situated) experiment: at the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen, an interdisciplinary group…
Trans-temporal Hinges
Based on two case studies of Chinese infrastructural interventions in Mozambique and in Mongolia, this article introduces the notion of 'trans-temporal hinge' as a heuristic methodological concept that brings together phenomena and events otherwise distributed across time. The authors explore envelopes used when paying Mozambican workers at a construction site in Maputo and roads dividing Chinese oil workers and local nomads in southern and easte…
Diskussion
Lars Højer: Hvilke ting? Hvilke relationer? Hvilke verdener? Inger Sjørslev: Hvorfor skal forskelligheder være ontologiske? Anders Blok: Med Wittgenstein på kanten af antropologiens sprogspil? Heiko Henkel: Hvad kan 'mangfoldige verdener' gøre for os? Asger F. Simonsen, Toke K. Amlund, Lars Rømer, Astrid Grue og Christina Vega: Rejsen til planeterne M&M Morten Nielsen: Respons Morten Axel Pedersen: Respons
Vi Bebor Mangfoldige Verdener
Debatoplæg. For udsagnet
A Day in the Cadillac
Based on fieldwork among Ulaanbaatar's dispossessed youth, this article explores the 'work of hope' in post-socialist Mongolia. Using anthropological writings on presentism and hope as my theoretical point of departure, I show how the concept of hope allows for the potentials of the moment to overflow the possibilities of the present. The article describes a number of lucky-and not so lucky-events that took place during a day spent with a group o…
Revolutionary securitization
This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of securitization in International Relations. In contrast to existing attempts to show how, suitably elaborated, this model can be ‘applied’ to various non-Western contexts, our anthropological strategy is to use the contingency of empirical materials (namely the Cuban Revolution and the political forms it instantiates) as a means for transforming the bas…
Roads that Separate
We usually think of roads as tools of social and material connection which serve to enchain places, things and people that have not before been as directly, or intensely, linked up. Yet, in the sparsely populated grasslands and deserts of the Sino-Mongolian border zone, it is equally much the other way around. Rather than facilitating more interaction between local Mongolians and the growing number of Chinese employed in mining and oil companies,…
The Soul of the Soul Is the Body
As part of a Common Knowledge symposium on the "consequence of blur," this article reassesses the anthropologist E. B. Tylor's famous but vague concept of the animist soul as an optimal reflection of the soul's fuzzy ontological status among animist peoples. Unlike the Platonic body/soul dichotomy, with its fixed appearance/essence distinction, indigenous conceptions of the soul among North Asian peoples, such as the Chukchi of Siberia and the Da…
Proposing the motion
Thinking Through Things
Book description: Drawing upon the work of some of the most influential theorists in the field, Thinking Through Things demonstrates the quiet revolution growing in anthropology and its related disciplines, shifting its philosophical foundations. The first text to offer a direct and provocative challenge to disciplinary fragmentation - arguing for the futility of segregating the study of artefacts and society - this collection expands on the conc…
Technologies of the Imagination
Totemism, Animism and North Asian Indigenous Ontologies
This article examines the extent to which new theories of animism advanced by Descola and Viveiros de Castro are consistent with the indigenous ontologies of North Asia. Based on a survey of North Asian ethnography and on fieldwork in Mongolia and Siberia, it is proposed that an analytical distinction between animist and totemist modalities will shed light on indigenous ontologies in North Asia. Whereas the ontologies of Northern North Asia (NNA)…
Planet M
This article examines the peculiar nature of comparison in the work of Marilyn Strathern. Contrasting her approach to more familiar arguments regarding the role of reflexivity and multi-sited ethnography in the comparative agenda of contemporary anthropology, we elucidate the logical and metaphysical tenets that underlie the particular manner in which Strathern connects and disconnects ethnographic materials (not least her juxtapositions of Melan…
Roads that Separate
We usually think of roads as tools of social and material connection which serve to enchain places, things and people that have not before been as directly, or intensely, linked up. Yet, in the sparsely populated grasslands and deserts of the Sino-Mongolian border zone, it is equally much the other way around. Rather than facilitating more interaction between local Mongolians and the growing number of Chinese employed in mining and oil companies,…
The Political Economy of Attention
Attention has become an issue of intense political, economic, and moral concern over recent years: from the commodification of attention by digital platforms to the alleged loss of the attentional capacities of screen-addicted children (and their parents). While attention has rarely been an explicit focus of anthropological inquiry, it has still played an important if mostly tacit part in many anthropological debates and subfields. Focusing on an…
