T M Malaby
Biographic Data
| ID | 4145 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T M Malaby |
| GIVEN NAMES | T M |
| FAMILY NAME | Malaby |
| SIGNATURE | MALABY T M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1962-8653 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 154 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Solicitude and Solitude
The moral terrain of caring in a social work context is often treacherous. During ethnographic fieldwork with front-line workers at an organization providing services for unhoused individuals in a U.S. city, respondents articulated a relational intimacy required in client care. However, they also recognized the limits of their endurance and their need for distance from others. In this article, we suggest that Paul Ricoeur's "little ethics," in co…
Digital Gaming, Game Design and Its Precursors
With the arrival and expansiveness of digital gaming a new contingent of anthropologists has appeared, giving fresh attention both at the general level to the cultural form of the game itself and specifically to the way the situated practices of gaming trouble our understandings of governance, institutions, immersion, creativity and other issues. The opening up of territory for inquiry that is the aim of digital anthropology is a project that occ…
Speculating (on the Digital and the Monetary)
Scholarship has frequently struggled with several pairs of dichotomies as it has sought to understand the digital: real vs. virtual, authentic vs. mediated, openness (freedom) vs. closure (control), and community vs. network. In order to make conceptual headway without falling into these traps, we turn in this article to the concept of indexicality. We urge an account of the digital that sees it as a resource for social action, one with the capac…
Think Pieces in Analytics
Experimenting with the many potentials of anthropological analysis—that shifting interface between the empirical and the conceptual, the space and perhaps the time between ethnography and theory—is at the heart of our journal’s intellectual mission. Our aim is to publish articles that display a spirit of analytical exploration by dealing in fresh ways with their empirical materials and showing in the action of their analytical treatment new paths…
Our Present Misfortune
Anthropology is turning toward a new engagement with a central question of Weber: how do people come to understand the distribution of fortune in the world? Our discipline's recent examination of the uses of the past prompts us to ask how stances toward the future are both the product of cultural logics and the target of institutional interests. In this article, I trace the engagement with contingency in anthropology and social thought, and then …
Making Virtual Worlds
Malaby shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion.
The Second Life of Institutions
In the bureaucratic moments that Michael Herzfeld describes, functionaries of the nation-state deny the contingent points of possible connection with their hapless subjects yet draw on a common symbolic language to do so-thus is the institution reproduced. Such ethnographic moments implicitly rely on other moments, those informed by their expressed lack of total order: illicit activities, games, and competitive verbal performance; cultural intima…
Blood and Oranges
Anthropology and Play
This essay traces twentieth-century work on play in anthropology, and shows that while the ingredients of a more useful conception of play as a disposition were always present, the field as a whole stressed only two viable possibilities: play as nonwork, and play as representation. The essay offers a better model for thinking about play, one that draws ultimately on the pragmatist philosophers' portrayal of the world as irreducibly contingent. On…
The Short and Happy Life of Interdisciplinarity in Game Studies
The rise of virtual worlds and their demonstrated potential to generate new economies, forms of belonging, and learning-all within spaces that are deeply game-like-makes new demands of our thinking about games and society. A number of scholars have recently begun to forge an approach distinct from past efforts, shifting their attention toward broader, contextual understandings of games, communities, and play. Seeking to treat such spaces neither …
Coming of Age in Second Life
Beyond Play
Games have intruded into popular, academic, and policy-maker awareness to an unprecedented level, and this creates new opportunities for advancing our understanding of the relationship of games to society. The author offers a new approach to games that stresses them as characterized by process. Games, the author argues, are domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected…
Coding Control
Approximately 11 million people worldwide regularly participate in persistent, graphically–realized, online virtual worlds (including EverQuest, Ultima Online, Second Life, and Lineage). Originally built on computer game platforms, these worlds are in many respects the most viable online arenas for broad–based social action; their participants pursue lasting social relations as well as globally consequential economic activities that elide the bou…
Introduction
None Available
Parlaying Value
Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virtual worlds or MMORPGs) produce commodities and currencies with market value, whereas other work has established the increasing importance of social networks within and between worlds and across the boundary that appears to separate them from the rest of users' lives. To tie these two threads together and account for the use of these environments for t…
The Currency of Proof
