Greg Downey
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3618779 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Greg Downey |
| NOMBRES | Greg |
| APELLIDO | Downey |
| FIRMA | DOWNEY G |
| AFILIACIONES | Macquarie School of Social Sciences Macquarie University Room B514, Level 5, 25B Wally's Walk NSW 2109 Australia |
| ORCID | 0009-0001-5877-4717 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 223 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1997 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Lice, gossip and the origins of language
Some 30 years after the popularization of the ‘social brain hypothesis’, this commentary takes a multispecies lens to highlight the catalytic role that ectoparasites have played in the evolution of grooming and, by extension, potentially in humanly organized multimodal communication. Predators and foraging helped draw our ancestors into groups, but lice and other parasites applied a more intimate pressure, compelling tactile care. If grooming beg…
More than “Information in the Head”
Humans engage the world, not just through organic evolutionary processes but also through innovation, technology, communication, social organization, environmental exploitation and alteration, and developing complex skills passed on within and between social groups. Evolutionary theorists recognize our species’ distinctive capacity to learn across generations and share that knowledge in dynamic and cumulative ways. However, much theorizing in evo…
Neuroanthropology
Mapping the Social Relations of Labor in Contemporary Algorithmic Society
Moritz Altenried's The Digital Factory (2022) accomplishes in just under two hundred pages what many other books twice that length have struggled with: assembling a concise yet readable introductory map to the global, fragmented, and too-often hidden landscape of digitally-mediated capitalism. But the digital factory itself is an incomplete concept, almost always requiring us to look for the external and contingent labor support hidden just outsi…
Echolocation among the blind
Proponents of the ontological turn typically advance a highly conceptual understanding of variation in ontology. In contrast, this article argues theoretically that cultural canalizations of embodied ontogenetic processes - especially the development of local neurologies - underwrite distinct lived worlds. This theoretical argument for a corporeal basis of world-making draws on the case of vision-impaired individuals who actively echolocate, or p…
Hybrid Experiments in Higher Education
In response to the many pressures facing public higher education, public universities are experimenting with business-oriented practices that seem likely to alter their nature and purposes. In this paper, we examine several hybrid experiments-new organizational strategies intended deliberately, sometimes explicitly, to hybridize the traditional norms and practices associated with academia and business at one emblematic public university. These ca…
Recoding Gender
Janet Abbate's Recoding Gender is not only a powerful analysis of the construction and reproduction of gender roles with respect to technological infrastructures of computing—but it is also simply one of the most readable and engaging histories of technology and labor ever written. Stretching from the operation of the ENIAC in the 1940s to the present-day disproportionate lack of women within academic computer science, Abbate retells the story of…
Ambient Commons
Reviewed by: Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Informationby Malcolm McCullough Greg Downey (bio) Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. by Malcolm McCullough. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Pp. 347. $27.95. Malcolm McCullough has produced a provocative set of essays on an emerging but elusive set of phenomena in his Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Asserting that "The twenty-…
Studying the History of Social Science Data Archives as Knowledge Infrastructure
We map out a new arena of analysis for knowledge and cyberinfrastructure scholars: Social Science Data Archives (SSDA). SSDA have influenced the international development of the social sciences, research methods, and data standards in the latter half of the twentieth century. They provide entry points to understand how fields organise themselves to be ‘data intensive’. Longitudinal studies of SSDA can increase our understanding of the sustainabil…
Being Human in Cities
Cities are sites of intense investment in niche construction, substantially altering ecological dynamics. Although novel in evolutionary terms, cities have distinctive epidemiological and demographic effects on human mortality and phenotype. Cities, however, do not affect all of their inhabitants identically, especially with a trend toward greater inequity with increased urbanization; the urban landscape offers a set of stratified behavioral nich…
Apprenticeship as method
Apprenticeship, the process of developing from novice to proficiency under the guidance of a skilled expert, varies across cultures and among different skilled communities, but for many communities of practice, apprenticeship offers an ideal ethnographic point of entry. For certain kinds of anthropological fieldwork, such as studies of bodily arts, apprenticeship may offer an essential research method. In this article, three anthropologists discu…
Habitus in Extremis
Loïc Wacquant argues for a radicalization of the habitus concept provided by Pierre Bourdieu, suggesting that habitus is a site and mode for conducting research, not simply an explanatory or theoretical mechanism. Taking seriously this call to examine skills and communities of practice through apprenticeship, however, requires that the theoretical account of habitus be subject to empirical testing. Moreover, enquiry into communities of practice, …
Anthropology in and of Moocs
The suddenness with which Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, sprang upon us left many within the academy grasping for interpretations. Early proponents touted them as revolutionary tools that could enhance on-campus learning while also making high-quality education accessible to a vast global population, reforming a malfunctioning university system, and producing new kinds of data on how people learn. Critics countered that behind this latest…
