J Mcintosh
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 15065 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | J Mcintosh |
| NOMBRES | J |
| APELLIDO | Mcintosh |
| FIRMA | MCINTOSH J |
| AFILIACIONES | Brandeis University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8182-6589 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 189 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1987 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
The Uncanny Magic of Bomb Mail
This paper analyzes the practice of writing inscriptions on munitions, termed “bomb mail,” with a focus on inscriptions on artillery shells used in the Ukraine–Russia conflict and in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. To better understand bomb mail’s enigmatic appeal, I examine its uncanny and quasi-magical affordances. First, through the medium of writing, bomb mail offers the inscriber a form of distributed personhood that extends into the weapon. S…
From Pajama Boy to Pepe the Frog
Critical watchers of the manosphere-that digital space devoted to "men's issues"have observed its evolution with alarm.Over the last couple of decades, it has morphed from an array of online forums promoting (for instance) father's rights and gross pickup techniques, to sites touting a far more aggressive and sometimes downright fascistic stance (Ribeiro et al. 2021).The toxic shift has accompanied the growing alienation of US men, especially Whi…
Poetry of Rehumanization
“Poetry of Rehumanization” explains the communication challenges for homecoming combat veterans, including the difficulty of expressing trauma through words. The chapter details the history of the veteran poetry movement following the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terrorism, as veterans discovered how the genre of poetry allows them to explore memories and feelings in new and subversive ways. Poetry can suspend time and consecrate moments tha…
Right-Wing Studies
Author(s): Bures, Eliah; Mudde, Cas; McIntosh, Janet; HoSang, Daniel Martinez; Lowndes, Joseph; Block, Fred; Givens, Terri; Moallem, Minoo; Ahmed, Hilal; Figueiredo, Ângela; Mason, Carol; Joffe, Carole; Griffin, Roger; Rosenthal, Lawrence
Full Issue
This special issue of the Humboldt Journal of Social Relations visits one of the most polarizing policy debates in the US. In 2012, voters in Washington and Colorado passed initiatives that legalized the recreational use of marijuana. In fact, there were about 75,000 more votes cast in support of marijuana legalization in Colorado than were given to reelect President Obama. Yet according to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, Demo…
The sinister signs of QAnon
QAnon's promotion of Donald Trump and conspiracy theories is well known, yet almost no analysis has focused on the cryptic writing style in Q's online postings, or 'Q-drops'. This essay focuses on QAnon's relationship to signs and symbols, including the style of communication in Q-drops and the semiotic-interpretive stances that these encourage. The poetic forms in Q-drops have social effects crucial to QAnon's popularity. I examine the types of …
Because it's easier to kill that way
This article examines the blunt conceptual instrument of dehumanizing American military terms for the enemy in the context of the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terror. I examine language that dehumanizes American service members themselves, who are semiotically framed as expendable. Next, I explore the essentialist, semi-propositional qualities of derogatory epithets for the enemy and the affectively charged, deadly stances they encourage. I …
Language and the Military
This article augments and complicates Nelson's claim that "we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it" ( Dedaić & Nelson 2003 , p. 459). Military endeavors require verbal legitimation, but militarizing participants and wide swaths of the civilian population requires more than just a stated rationale. It requires the complex construction of acquiescent selves and societies through linguistic maneuvers that present themselves with both bru…
Whiteness and Language
Whiteness, like all racial categories, is a mythic and cunning construct with little biological credibility but tremendous social power. Historically, White social dominance has been propped up not only by violence, political control, and socioeconomic configurations, but also by language ideology and linguistic practice. This entry explores several ways in which White advantages and subject positions have been constructed through language. It lo…
Maledictive Language
Obscene words have an astonishing social range: they can provoke, grind a conversation to a halt, underline fury, threaten the moral order, effect joyful emotional release, praise, bond people in joking relationships, expand the function of a ritual, mark an unusual gender identity, and more. Obscenity takes “offstage” topics – typically to do with sex, excretion, and oral, anal, and genital functions – and brings them onstage. Taboo words are th…
Polyontologism
This article challenges the common assumption that the framework of “syncretism” (in terms of hybridity or blending) neatly characterizes pluralist religious practices. My case study from coastal Kenya suggests that in some communities, religious pluralism may preserve discontinuity between loci of religious power, a model I call “polyontologism.”