The rollout of the euro as a hard currency involved unprecedented logistical organization oriented toward security; yet just as central to its success was the pedagogical project of enlisting those within the euro-zone to be competent with the new currency. This paper explores two forms of euro competence in Greece: the accurate recognition and use of the currency, and the learned refiguring of the values of everyday products. These competencies …
Odds and Ends
Making Change in the New Europe
Anthropological Quarterly - Volume 75, Number 3, Summer 2002
The Future of Class? The Role of Temporality in Class Identity in Greece
Recent approaches to the importance of class in social inquiry have noted the importance of temporality - attitudes toward the past and future - as a locus of class identity conceived both processually and structurally. In Greece this issue of the future and its unpredictability is deeply embedded in much of the agonistic practices of everyday life, from politics and business to localized illegal activities such as gambling. This paper explores h…
Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood
Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia. ANASTASIA N. KARAKASIDOU. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997; 334 pp. The recent and tragic conflicts in the Balkans have raised forcibly and anew the challenge for anthropology to provide insight into the processes of national identity formation, both in Europe and elsewhere. The virulence of the controversy over the imagery, history, and area of Macedonia has…
Beyond Play
Games have intruded into popular, academic, and policy-maker awareness to an unprecedented level, and this creates new opportunities for advancing our understanding of the relationship of games to society. The author offers a new approach to games that stresses them as characterized by process. Games, the author argues, are domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected…
Anthropology and Play
This essay traces twentieth-century work on play in anthropology, and shows that while the ingredients of a more useful conception of play as a disposition were always present, the field as a whole stressed only two viable possibilities: play as nonwork, and play as representation. The essay offers a better model for thinking about play, one that draws ultimately on the pragmatist philosophers' portrayal of the world as irreducibly contingent. On…
Parlaying Value
Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virtual worlds or MMORPGs) produce commodities and currencies with market value, whereas other work has established the increasing importance of social networks within and between worlds and across the boundary that appears to separate them from the rest of users' lives. To tie these two threads together and account for the use of these environments for t…
The Short and Happy Life of Interdisciplinarity in Game Studies
The rise of virtual worlds and their demonstrated potential to generate new economies, forms of belonging, and learning-all within spaces that are deeply game-like-makes new demands of our thinking about games and society. A number of scholars have recently begun to forge an approach distinct from past efforts, shifting their attention toward broader, contextual understandings of games, communities, and play. Seeking to treat such spaces neither …
The Second Life of Institutions
In the bureaucratic moments that Michael Herzfeld describes, functionaries of the nation-state deny the contingent points of possible connection with their hapless subjects yet draw on a common symbolic language to do so-thus is the institution reproduced. Such ethnographic moments implicitly rely on other moments, those informed by their expressed lack of total order: illicit activities, games, and competitive verbal performance; cultural intima…
The Currency of Proof
The rollout of the euro as a hard currency involved unprecedented logistical organization oriented toward security; yet just as central to its success was the pedagogical project of enlisting those within the euro-zone to be competent with the new currency. This paper explores two forms of euro competence in Greece: the accurate recognition and use of the currency, and the learned refiguring of the values of everyday products. These competencies …
Making Change in the New Europe
Anthropological Quarterly - Volume 75, Number 3, Summer 2002
Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood
Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia. ANASTASIA N. KARAKASIDOU. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997; 334 pp. The recent and tragic conflicts in the Balkans have raised forcibly and anew the challenge for anthropology to provide insight into the processes of national identity formation, both in Europe and elsewhere. The virulence of the controversy over the imagery, history, and area of Macedonia has…
The Future of Class? The Role of Temporality in Class Identity in Greece
Recent approaches to the importance of class in social inquiry have noted the importance of temporality - attitudes toward the past and future - as a locus of class identity conceived both processually and structurally. In Greece this issue of the future and its unpredictability is deeply embedded in much of the agonistic practices of everyday life, from politics and business to localized illegal activities such as gambling. This paper explores h…
Odds and Ends
Making Change in the New Europe
Anthropological Quarterly - Volume 75, Number 3, Summer 2002
The Currency of Proof
The rollout of the euro as a hard currency involved unprecedented logistical organization oriented toward security; yet just as central to its success was the pedagogical project of enlisting those within the euro-zone to be competent with the new currency. This paper explores two forms of euro competence in Greece: the accurate recognition and use of the currency, and the learned refiguring of the values of everyday products. These competencies …
