Michael Lempert
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 93648 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Michael Lempert |
| NOMBRES | Michael |
| APELLIDO | Lempert |
| FIRMA | LEMPERT M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4981-549X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 583 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
On Being Receptive
How should you listen when you hear about harms in interpersonal life, such as sexual harassment or anti‐Black racism? Across a range of sites on a university campus, from bystander intervention workshops to reporting systems for sex‐ and gender‐based misconduct, we spotlight the way “listening” is mobilized to address harms of various kinds. The desired form of listening is one that is always attentive and responsive but not deliberative: that d…
Making the Ethical in Social Interaction
The ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has charted alternatives to some prevailing philosophical, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This engagement forces anthropologists to reconsider old antinomies such as constraint and agency, relativism and universalism, individualism and collectivism. Like other anthropologists of ethics, we resist forms of determinism that would reduce ethical life to the putatively universal constraints of biolog…
Introduction
No abstract
What is an anthropology of gesture
For gesture research outside anthropology, the promise – and challenge – of anthropological method stems from one or more of its core commitments: its pursuit of human variation, both diachronic and synchronic; its insistence on naturalistic rather than experimental research design; and its integrative sensibility that situates human behavior in relation to an expansive sociocultural context. This essay reflects on this last sensibility. As we en…
Scale
Wherever we turn, we see diverse things scaled for us, from cities to economies to history to love. We know scale by many names, and through many familiar antinomies: 'local' and 'global,' 'micro' and 'macro,' 'events' and the 'longue durée.' Even the most critical amongst us often proceed with our analysis as if such scales are the readymade platforms of social life, rather than asking how, why, and to what effect scalar distinctions are forged …
Fine-Grained Analysis
Mechanical objectivity," which Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison trace to the mid-nineteenth century, often coincided with efforts to inscribe nature "directly," such as through automatic registering machines. But what did this inscription entail? Addressing this question requires that we reexamine indexicalization: the shift in semiotic ideology whereby medial technologies are imagined and acted on as if they preserved material traces of the rea…
On the Pragmatic Poetry of Pose
Poetics matters in gestural pragmatics. The recurrent returns of cospeech manual gesture, which appear as “repetitions” and “parallelisms” of handshape and movement pattern, deserve close attention for their pragmatic potential. To appreciate how poetically dimensionalized gestures can contribute to everything from cohesion to speech-act performativity, we need a turn akin to what Michael Silverstein once called a “pragmatic-poetic turn” for disc…
Uncommon resemblance
Research on manual gesture has been preoccupied with unconventionalized and conventionalized extremes. Homesigns developed spontaneously by deaf children unexposed to standardized sign languages have been used as a window onto more general socio-cognitive processes of semiotic systemization. Spontaneous, idiosyncratic gesticulation has been contrasted with shared, highly regimented “emblematic” or “quotable” gestures to reveal a cline of conventi…
Scale
Wherever we turn, we see diverse things scaled for us, from cities to economies, from history to love. We know scale by many names and through many familiar antinomies: local and global, micro and macro events. Even the most critical among us often proceed with our analysis as if such scales were the ready-made platforms of social life, rather than asking how, why, and to what effect are scalar distinctions forged in the first place. How do scala…
Unusual Politics as Usual
Ethics without immanence
A virtue of the turn called ‘ordinary ethics’ is that it can steer us toward the often tacit and seemingly pervasive presence of ethics in everyday social practice. Yet what is the status of this presence? Is ethics somehow intrinsic to discursive interaction, as suggested by Michael Lambek and by earlier writers ranging from Goffman to Habermas? I argue that ordinary ethics’ notion of ethical immanence poses risks for the anthropology of ethics.…
Uneventful ethics
This essay examines the ethical implications of seemingly "uneventful" moments in ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on fieldwork in a Michigan courtroom, Lempert argues against the tendency to focus solely on dramatic or morally charged events. Instead, he suggests that the everyday, routine aspects of legal proceedings, often overlooked, reveal significant ethical dilemmas and complexities. By attending to these uneventful moments, researchers can…
Imitation