Lost in Transition
For many people in postsocialist Mongolia, the crisis brought about by the 'transition' from state socialism to democracy and capitalism has become a permanent condition of life. Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores various religious and economic innovations through which people respond to the 'age of the market'. We show how, among low-income families of mixed Mongolian and Russian background, one age group in particular suff…
Complementary social science? Quali-quantitative experiments in a Big Data world
The rise of Big Data in the social realm poses significant questions at the intersection of science, technology, and society, including in terms of how new large-scale social databases are currently changing the methods, epistemologies, and politics of social science. In this commentary, we address such epochal ("large-scale") questions by way of a (situated) experiment: at the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen, an interdisciplinary group…
Introduction
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
Revolutionary securitization
This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of securitization in International Relations. In contrast to existing attempts to show how, suitably elaborated, this model can be ‘applied’ to various non-Western contexts, our anthropological strategy is to use the contingency of empirical materials (namely the Cuban Revolution and the political forms it instantiates) as a means for transforming the bas…
Anthropological Epochés
This article has two objectives. In the first part, I present a critical overview of the extensive anthropological literature that may be deemed “phenomenological.” Following this critique, which is built up around a classification into four different varieties of phenomenological anthropology, I discuss the relationship between phenomenological anthropology and the ontological turn (OT). Contrary to received wisdom within the anthropological dis…
The Soul of the Soul Is the Body
As part of a Common Knowledge symposium on the "consequence of blur," this article reassesses the anthropologist E. B. Tylor's famous but vague concept of the animist soul as an optimal reflection of the soul's fuzzy ontological status among animist peoples. Unlike the Platonic body/soul dichotomy, with its fixed appearance/essence distinction, indigenous conceptions of the soul among North Asian peoples, such as the Chukchi of Siberia and the Da…
Multiplicity Without Myth
What would an animist ontology look like if there were no mythology to prop it up? Based partly on the Darhad hunting lore about badagshin or 'half-people', this article argues that myth is not a precondition for perspectivism. It is possible to conceive of an animist cosmos that is thoroughlymultiple, but at the same time amythological. Thus the Darhads do not entertain ideas of an original state of undifferentiation, in the sense of a truer for…
The task of anthropology is to invent relations
Stitching together the heterogeneous party
The era of ‘big data’ studies and computational social science has recently given rise to a number of realignments within and beyond the social sciences, where otherwise distinct data formats – digital, numerical, ethnographic, visual, etc. – rub off and emerge from one another in new ways. This article chronicles the collaboration between a team of anthropologists and sociologists, who worked together for one week in an experimental attempt to c…
Affective Publics
In Denmark, as with elsewhere in the world, Twitter has emerged as an important arena of public discussion on issues relating to COVID-19 pandemic, including the handling of the crisis by state authorities and health institutions. Based on approximately 140,000 tweets harvested from Danish Twitter in the period between 24 February and 28 April 2020, this report explores how tweeting about mis/trust on this digital platform can be understood as a …
Debt as an Urban Chronotope in Mongolia
Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores the spatio-temporal properties of debt relations in urban Mongolia. During socialism, relations of debt were mostly restricted to closed circuits of friends, whose exchange of objects and favours often stretched over a long time. With the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, both the number of debt obligations and the size of loans expanded dramatically, without being subject to similar c…
Proposing the motion
The Vanishing Power Plant
In a neglected corner of peri-urban Ulaanbaatar’s sprawling post-socialist slums, the livelihood of dozens of households has over recent years been affected by a large infrastructure project that will never be built. ‘Power Plant #5’ was originally tendered to a Chinese construction firm in 2008 as part of a national strategy to develop Mongolia’s energy production to meet new needs. Taking its departure in the story of a poverty-stricken woman l…
Vi Bebor Mangfoldige Verdener
Debatoplæg. For udsagnet
Grøn Genstart