Essentialism
Essentialism is a way of conceptualizing categories as if they obtain naturally, intrinsically, or metaphysically in the world, rather than being constructed by human myths and social dynamics. Essentialist thinking is frequently applied to so‐called “natural kinds” and “social kinds,” as well as to putative human qualities and other elaborated cultural concepts. In essentialist discourse, category members are portrayed as deeply similar and natu…
Listening versus Lingwashing
This article focuses on the liberal South African whites in Cape Town who mediate their crisis of national belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages. After contextualizing white aspirations to linguistic belonging, some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, and various white metapragmatic judgments, I discuss promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, then argue that language learnin…
Personhood, Self, and Individual
In every society, beliefs and ideologies circulate about the qualifications necessary to be classified or treated as a full person in the world. Personhood is often (though not always) thought to be constituted throughout the life course and many societies have distinct ontological and ethnopsychological ideas about the constitution of persons, including persons' articulation with others, their interpenetration with the world around them, their m…
Land, belonging and structural oblivion among contemporary white Kenyans
In recent years, settler descendants in Kenya have found their rights to hold land in Laikipia challenged by Maasai activists. Many have defended themselves by drawing on colonial-era discourses about pastoralist ecology and what constitutes good use of the land. These discourses have side-stepped ecological history and the moral problematics of colonial land seizure, while treating Maasai anger and nostalgia as manipulative and inauthentic. At t…
Africa after Apartheid
Even on the evidence of this book's front cover, we sense it will take a fresh angle; it's entitled ‘Africa after Apartheid’, but situated in Tanzania. The book transcends national borders, for, as Richard Schroeder reminds us, South Africa's apartheid was felt far to the north during the decades when Tanzania sacrificed and strove to support the liberation struggle. Apartheid still reverberates there today, but in surprising and disconcerting fa…
"Autochthony and "Family
For white Kenyans descended from colonial settlers, the question of how to establish their right to belong in Kenya provokes considerable anxiety. Some whites attempt to suture themselves to Kenya through kinship narratives that reach backward in time, as well as laterally across races. Whites' relationship to colonial ancestors indexes a bloodline on Kenyan soil, a version of autochthony that some hope will establish entitlement to land or broad…
Linguistic Atonement
This article analyzes language ideology among whites in Kenya, documenting an historical shift from colonial settlers' condescending attitude toward Kiswahili to an enthusiastic stance among settler descendants, some of whom pride themselves on their Kiswahili abilities and say it is their languge of "connection" to Afro-Kenyans. I situate this change in a context of contemporary white anxiety about national belonging, especially given that colon…
P1-237 Post-separation parenting arrangements
Introduction Changes in family law in many countries have preceded research addressing the developmental impacts of different patterns of parenting after separation. We use data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to examine differences in developmental outcomes due to different patterns of overnight care among infants and children with parents living elsewhere. Analysis LSAC includes a national random sample of Australian c…
Mobile phones and Mipoho's prophecy
In this article, I examine the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya. I argue that young people use rapid code-switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self-fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect re…
The Edge of Islam
In this theoretically rich exploration of ethnic and religious tensions, Janet McIntosh demonstrates how the relationship between two ethnic groups in the bustling Kenyan town of Malindi is reflected in and shaped by the different ways the two groups relate to Islam. While Swahili and Giriama peoples are historically interdependent, today Giriama find themselves literally and metaphorically on the margins, peering in at a Swahili life of greater …
Bewitching Development
Elders and 'Frauds
Among Mijikenda of the Kenya coast, the male Kaya elders (azhere a Kaya) - custodians of sacred spaces and customary knowledge - traditionally undergo years of secretive ritual training and tribulation in order to accrue both expertise and seniority. Over the past few years, however, a series of scandals have fragmented this group, casting them into the national spotlight while fomenting debates about the nature of elders' expertise. In the ethni…
Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería
Why do children experiment with illegal drugs? The declining role of peer pressure with increasing age
There has been hardly any research on the decisions that children in their late pre-teen and early teenage years (age 11–14) make in relation to drugs and the factors which influence these decisions. This article examines one aspect of this process: the role of peer pressure and its influence in the initiation of illegal drug use. The article is based on a longitudinal study of 92 ‘at risk’ children aged 10–12 years at the time of first contact. …
Mobile phones and Mipoho's prophecy
In this article, I examine the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya. I argue that young people use rapid code-switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self-fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect re…
The Edge of Islam
In this theoretically rich exploration of ethnic and religious tensions, Janet McIntosh demonstrates how the relationship between two ethnic groups in the bustling Kenyan town of Malindi is reflected in and shaped by the different ways the two groups relate to Islam. While Swahili and Giriama peoples are historically interdependent, today Giriama find themselves literally and metaphorically on the margins, peering in at a Swahili life of greater …
Reluctant Muslims
This account of a form of spirit possession widely experienced among Giriama people of coastal Kenya challenges prevailing theories of possession as resistance. Giriama are routinely possessed by Muslim spirits which hold their bodies hostage, afflicting them with illness and vomiting until they agree to abandon their customary practices and embrace Islam. Those possessed apparently somatize a hegemonic system of oppressive meanings according to …
Elders and 'Frauds
Among Mijikenda of the Kenya coast, the male Kaya elders (azhere a Kaya) - custodians of sacred spaces and customary knowledge - traditionally undergo years of secretive ritual training and tribulation in order to accrue both expertise and seniority. Over the past few years, however, a series of scandals have fragmented this group, casting them into the national spotlight while fomenting debates about the nature of elders' expertise. In the ethni…
Language essentialism and social hierarchies among Giriama and Swahili
Because it's easier to kill that way
This article examines the blunt conceptual instrument of dehumanizing American military terms for the enemy in the context of the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terror. I examine language that dehumanizes American service members themselves, who are semiotically framed as expendable. Next, I explore the essentialist, semi-propositional qualities of derogatory epithets for the enemy and the affectively charged, deadly stances they encourage. I …
Baptismal Essentialisms
"Autochthony and "Family
For white Kenyans descended from colonial settlers, the question of how to establish their right to belong in Kenya provokes considerable anxiety. Some whites attempt to suture themselves to Kenya through kinship narratives that reach backward in time, as well as laterally across races. Whites' relationship to colonial ancestors indexes a bloodline on Kenyan soil, a version of autochthony that some hope will establish entitlement to land or broad…
The sinister signs of QAnon
QAnon's promotion of Donald Trump and conspiracy theories is well known, yet almost no analysis has focused on the cryptic writing style in Q's online postings, or 'Q-drops'. This essay focuses on QAnon's relationship to signs and symbols, including the style of communication in Q-drops and the semiotic-interpretive stances that these encourage. The poetic forms in Q-drops have social effects crucial to QAnon's popularity. I examine the types of …
Language and the Military
This article augments and complicates Nelson's claim that "we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it" ( Dedaić & Nelson 2003 , p. 459). Military endeavors require verbal legitimation, but militarizing participants and wide swaths of the civilian population requires more than just a stated rationale. It requires the complex construction of acquiescent selves and societies through linguistic maneuvers that present themselves with both bru…
Land, belonging and structural oblivion among contemporary white Kenyans
In recent years, settler descendants in Kenya have found their rights to hold land in Laikipia challenged by Maasai activists. Many have defended themselves by drawing on colonial-era discourses about pastoralist ecology and what constitutes good use of the land. These discourses have side-stepped ecological history and the moral problematics of colonial land seizure, while treating Maasai anger and nostalgia as manipulative and inauthentic. At t…
Going Bush