Imitation" in contemporary anthropology comprises numerous topics whose relations have seldom been explored. In surveying mimetic phenomena that range from television parodies to postural mirroring, I offer reflections designed to stimulate exploration of "mimetic practice." The review encourages work at the nexus of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, for without appreciating the communicative specificities of mimetic practice, one can ne…
No ordinary ethics
Ordinary ethics' suggests that everyday discursive interaction - interaction mediated by actual language use - has tacit ethical dimensions. This line of inquiry is productive for the anthropology of ethics and has the potential to reframe long-standing language-based research on everything from conversational turn-taking to politeness displays, but what does it mean to speak of discursive practice as a locus for ethical life? To what extent is t…
Where the action isn't
Enfield'sThe anatomy of meaningis a pathbreaking exploration of multimodal communication based on Lao video recordings and fieldwork. Of special interest is his notion ofcomposites, through which he addresses the question of cross-modal integration-how it is that signs in different modalities cohere, speech and gesture being his focus. For whom, to what degree, and through what means do composites coalesce? Does this notion denote akindof cross-m…
Creatures of Politics
Message, politics, and character contests in US presidential elections
Interaction Rescaled
Rather than assume the relevance of a priori scalar distinctions (micro-, macro-, meso-), this article examines scale as an emergent dimension of sociospatial practice in educational institutions. Focusing on Buddhist debate at Tibetan monasteries in India, I describe how this educational practice has been placed as a rite of institution within the perimeter of Sera Monastery in India and rescaled into a more expansive diasporic pedagogy by refor…
Barack Obama, being sharp
Gesture in political oratory and debate is renowned for its nonreferential indexical functions, for the way it purportedly can indicate qualities of speaker and materialize acts of persuasion — functions famously addressed in Quintilian’s classic writings but understudied today. I revisit this problematic through a case study of precision-grip (especially thumb to tip of forefinger) in Barack Obama’s debate performances (2004–2008). Cospeech gest…
Avoiding "The Issues" as Addressivity in US Electoral Politics
In televised debates in US electoral politics, behavior before The Issues is scrupulously monitored, so much so that even a candidate's dysfluencies can be perilous, often registering to commentators as 'avoidance' and spurring them to speculate about addressivity, about which category of implied voter the candidate's avoidance was "to" and "for." Focusing on the 2007-2008 primary debates and post-debate coverage, I examine how infelicities aroun…
Introduction
Introduction:Beyond Bad Words Luke Fleming and Michael Lempert As that which ought not to be said, taboo speech involves the moral life of language. Efforts to proscribe speech may be justified variously, by appeal to religious dictates, state policy, or etiquette. They may be conventionalized and institutionalized, policed and punished in myriad ways. But a familiar irony haunts all these efforts: proscription is, in a word, productive (cf. Fouc…
Words in Motion
On ‘flip‐flopping
This article examines stance in U.S. political discourse, taking as its empirical point of departure Democratic candidate John Kerry's epistemic stance‐taking in the televised 2004 presidential debates. Kerry's stance‐taking is shown to help display the characterological attribute of ‘conviction’ and serve as a rejoinder to critics who had branded him as a ‘flip‐flopper.’ His stance‐taking is thus not primarily ‘to’ or ‘for’ copresent interactant…
The poetics of stance
This article examines the text-metrical ("poetic") organization of epistemic stance-taking in discourse, focusing on epistemic stance in a form of argumentation, Tibetan Buddhist 'debate' (rtsod pa) at Sera Monastery in India. Emergent text-metrical structures in discourse are shown to reflexively map utterance-level propositional stance into larger-scale, fractionally congruent models of interactional stance. In charting the movement from episte…
How to make our subjects clear
To examine the fraught relationship between intelligibility and subject formation in the Tibetan diaspora, this article first revisits Malinowski's classic discussion of the so-called ‘co-efficients’ of ‘weirdness and intelligibility’ in magical speech, noting how these qualities of discourse were mediated by a post-Enlightenment language ideology and evolutionist presumptions of alterity. Malinowski's text is instructive in this respect, for con…
Conspicuously past
Scale
Wherever we turn, we see diverse things scaled for us, from cities to economies, from history to love. We know scale by many names and through many familiar antinomies: local and global, micro and macro events. Even the most critical among us often proceed with our analysis as if such scales were the ready-made platforms of social life, rather than asking how, why, and to what effect are scalar distinctions forged in the first place. How do scala…
Entextualization and the ends of temporality
No ordinary ethics