The Encultured Brain
Basic concepts and case studies from an emerging field that investigates human capacities and pathologies at the intersection of brain and culture. The brain and the nervous system are our most cultural organs. Our nervous system is especially immature at birth, our brain disproportionately small in relation to its adult size and open to cultural sculpting at multiple levels. Recognizing this, the new field of neuroanthropology places the brain a…
Encultured Brain
Cultural Variation in Rugby Skills
Cultural differences in sports playing styles may be the result of players possessing diverging cognitive–perceptual strategies, with resulting differences in the underlying neurological correlates of skilled behavior. The chapter describes the preliminary stages of an applied project with national rugby unions to understand how different developmental environments for skill acquisition may effect cognitive variation by making use of “degenerate”…
Neuroanthropology and Its Applications
The Pre-Internet Downloading Controversy
This article describes and explains the shift in the database industry's treatment of downloading. Downloading began as an unwanted by-product of new technology and became a product feature. The authors explain this shift in terms of shifts in "use-regimes," or changes to market practices, legal rules, user expectations, and technology-based tools that shape the use of intellectual and cultural property. In the early 1980s, citation database user…
Practice without theory
This paper, drawing on research on skill acquisition and sports training, asks two questions. First, how does the mimetic channel function and thus limit what can be acquired by bodily enculturation? Second, given that it was acquired through imitation, what must be the nature of the resulting bodily knowledge? These questions are addressed through a close examination of movement education, especially its neurological, psychological, and interact…
The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It (review)
Reviewed by: The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It Greg Downey (bio) The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. By Jonathan Zittrain. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. vi+342. $30. Jonathan Zittrain has written a clear and compelling argument for preserving the productive potential of the global infrastructure of networked PCs and their (potentially) collaborative users which we increasingly refer to as “Web 2.0”. Bot…
Telegraphic Realism
Reviewed by: Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems Greg Downey (bio) Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems. By Richard Menke. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. viii+321. $60. Rather than a historical study which draws on popular literary sources to make arguments about a society’s relationship to the development of new information networks, Richard Menke has writte…
Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira
Imitation plays a crucial role in apprenticeship in the Afro-Brazilian performance genre capoeira, as in many skills across cultures. In this article, I examine the interactional dynamics of imitative pedagogy in capoeira to better understand physical education as a form of bodily enculturation. The ability to learn through imitation is widely considered a hallmark of our species. Imitative ability, however, is a social accomplishment rather than…
Seeing With a ‘Sideways Glance’
Frontiers of Capital
Frontiers of Capital
Practice without theory
This paper, drawing on research on skill acquisition and sports training, asks two questions. First, how does the mimetic channel function and thus limit what can be acquired by bodily enculturation? Second, given that it was acquired through imitation, what must be the nature of the resulting bodily knowledge? These questions are addressed through a close examination of movement education, especially its neurological, psychological, and interact…
Listening to Capoeira
L'A. examine comment, chez les praticiens de la capoeira - une forme artistique afro-bresilienne melant des elements de danse et d'arts martiaux -, se realise un apprentissage de l'ecoute/de l'audition. A travers une exploration phenomenologique de l'audition, il demontre que la culture faconne l'ecoute, mais egalement que la perception sensible est un phenomene intrinsequement social et culturel. Il soutient que les influences sociales et cultur…
Apprenticeship as method
Apprenticeship, the process of developing from novice to proficiency under the guidance of a skilled expert, varies across cultures and among different skilled communities, but for many communities of practice, apprenticeship offers an ideal ethnographic point of entry. For certain kinds of anthropological fieldwork, such as studies of bodily arts, apprenticeship may offer an essential research method. In this article, three anthropologists discu…
Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira
Imitation plays a crucial role in apprenticeship in the Afro-Brazilian performance genre capoeira, as in many skills across cultures. In this article, I examine the interactional dynamics of imitative pedagogy in capoeira to better understand physical education as a form of bodily enculturation. The ability to learn through imitation is widely considered a hallmark of our species. Imitative ability, however, is a social accomplishment rather than…
Masculinities
Masculinities: Football, Polo, and the Tango in Argentina. Eduardo P. Archetti. Oxford: Berg, 1999. xviii. 212 pp., bibliography, index
Being Human in Cities
Cities are sites of intense investment in niche construction, substantially altering ecological dynamics. Although novel in evolutionary terms, cities have distinctive epidemiological and demographic effects on human mortality and phenotype. Cities, however, do not affect all of their inhabitants identically, especially with a trend toward greater inequity with increased urbanization; the urban landscape offers a set of stratified behavioral nich…
Habitus in Extremis
