Robert J Foster
Biographic Data
| ID | 3618378 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert J Foster |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert J |
| FAMILY NAME | Foster |
| SIGNATURE | FOSTER R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Rochester |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 617 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
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…
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.
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
The Significance of Exemplars for the Interpretation of the Letter of James
In this book, Robert J. Foster explores James' use of his four characters from Jewish history and tradition (Abraham, Rahab, Job and Elijah) and considers their collective as well as individual functions in the composition. He concludes that each of the four exemplars was tested to the extreme (albeit in very different ways) yet remained wholly-committed to God. By reason of that commitment each exemplar became an outsider in both their cultural …
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…
Corporate oxymorons and the anthropology of corporations
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…
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…
Negotiating Globalization
Commentary| January 01 2005 Negotiating Globalization: Contemporary Pacific Perspectives Robert J. Foster Robert J. Foster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2005) 52 (1): 167–177. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-52-1-167 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Se…
Commodity futures
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…
Oceania, Sociocultural Overviews
Remotely Global
Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Charles Piot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ix. 220 pp., maps, pho- tographs, notes, references, index
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…
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia
1. Introduction: history, alterity, and a new (Melanesian) anthropology 2. Commoditization and the emergence of kastam 3. Kastam, bisnis and matriliny 4. Finishing the dead: an outline of Tangan mortuary feasts and exchanges 5. Replacing the dead: identical exchange and lineage succession 6. Performing lineage succession: feast giving and value-creation 7. Performing lineage succession: transformative exchange and the power of mortuary rites 8. C…
Commercial Mass Media In Papua New Guinea
Nation Making
Nation Making
Nation Making
In this theoretically sophisticated volume, contributors examine the process of nation making in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu- states that attained formal political independence between 1970 and 1980. The remarkable cultural diversity within these states demands close ethnographic study of different groups and their contesting definitions of nationhood and leads to highly original approaches. The essays explore the pol…
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
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…
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…
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…
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
Value Without Equivalence
The Heart of the Pearlshell
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
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…
Nation Making
In this theoretically sophisticated volume, contributors examine the process of nation making in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu- states that attained formal political independence between 1970 and 1980. The remarkable cultural diversity within these states demands close ethnographic study of different groups and their contesting definitions of nationhood and leads to highly original approaches. The essays explore the pol…
Take Care of Public Telephones
Negotiating Globalization
Commentary| January 01 2005 Negotiating Globalization: Contemporary Pacific Perspectives Robert J. Foster Robert J. Foster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2005) 52 (1): 167–177. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-52-1-167 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Se…
Commercial Mass Media In Papua New Guinea
Komine and Tanga
(1987). Komine and Tanga: A note on writing the history of German New Guinea. The Journal of Pacific History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 56-64
Inalienable Possessions
Acquiescent response set as a measure of acquiescence
Acquiescent response set as a measure of acquiescence
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
Production and Value in the Enga Tee
Komine and Tanga
(1987). Komine and Tanga: A note on writing the history of German New Guinea. The Journal of Pacific History: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 56-64
Value Without Equivalence
The Heart of the Pearlshell
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…
Nationalist Ideologies and the Production of National Cultures . Richard G. Fox
Death Rituals and Life in the Societies of the Kula Ring
Material Culture and Mass Consumption
Part 1 Objectification: Hegel and objectification Marx - objectification as rupture Munn - objectification as culture Simmel - objectification as modernity. Part 2 Material culture: material culture artefacts in their contexts. Part 3 Mass consumption: the study of consumption object domains, ideology and interests towards a theory of consumption
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
Commoditization and the Emergence of Kastam as a Cultural Category
Take Care of Public Telephones
Nation‐States and Indians in Latin America . GREG Urban and Joel SHERZER
Nation Making
In this theoretically sophisticated volume, contributors examine the process of nation making in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu- states that attained formal political independence between 1970 and 1980. The remarkable cultural diversity within these states demands close ethnographic study of different groups and their contesting definitions of nationhood and leads to highly original approaches. The essays explore the pol…
Inalienable Possessions
Commercial Mass Media In Papua New Guinea
Nation Making
Nation Making
Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia
1. Introduction: history, alterity, and a new (Melanesian) anthropology 2. Commoditization and the emergence of kastam 3. Kastam, bisnis and matriliny 4. Finishing the dead: an outline of Tangan mortuary feasts and exchanges 5. Replacing the dead: identical exchange and lineage succession 6. Performing lineage succession: feast giving and value-creation 7. Performing lineage succession: transformative exchange and the power of mortuary rites 8. C…
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…
Remotely Global
Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Charles Piot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ix. 220 pp., maps, pho- tographs, notes, references, index
Oceania, Sociocultural Overviews
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…
Sociology (28 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · History (14 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (13 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Ethnology (8 works)