Ordinary ethics' suggests that everyday discursive interaction - interaction mediated by actual language use - has tacit ethical dimensions. This line of inquiry is productive for the anthropology of ethics and has the potential to reframe long-standing language-based research on everything from conversational turn-taking to politeness displays, but what does it mean to speak of discursive practice as a locus for ethical life? To what extent is t…
Imitation
Imitation" in contemporary anthropology comprises numerous topics whose relations have seldom been explored. In surveying mimetic phenomena that range from television parodies to postural mirroring, I offer reflections designed to stimulate exploration of "mimetic practice." The review encourages work at the nexus of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, for without appreciating the communicative specificities of mimetic practice, one can ne…
Introduction
Introduction:Beyond Bad Words Luke Fleming and Michael Lempert As that which ought not to be said, taboo speech involves the moral life of language. Efforts to proscribe speech may be justified variously, by appeal to religious dictates, state policy, or etiquette. They may be conventionalized and institutionalized, policed and punished in myriad ways. But a familiar irony haunts all these efforts: proscription is, in a word, productive (cf. Fouc…
The poetics of stance
This article examines the text-metrical ("poetic") organization of epistemic stance-taking in discourse, focusing on epistemic stance in a form of argumentation, Tibetan Buddhist 'debate' (rtsod pa) at Sera Monastery in India. Emergent text-metrical structures in discourse are shown to reflexively map utterance-level propositional stance into larger-scale, fractionally congruent models of interactional stance. In charting the movement from episte…
On ‘flip‐flopping
This article examines stance in U.S. political discourse, taking as its empirical point of departure Democratic candidate John Kerry's epistemic stance‐taking in the televised 2004 presidential debates. Kerry's stance‐taking is shown to help display the characterological attribute of ‘conviction’ and serve as a rejoinder to critics who had branded him as a ‘flip‐flopper.’ His stance‐taking is thus not primarily ‘to’ or ‘for’ copresent interactant…
Interaction Rescaled
Rather than assume the relevance of a priori scalar distinctions (micro-, macro-, meso-), this article examines scale as an emergent dimension of sociospatial practice in educational institutions. Focusing on Buddhist debate at Tibetan monasteries in India, I describe how this educational practice has been placed as a rite of institution within the perimeter of Sera Monastery in India and rescaled into a more expansive diasporic pedagogy by refor…
Barack Obama, being sharp
Gesture in political oratory and debate is renowned for its nonreferential indexical functions, for the way it purportedly can indicate qualities of speaker and materialize acts of persuasion — functions famously addressed in Quintilian’s classic writings but understudied today. I revisit this problematic through a case study of precision-grip (especially thumb to tip of forefinger) in Barack Obama’s debate performances (2004–2008). Cospeech gest…
Creatures of Politics
Message, politics, and character contests in US presidential elections
Ethics without immanence
A virtue of the turn called ‘ordinary ethics’ is that it can steer us toward the often tacit and seemingly pervasive presence of ethics in everyday social practice. Yet what is the status of this presence? Is ethics somehow intrinsic to discursive interaction, as suggested by Michael Lambek and by earlier writers ranging from Goffman to Habermas? I argue that ordinary ethics’ notion of ethical immanence poses risks for the anthropology of ethics.…
Fine-Grained Analysis
Mechanical objectivity," which Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison trace to the mid-nineteenth century, often coincided with efforts to inscribe nature "directly," such as through automatic registering machines. But what did this inscription entail? Addressing this question requires that we reexamine indexicalization: the shift in semiotic ideology whereby medial technologies are imagined and acted on as if they preserved material traces of the rea…
Uneventful ethics
This essay examines the ethical implications of seemingly "uneventful" moments in ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on fieldwork in a Michigan courtroom, Lempert argues against the tendency to focus solely on dramatic or morally charged events. Instead, he suggests that the everyday, routine aspects of legal proceedings, often overlooked, reveal significant ethical dilemmas and complexities. By attending to these uneventful moments, researchers can…
Avoiding "The Issues" as Addressivity in US Electoral Politics
In televised debates in US electoral politics, behavior before The Issues is scrupulously monitored, so much so that even a candidate's dysfluencies can be perilous, often registering to commentators as 'avoidance' and spurring them to speculate about addressivity, about which category of implied voter the candidate's avoidance was "to" and "for." Focusing on the 2007-2008 primary debates and post-debate coverage, I examine how infelicities aroun…
On the Pragmatic Poetry of Pose