Loïc Wacquant argues for a radicalization of the habitus concept provided by Pierre Bourdieu, suggesting that habitus is a site and mode for conducting research, not simply an explanatory or theoretical mechanism. Taking seriously this call to examine skills and communities of practice through apprenticeship, however, requires that the theoretical account of habitus be subject to empirical testing. Moreover, enquiry into communities of practice, …
Anthropology in and of Moocs
The suddenness with which Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, sprang upon us left many within the academy grasping for interpretations. Early proponents touted them as revolutionary tools that could enhance on-campus learning while also making high-quality education accessible to a vast global population, reforming a malfunctioning university system, and producing new kinds of data on how people learn. Critics countered that behind this latest…
Virtual Webs, Physical Technologies, and Hidden Workers
Barely ten years since its inception the World Wide Web has become all but impossible to ignore. 1 My undergraduate students at a large Midwestern university in the turn-of-the-millennium United States are quite comfortable with the hyperlinked front end to the Internet that they simply call "the Web." Logging in at all hours from wired dorm rooms and public computer labs, they rely on it (often to a fault) as their main resource for communicatio…
Neuroanthropology and Its Applications
Echolocation among the blind
Proponents of the ontological turn typically advance a highly conceptual understanding of variation in ontology. In contrast, this article argues theoretically that cultural canalizations of embodied ontogenetic processes - especially the development of local neurologies - underwrite distinct lived worlds. This theoretical argument for a corporeal basis of world-making draws on the case of vision-impaired individuals who actively echolocate, or p…
Hybrid Experiments in Higher Education
In response to the many pressures facing public higher education, public universities are experimenting with business-oriented practices that seem likely to alter their nature and purposes. In this paper, we examine several hybrid experiments-new organizational strategies intended deliberately, sometimes explicitly, to hybridize the traditional norms and practices associated with academia and business at one emblematic public university. These ca…
Recoding Gender
Janet Abbate's Recoding Gender is not only a powerful analysis of the construction and reproduction of gender roles with respect to technological infrastructures of computing—but it is also simply one of the most readable and engaging histories of technology and labor ever written. Stretching from the operation of the ENIAC in the 1940s to the present-day disproportionate lack of women within academic computer science, Abbate retells the story of…
Educating the Eyes
Diverse forms of physical education form in their participants' skills, perceptual abilities and physiological adaptations that distinguish them from practitioners of other activities. These traits, many unconscious, are little studied in sociocultural anthropology in spite of their widespread prevalence. This article specifically explores how practitioners of capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian dance and martial art, learn to do a bananeira, a form of h…
Cultural Variation in Rugby Skills
Cultural differences in sports playing styles may be the result of players possessing diverging cognitive–perceptual strategies, with resulting differences in the underlying neurological correlates of skilled behavior. The chapter describes the preliminary stages of an applied project with national rugby unions to understand how different developmental environments for skill acquisition may effect cognitive variation by making use of “degenerate”…
Commentary
As co-editor of this IRSH supplement “Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions”, I have to begin this commentary with a confession. Before I entered the world of abstract knowledge production, commodification, and consumption known as academia, I was myself a worker in a world of much more concrete information processing: I was a computer programmer in the US from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a time we might now consider the nostalgic heyd…
Pain as Human Experience
Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good. Paul E. Brodwin. Byron J. Good. and Arthur Kleinman. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. vlii. 214 pp., notes, references, contributors, Index
Writing of Motion
Barbara Browning. Samba: Resistance in Motion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. xxvi. 190 pp
Pain as Human Experience
Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good. Paul E. Brodwin. Byron J. Good. and Arthur Kleinman. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. vlii. 214 pp., notes, references, contributors, Index
Masculinities
Masculinities: Football, Polo, and the Tango in Argentina. Eduardo P. Archetti. Oxford: Berg, 1999. xviii. 212 pp., bibliography, index
Virtual Webs, Physical Technologies, and Hidden Workers
Barely ten years since its inception the World Wide Web has become all but impossible to ignore. 1 My undergraduate students at a large Midwestern university in the turn-of-the-millennium United States are quite comfortable with the hyperlinked front end to the Internet that they simply call "the Web." Logging in at all hours from wired dorm rooms and public computer labs, they rely on it (often to a fault) as their main resource for communicatio…
Listening to Capoeira
L'A. examine comment, chez les praticiens de la capoeira - une forme artistique afro-bresilienne melant des elements de danse et d'arts martiaux -, se realise un apprentissage de l'ecoute/de l'audition. A travers une exploration phenomenologique de l'audition, il demontre que la culture faconne l'ecoute, mais egalement que la perception sensible est un phenomene intrinsequement social et culturel. Il soutient que les influences sociales et cultur…
Commentary