Coding Control
Approximately 11 million people worldwide regularly participate in persistent, graphically–realized, online virtual worlds (including EverQuest, Ultima Online, Second Life, and Lineage). Originally built on computer game platforms, these worlds are in many respects the most viable online arenas for broad–based social action; their participants pursue lasting social relations as well as globally consequential economic activities that elide the bou…
Introduction
None Available
Parlaying Value
Recent scholarship has made it clear that people within synthetic worlds (otherwise known as virtual worlds or MMORPGs) produce commodities and currencies with market value, whereas other work has established the increasing importance of social networks within and between worlds and across the boundary that appears to separate them from the rest of users' lives. To tie these two threads together and account for the use of these environments for t…
Beyond Play
Games have intruded into popular, academic, and policy-maker awareness to an unprecedented level, and this creates new opportunities for advancing our understanding of the relationship of games to society. The author offers a new approach to games that stresses them as characterized by process. Games, the author argues, are domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected…
Blood and Oranges
Anthropology and Play
This essay traces twentieth-century work on play in anthropology, and shows that while the ingredients of a more useful conception of play as a disposition were always present, the field as a whole stressed only two viable possibilities: play as nonwork, and play as representation. The essay offers a better model for thinking about play, one that draws ultimately on the pragmatist philosophers' portrayal of the world as irreducibly contingent. On…
The Short and Happy Life of Interdisciplinarity in Game Studies
The rise of virtual worlds and their demonstrated potential to generate new economies, forms of belonging, and learning-all within spaces that are deeply game-like-makes new demands of our thinking about games and society. A number of scholars have recently begun to forge an approach distinct from past efforts, shifting their attention toward broader, contextual understandings of games, communities, and play. Seeking to treat such spaces neither …
Coming of Age in Second Life
Making Virtual Worlds
Malaby shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion.
The Second Life of Institutions
In the bureaucratic moments that Michael Herzfeld describes, functionaries of the nation-state deny the contingent points of possible connection with their hapless subjects yet draw on a common symbolic language to do so-thus is the institution reproduced. Such ethnographic moments implicitly rely on other moments, those informed by their expressed lack of total order: illicit activities, games, and competitive verbal performance; cultural intima…
Our Present Misfortune
Anthropology is turning toward a new engagement with a central question of Weber: how do people come to understand the distribution of fortune in the world? Our discipline's recent examination of the uses of the past prompts us to ask how stances toward the future are both the product of cultural logics and the target of institutional interests. In this article, I trace the engagement with contingency in anthropology and social thought, and then …
Speculating (on the Digital and the Monetary)
Scholarship has frequently struggled with several pairs of dichotomies as it has sought to understand the digital: real vs. virtual, authentic vs. mediated, openness (freedom) vs. closure (control), and community vs. network. In order to make conceptual headway without falling into these traps, we turn in this article to the concept of indexicality. We urge an account of the digital that sees it as a resource for social action, one with the capac…
Think Pieces in Analytics
Experimenting with the many potentials of anthropological analysis—that shifting interface between the empirical and the conceptual, the space and perhaps the time between ethnography and theory—is at the heart of our journal’s intellectual mission. Our aim is to publish articles that display a spirit of analytical exploration by dealing in fresh ways with their empirical materials and showing in the action of their analytical treatment new paths…
Digital Gaming, Game Design and Its Precursors
With the arrival and expansiveness of digital gaming a new contingent of anthropologists has appeared, giving fresh attention both at the general level to the cultural form of the game itself and specifically to the way the situated practices of gaming trouble our understandings of governance, institutions, immersion, creativity and other issues. The opening up of territory for inquiry that is the aim of digital anthropology is a project that occ…
Solicitude and Solitude
The moral terrain of caring in a social work context is often treacherous. During ethnographic fieldwork with front-line workers at an organization providing services for unhoused individuals in a U.S. city, respondents articulated a relational intimacy required in client care. However, they also recognized the limits of their endurance and their need for distance from others. In this article, we suggest that Paul Ricoeur's "little ethics," in co…
Political science (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Digital Games and Media (8 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Contingency (5 works)