Poetics matters in gestural pragmatics. The recurrent returns of cospeech manual gesture, which appear as “repetitions” and “parallelisms” of handshape and movement pattern, deserve close attention for their pragmatic potential. To appreciate how poetically dimensionalized gestures can contribute to everything from cohesion to speech-act performativity, we need a turn akin to what Michael Silverstein once called a “pragmatic-poetic turn” for disc…
Conspicuously past
Disciplinary theatrics
Denotational Textuality and Demeanor Indexicality in Tibetan Buddhist Debate
This article examines the place of demeanor indexicality in Tibetan Buddhist debate, a genre of argumentation practiced daily by monks of the Geluk sect in India. In debate, monks display forms of demeanor that parallel the operations they concurrently perform on the denotational content of their discourse. It is through the reciprocally reflexive relationship between demeanor indexicality and denotational textuality that debate is shown to achie…
Uncommon resemblance
Research on manual gesture has been preoccupied with unconventionalized and conventionalized extremes. Homesigns developed spontaneously by deaf children unexposed to standardized sign languages have been used as a window onto more general socio-cognitive processes of semiotic systemization. Spontaneous, idiosyncratic gesticulation has been contrasted with shared, highly regimented “emblematic” or “quotable” gestures to reveal a cline of conventi…
What is an anthropology of gesture
For gesture research outside anthropology, the promise – and challenge – of anthropological method stems from one or more of its core commitments: its pursuit of human variation, both diachronic and synchronic; its insistence on naturalistic rather than experimental research design; and its integrative sensibility that situates human behavior in relation to an expansive sociocultural context. This essay reflects on this last sensibility. As we en…
Scale
Wherever we turn, we see diverse things scaled for us, from cities to economies to history to love. We know scale by many names, and through many familiar antinomies: 'local' and 'global,' 'micro' and 'macro,' 'events' and the 'longue durée.' Even the most critical amongst us often proceed with our analysis as if such scales are the readymade platforms of social life, rather than asking how, why, and to what effect scalar distinctions are forged …
Where the action isn't
Enfield'sThe anatomy of meaningis a pathbreaking exploration of multimodal communication based on Lao video recordings and fieldwork. Of special interest is his notion ofcomposites, through which he addresses the question of cross-modal integration-how it is that signs in different modalities cohere, speech and gesture being his focus. For whom, to what degree, and through what means do composites coalesce? Does this notion denote akindof cross-m…
Elise Kärkkäinen, Epistemic stance in English conversation
Elise Kärkkäinen, Epistemic stance in English conversation: A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 115). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. ix, 207. Hb $102.00.In this innovative study of epistemic stance marking in English conversation, Elise Kärkkäinen attempts to cross-fertilize discourse-functional linguistics with conversation analysis, and her effort bears fruit. She moves d…
The Academic Man
"Children and Families "At Promise
Children and Families "At Promise": Deconstructing the Discourse of Risk. Beth Blue Swadener and Sally Lubeck, eds. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. 288 pp
Denotational Textuality and Demeanor Indexicality in Tibetan Buddhist Debate
This article examines the place of demeanor indexicality in Tibetan Buddhist debate, a genre of argumentation practiced daily by monks of the Geluk sect in India. In debate, monks display forms of demeanor that parallel the operations they concurrently perform on the denotational content of their discourse. It is through the reciprocally reflexive relationship between demeanor indexicality and denotational textuality that debate is shown to achie…
Disciplinary theatrics
How to make our subjects clear
To examine the fraught relationship between intelligibility and subject formation in the Tibetan diaspora, this article first revisits Malinowski's classic discussion of the so-called ‘co-efficients’ of ‘weirdness and intelligibility’ in magical speech, noting how these qualities of discourse were mediated by a post-Enlightenment language ideology and evolutionist presumptions of alterity. Malinowski's text is instructive in this respect, for con…
Conspicuously past
Elise Kärkkäinen, Epistemic stance in English conversation
Elise Kärkkäinen, Epistemic stance in English conversation: A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 115). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. ix, 207. Hb $102.00.In this innovative study of epistemic stance marking in English conversation, Elise Kärkkäinen attempts to cross-fertilize discourse-functional linguistics with conversation analysis, and her effort bears fruit. She moves d…
Entextualization and the ends of temporality
The poetics of stance
This article examines the text-metrical ("poetic") organization of epistemic stance-taking in discourse, focusing on epistemic stance in a form of argumentation, Tibetan Buddhist 'debate' (rtsod pa) at Sera Monastery in India. Emergent text-metrical structures in discourse are shown to reflexively map utterance-level propositional stance into larger-scale, fractionally congruent models of interactional stance. In charting the movement from episte…