In this study, we build on a recent social data scientific mapping of Danish environmentalist organizations and activists during the COVID-19 lockdown in order to sketch a distinct genre of digital social research that we dub a quali-quantitative micro-history of ideas in real-time. We define and exemplify this genre by tracing and tracking the single political idea and activist slogan of grøn genstart ('green restart') across Twitter and other p…
Anthropology of/as repetition
Non-Identity Politics
This commentary on Marilyn Strathern's article, "Binary License," discusses certain implications of her assertion that intertribal relationships among urban migrants in Papua New Guinea are not "ethnic." For if such social encounters do not involve a conventional politics of identity, what then might its politics be? By comparing Strathern's Melanesian case with ethnographic examples in Corsica and Mongolia, a novel relational modality of "intens…
Fixing Fieldnotes
Ethnographic fieldnotes can contain richer and more thorough descriptions of social phenomena compared to other data sources. Their open-ended and flexible character makes them especially useful in explorative research. However, fieldnotes are typically highly unstructured and personalized by individual researchers, which make them harder to use as a method for data collection in collaborative and mixed methods research. More precisely, the unstr…
Tarrying with Repression
This article1 explores different forms of social memory about the state socialist repression of Mongolian Buddhism in the 1930s. Based on two political anecdotes collected during fieldwork among Darhads in Northern Mongolia as well as on recent studies of social memory in Mongolia and Buryatia by Christopher Kaplonski and Caroline Humphrey, I identify three 'mnemonic tropes,' which are appropriated by people in recounting these tragic events of t…
Totemism, Animism and North Asian Indigenous Ontologies
This article examines the extent to which new theories of animism advanced by Descola and Viveiros de Castro are consistent with the indigenous ontologies of North Asia. Based on a survey of North Asian ethnography and on fieldwork in Mongolia and Siberia, it is proposed that an analytical distinction between animist and totemist modalities will shed light on indigenous ontologies in North Asia. Whereas the ontologies of Northern North Asia (NNA)…
Tarrying with Repression
This article1 explores different forms of social memory about the state socialist repression of Mongolian Buddhism in the 1930s. Based on two political anecdotes collected during fieldwork among Darhads in Northern Mongolia as well as on recent studies of social memory in Mongolia and Buryatia by Christopher Kaplonski and Caroline Humphrey, I identify three 'mnemonic tropes,' which are appropriated by people in recounting these tragic events of t…
Thinking Through Things
Book description: Drawing upon the work of some of the most influential theorists in the field, Thinking Through Things demonstrates the quiet revolution growing in anthropology and its related disciplines, shifting its philosophical foundations. The first text to offer a direct and provocative challenge to disciplinary fragmentation - arguing for the futility of segregating the study of artefacts and society - this collection expands on the conc…
Multiplicity Without Myth
What would an animist ontology look like if there were no mythology to prop it up? Based partly on the Darhad hunting lore about badagshin or 'half-people', this article argues that myth is not a precondition for perspectivism. It is possible to conceive of an animist cosmos that is thoroughlymultiple, but at the same time amythological. Thus the Darhads do not entertain ideas of an original state of undifferentiation, in the sense of a truer for…
Lost in Transition
For many people in postsocialist Mongolia, the crisis brought about by the 'transition' from state socialism to democracy and capitalism has become a permanent condition of life. Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores various religious and economic innovations through which people respond to the 'age of the market'. We show how, among low-income families of mixed Mongolian and Russian background, one age group in particular suff…
Planet M
This article examines the peculiar nature of comparison in the work of Marilyn Strathern. Contrasting her approach to more familiar arguments regarding the role of reflexivity and multi-sited ethnography in the comparative agenda of contemporary anthropology, we elucidate the logical and metaphysical tenets that underlie the particular manner in which Strathern connects and disconnects ethnographic materials (not least her juxtapositions of Melan…
Technologies of the Imagination
Industry and Modernism. Companies, Architecture, and Identity in the Nordic and Baltic Countries during the High-Industrial Period
Anja Kervanto Nevanlinna (ed.), Industry and Modernism. Companies, Architecture, and Identity in the Nordic and Baltic Countries during the High-Industrial Period, Studia Fennica Historica 14, Hels
Not Quite Shamans
Introduction
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
Non-Identity Politics