This article examines the ways in which contemporary white Kenyans know about, talk about and sometimes interact with what they call 'witchcraft' and 'magic' in ways they find deeply discomfiting. Although white Kenyans are at pains to justify their postcolonial advantages in Kenya in terms of a level-headed and pragmatic kind of personhood, many of them interact with indigenous religious ontologies more than ever, sometimes as manipulators of th…
Linguistic Atonement
This article analyzes language ideology among whites in Kenya, documenting an historical shift from colonial settlers' condescending attitude toward Kiswahili to an enthusiastic stance among settler descendants, some of whom pride themselves on their Kiswahili abilities and say it is their languge of "connection" to Afro-Kenyans. I situate this change in a context of contemporary white anxiety about national belonging, especially given that colon…
Listening versus Lingwashing
This article focuses on the liberal South African whites in Cape Town who mediate their crisis of national belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages. After contextualizing white aspirations to linguistic belonging, some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, and various white metapragmatic judgments, I discuss promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, then argue that language learnin…
Personhood, Self, and Individual
In every society, beliefs and ideologies circulate about the qualifications necessary to be classified or treated as a full person in the world. Personhood is often (though not always) thought to be constituted throughout the life course and many societies have distinct ontological and ethnopsychological ideas about the constitution of persons, including persons' articulation with others, their interpenetration with the world around them, their m…
Liminal meanings
The Archaeologist's Handbook
Symbolism, Cognition, and Political Orders
Under Attack" (The
Maxwell's Demons
This is an account of the fluctuating spiritual beliefs of my research assistant, Maxwell, and me as we moved through his cultural world side by side—I, initially, as an agnostic ethnographer; he, initially, as the passionate would‐be leader of a revival movement for a marginalized indigenous religion. The article is intended as a meditation on the fine line between belief and disbelief, on the politics and pain of adhering to a stigmatized belie…
Maxwell's Demons
Reluctant Muslims
This account of a form of spirit possession widely experienced among Giriama people of coastal Kenya challenges prevailing theories of possession as resistance. Giriama are routinely possessed by Muslim spirits which hold their bodies hostage, afflicting them with illness and vomiting until they agree to abandon their customary practices and embrace Islam. Those possessed apparently somatize a hegemonic system of oppressive meanings according to …
Liminal meanings
Language essentialism and social hierarchies among Giriama and Swahili
Baptismal Essentialisms
Why do children experiment with illegal drugs? The declining role of peer pressure with increasing age
There has been hardly any research on the decisions that children in their late pre-teen and early teenage years (age 11–14) make in relation to drugs and the factors which influence these decisions. This article examines one aspect of this process: the role of peer pressure and its influence in the initiation of illegal drug use. The article is based on a longitudinal study of 92 ‘at risk’ children aged 10–12 years at the time of first contact. …
Going Bush
This article examines the ways in which contemporary white Kenyans know about, talk about and sometimes interact with what they call 'witchcraft' and 'magic' in ways they find deeply discomfiting. Although white Kenyans are at pains to justify their postcolonial advantages in Kenya in terms of a level-headed and pragmatic kind of personhood, many of them interact with indigenous religious ontologies more than ever, sometimes as manipulators of th…
Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería
The Edge of Islam
In this theoretically rich exploration of ethnic and religious tensions, Janet McIntosh demonstrates how the relationship between two ethnic groups in the bustling Kenyan town of Malindi is reflected in and shaped by the different ways the two groups relate to Islam. While Swahili and Giriama peoples are historically interdependent, today Giriama find themselves literally and metaphorically on the margins, peering in at a Swahili life of greater …
Bewitching Development
Elders and 'Frauds
Among Mijikenda of the Kenya coast, the male Kaya elders (azhere a Kaya) - custodians of sacred spaces and customary knowledge - traditionally undergo years of secretive ritual training and tribulation in order to accrue both expertise and seniority. Over the past few years, however, a series of scandals have fragmented this group, casting them into the national spotlight while fomenting debates about the nature of elders' expertise. In the ethni…
Mobile phones and Mipoho's prophecy
In this article, I examine the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya. I argue that young people use rapid code-switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self-fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect re…