As co-editor of this IRSH supplement “Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions”, I have to begin this commentary with a confession. Before I entered the world of abstract knowledge production, commodification, and consumption known as academia, I was myself a worker in a world of much more concrete information processing: I was a computer programmer in the US from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a time we might now consider the nostalgic heyd…
Educating the Eyes
Diverse forms of physical education form in their participants' skills, perceptual abilities and physiological adaptations that distinguish them from practitioners of other activities. These traits, many unconscious, are little studied in sociocultural anthropology in spite of their widespread prevalence. This article specifically explores how practitioners of capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian dance and martial art, learn to do a bananeira, a form of h…
The African Diaspora
Frontiers of Capital
Frontiers of Capital
Frontiers of Capital
Central States Anthropological Society
Seeing With a ‘Sideways Glance’
Telegraphic Realism
Reviewed by: Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems Greg Downey (bio) Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems. By Richard Menke. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. viii+321. $60. Rather than a historical study which draws on popular literary sources to make arguments about a society’s relationship to the development of new information networks, Richard Menke has writte…
Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira
Imitation plays a crucial role in apprenticeship in the Afro-Brazilian performance genre capoeira, as in many skills across cultures. In this article, I examine the interactional dynamics of imitative pedagogy in capoeira to better understand physical education as a form of bodily enculturation. The ability to learn through imitation is widely considered a hallmark of our species. Imitative ability, however, is a social accomplishment rather than…
The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It (review)
Reviewed by: The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It Greg Downey (bio) The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. By Jonathan Zittrain. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. vi+342. $30. Jonathan Zittrain has written a clear and compelling argument for preserving the productive potential of the global infrastructure of networked PCs and their (potentially) collaborative users which we increasingly refer to as “Web 2.0”. Bot…
Practice without theory
This paper, drawing on research on skill acquisition and sports training, asks two questions. First, how does the mimetic channel function and thus limit what can be acquired by bodily enculturation? Second, given that it was acquired through imitation, what must be the nature of the resulting bodily knowledge? These questions are addressed through a close examination of movement education, especially its neurological, psychological, and interact…
The Pre-Internet Downloading Controversy
This article describes and explains the shift in the database industry's treatment of downloading. Downloading began as an unwanted by-product of new technology and became a product feature. The authors explain this shift in terms of shifts in "use-regimes," or changes to market practices, legal rules, user expectations, and technology-based tools that shape the use of intellectual and cultural property. In the early 1980s, citation database user…
The Encultured Brain
Basic concepts and case studies from an emerging field that investigates human capacities and pathologies at the intersection of brain and culture. The brain and the nervous system are our most cultural organs. Our nervous system is especially immature at birth, our brain disproportionately small in relation to its adult size and open to cultural sculpting at multiple levels. Recognizing this, the new field of neuroanthropology places the brain a…
Encultured Brain
Cultural Variation in Rugby Skills
Cultural differences in sports playing styles may be the result of players possessing diverging cognitive–perceptual strategies, with resulting differences in the underlying neurological correlates of skilled behavior. The chapter describes the preliminary stages of an applied project with national rugby unions to understand how different developmental environments for skill acquisition may effect cognitive variation by making use of “degenerate”…
Neuroanthropology and Its Applications
Habitus in Extremis
Loïc Wacquant argues for a radicalization of the habitus concept provided by Pierre Bourdieu, suggesting that habitus is a site and mode for conducting research, not simply an explanatory or theoretical mechanism. Taking seriously this call to examine skills and communities of practice through apprenticeship, however, requires that the theoretical account of habitus be subject to empirical testing. Moreover, enquiry into communities of practice, …
Anthropology in and of Moocs
The suddenness with which Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, sprang upon us left many within the academy grasping for interpretations. Early proponents touted them as revolutionary tools that could enhance on-campus learning while also making high-quality education accessible to a vast global population, reforming a malfunctioning university system, and producing new kinds of data on how people learn. Critics countered that behind this latest…
Apprenticeship as method
Apprenticeship, the process of developing from novice to proficiency under the guidance of a skilled expert, varies across cultures and among different skilled communities, but for many communities of practice, apprenticeship offers an ideal ethnographic point of entry. For certain kinds of anthropological fieldwork, such as studies of bodily arts, apprenticeship may offer an essential research method. In this article, three anthropologists discu…
Sociology (18 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras) · Psychology (12 obras) · Art (10 obras) · History (9 obras) · Political science (9 obras) · Law (7 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (6 obras) · Embodied cognition (6 obras) · Epistemology (6 obras)