This commentary on Marilyn Strathern's article, "Binary License," discusses certain implications of her assertion that intertribal relationships among urban migrants in Papua New Guinea are not "ethnic." For if such social encounters do not involve a conventional politics of identity, what then might its politics be? By comparing Strathern's Melanesian case with ethnographic examples in Corsica and Mongolia, a novel relational modality of "intens…
A Day in the Cadillac
Based on fieldwork among Ulaanbaatar's dispossessed youth, this article explores the 'work of hope' in post-socialist Mongolia. Using anthropological writings on presentism and hope as my theoretical point of departure, I show how the concept of hope allows for the potentials of the moment to overflow the possibilities of the present. The article describes a number of lucky-and not so lucky-events that took place during a day spent with a group o…
Revolutionary securitization
This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of securitization in International Relations. In contrast to existing attempts to show how, suitably elaborated, this model can be ‘applied’ to various non-Western contexts, our anthropological strategy is to use the contingency of empirical materials (namely the Cuban Revolution and the political forms it instantiates) as a means for transforming the bas…
Roads that Separate
We usually think of roads as tools of social and material connection which serve to enchain places, things and people that have not before been as directly, or intensely, linked up. Yet, in the sparsely populated grasslands and deserts of the Sino-Mongolian border zone, it is equally much the other way around. Rather than facilitating more interaction between local Mongolians and the growing number of Chinese employed in mining and oil companies,…
The Soul of the Soul Is the Body
As part of a Common Knowledge symposium on the "consequence of blur," this article reassesses the anthropologist E. B. Tylor's famous but vague concept of the animist soul as an optimal reflection of the soul's fuzzy ontological status among animist peoples. Unlike the Platonic body/soul dichotomy, with its fixed appearance/essence distinction, indigenous conceptions of the soul among North Asian peoples, such as the Chukchi of Siberia and the Da…
Proposing the motion
The task of anthropology is to invent relations
Trans-temporal Hinges
Based on two case studies of Chinese infrastructural interventions in Mozambique and in Mongolia, this article introduces the notion of 'trans-temporal hinge' as a heuristic methodological concept that brings together phenomena and events otherwise distributed across time. The authors explore envelopes used when paying Mozambican workers at a construction site in Maputo and roads dividing Chinese oil workers and local nomads in southern and easte…
Diskussion
Lars Højer: Hvilke ting? Hvilke relationer? Hvilke verdener? Inger Sjørslev: Hvorfor skal forskelligheder være ontologiske? Anders Blok: Med Wittgenstein på kanten af antropologiens sprogspil? Heiko Henkel: Hvad kan 'mangfoldige verdener' gøre for os? Asger F. Simonsen, Toke K. Amlund, Lars Rømer, Astrid Grue og Christina Vega: Rejsen til planeterne M&M Morten Nielsen: Respons Morten Axel Pedersen: Respons
Vi Bebor Mangfoldige Verdener
Debatoplæg. For udsagnet
Complementary social science? Quali-quantitative experiments in a Big Data world
The rise of Big Data in the social realm poses significant questions at the intersection of science, technology, and society, including in terms of how new large-scale social databases are currently changing the methods, epistemologies, and politics of social science. In this commentary, we address such epochal ("large-scale") questions by way of a (situated) experiment: at the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen, an interdisciplinary group…
The Ontological Turn
A new and often controversial theoretical orientation that resonates strongly with wider developments in contemporary philosophy and social theory, the so-called 'ontological turn' is receiving a great deal of attention in anthropology and cognate disciplines at present. This book provides the first anthropological exposition of this recent intellectual development. It traces the roots of the ontological turn in the history of anthropology and el…
Interpreting Strathern's ‘unconscious’ critique of ontology
Stitching together the heterogeneous party
The era of ‘big data’ studies and computational social science has recently given rise to a number of realignments within and beyond the social sciences, where otherwise distinct data formats – digital, numerical, ethnographic, visual, etc. – rub off and emerge from one another in new ways. This article chronicles the collaboration between a team of anthropologists and sociologists, who worked together for one week in an experimental attempt to c…
The Vanishing Power Plant
In a neglected corner of peri-urban Ulaanbaatar’s sprawling post-socialist slums, the livelihood of dozens of households has over recent years been affected by a large infrastructure project that will never be built. ‘Power Plant #5’ was originally tendered to a Chinese construction firm in 2008 as part of a national strategy to develop Mongolia’s energy production to meet new needs. Taking its departure in the story of a poverty-stricken woman l…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Ethnography (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works)