P1-237 Post-separation parenting arrangements
Introduction Changes in family law in many countries have preceded research addressing the developmental impacts of different patterns of parenting after separation. We use data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to examine differences in developmental outcomes due to different patterns of overnight care among infants and children with parents living elsewhere. Analysis LSAC includes a national random sample of Australian c…
Linguistic Atonement
This article analyzes language ideology among whites in Kenya, documenting an historical shift from colonial settlers' condescending attitude toward Kiswahili to an enthusiastic stance among settler descendants, some of whom pride themselves on their Kiswahili abilities and say it is their languge of "connection" to Afro-Kenyans. I situate this change in a context of contemporary white anxiety about national belonging, especially given that colon…
"Autochthony and "Family
For white Kenyans descended from colonial settlers, the question of how to establish their right to belong in Kenya provokes considerable anxiety. Some whites attempt to suture themselves to Kenya through kinship narratives that reach backward in time, as well as laterally across races. Whites' relationship to colonial ancestors indexes a bloodline on Kenyan soil, a version of autochthony that some hope will establish entitlement to land or broad…
Africa after Apartheid
Even on the evidence of this book's front cover, we sense it will take a fresh angle; it's entitled ‘Africa after Apartheid’, but situated in Tanzania. The book transcends national borders, for, as Richard Schroeder reminds us, South Africa's apartheid was felt far to the north during the decades when Tanzania sacrificed and strove to support the liberation struggle. Apartheid still reverberates there today, but in surprising and disconcerting fa…
Land, belonging and structural oblivion among contemporary white Kenyans
In recent years, settler descendants in Kenya have found their rights to hold land in Laikipia challenged by Maasai activists. Many have defended themselves by drawing on colonial-era discourses about pastoralist ecology and what constitutes good use of the land. These discourses have side-stepped ecological history and the moral problematics of colonial land seizure, while treating Maasai anger and nostalgia as manipulative and inauthentic. At t…
Essentialism
Essentialism is a way of conceptualizing categories as if they obtain naturally, intrinsically, or metaphysically in the world, rather than being constructed by human myths and social dynamics. Essentialist thinking is frequently applied to so‐called “natural kinds” and “social kinds,” as well as to putative human qualities and other elaborated cultural concepts. In essentialist discourse, category members are portrayed as deeply similar and natu…
Listening versus Lingwashing
This article focuses on the liberal South African whites in Cape Town who mediate their crisis of national belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages. After contextualizing white aspirations to linguistic belonging, some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, and various white metapragmatic judgments, I discuss promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, then argue that language learnin…
Personhood, Self, and Individual
In every society, beliefs and ideologies circulate about the qualifications necessary to be classified or treated as a full person in the world. Personhood is often (though not always) thought to be constituted throughout the life course and many societies have distinct ontological and ethnopsychological ideas about the constitution of persons, including persons' articulation with others, their interpenetration with the world around them, their m…
Polyontologism
This article challenges the common assumption that the framework of “syncretism” (in terms of hybridity or blending) neatly characterizes pluralist religious practices. My case study from coastal Kenya suggests that in some communities, religious pluralism may preserve discontinuity between loci of religious power, a model I call “polyontologism.”
Whiteness and Language
Whiteness, like all racial categories, is a mythic and cunning construct with little biological credibility but tremendous social power. Historically, White social dominance has been propped up not only by violence, political control, and socioeconomic configurations, but also by language ideology and linguistic practice. This entry explores several ways in which White advantages and subject positions have been constructed through language. It lo…
Sociology (24 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · Politics (18 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Philosophy (15 obras) · Gender Studies (14 obras) · History (13 obras) · Anthropology (12 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (11 obras) · Epistemology (10 obras)