On ‘flip‐flopping
This article examines stance in U.S. political discourse, taking as its empirical point of departure Democratic candidate John Kerry's epistemic stance‐taking in the televised 2004 presidential debates. Kerry's stance‐taking is shown to help display the characterological attribute of ‘conviction’ and serve as a rejoinder to critics who had branded him as a ‘flip‐flopper.’ His stance‐taking is thus not primarily ‘to’ or ‘for’ copresent interactant…
Words in Motion
Barack Obama, being sharp
Gesture in political oratory and debate is renowned for its nonreferential indexical functions, for the way it purportedly can indicate qualities of speaker and materialize acts of persuasion — functions famously addressed in Quintilian’s classic writings but understudied today. I revisit this problematic through a case study of precision-grip (especially thumb to tip of forefinger) in Barack Obama’s debate performances (2004–2008). Cospeech gest…
Avoiding "The Issues" as Addressivity in US Electoral Politics
In televised debates in US electoral politics, behavior before The Issues is scrupulously monitored, so much so that even a candidate's dysfluencies can be perilous, often registering to commentators as 'avoidance' and spurring them to speculate about addressivity, about which category of implied voter the candidate's avoidance was "to" and "for." Focusing on the 2007-2008 primary debates and post-debate coverage, I examine how infelicities aroun…
Introduction
Introduction:Beyond Bad Words Luke Fleming and Michael Lempert As that which ought not to be said, taboo speech involves the moral life of language. Efforts to proscribe speech may be justified variously, by appeal to religious dictates, state policy, or etiquette. They may be conventionalized and institutionalized, policed and punished in myriad ways. But a familiar irony haunts all these efforts: proscription is, in a word, productive (cf. Fouc…
Where the action isn't
Enfield'sThe anatomy of meaningis a pathbreaking exploration of multimodal communication based on Lao video recordings and fieldwork. Of special interest is his notion ofcomposites, through which he addresses the question of cross-modal integration-how it is that signs in different modalities cohere, speech and gesture being his focus. For whom, to what degree, and through what means do composites coalesce? Does this notion denote akindof cross-m…
Creatures of Politics
Message, politics, and character contests in US presidential elections
Interaction Rescaled
Rather than assume the relevance of a priori scalar distinctions (micro-, macro-, meso-), this article examines scale as an emergent dimension of sociospatial practice in educational institutions. Focusing on Buddhist debate at Tibetan monasteries in India, I describe how this educational practice has been placed as a rite of institution within the perimeter of Sera Monastery in India and rescaled into a more expansive diasporic pedagogy by refor…
No ordinary ethics
Ordinary ethics' suggests that everyday discursive interaction - interaction mediated by actual language use - has tacit ethical dimensions. This line of inquiry is productive for the anthropology of ethics and has the potential to reframe long-standing language-based research on everything from conversational turn-taking to politeness displays, but what does it mean to speak of discursive practice as a locus for ethical life? To what extent is t…
Uneventful ethics
This essay examines the ethical implications of seemingly "uneventful" moments in ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on fieldwork in a Michigan courtroom, Lempert argues against the tendency to focus solely on dramatic or morally charged events. Instead, he suggests that the everyday, routine aspects of legal proceedings, often overlooked, reveal significant ethical dilemmas and complexities. By attending to these uneventful moments, researchers can…
Imitation
Imitation" in contemporary anthropology comprises numerous topics whose relations have seldom been explored. In surveying mimetic phenomena that range from television parodies to postural mirroring, I offer reflections designed to stimulate exploration of "mimetic practice." The review encourages work at the nexus of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, for without appreciating the communicative specificities of mimetic practice, one can ne…
Ethics without immanence
A virtue of the turn called ‘ordinary ethics’ is that it can steer us toward the often tacit and seemingly pervasive presence of ethics in everyday social practice. Yet what is the status of this presence? Is ethics somehow intrinsic to discursive interaction, as suggested by Michael Lambek and by earlier writers ranging from Goffman to Habermas? I argue that ordinary ethics’ notion of ethical immanence poses risks for the anthropology of ethics.…
Scale
Wherever we turn, we see diverse things scaled for us, from cities to economies, from history to love. We know scale by many names and through many familiar antinomies: local and global, micro and macro events. Even the most critical among us often proceed with our analysis as if such scales were the ready-made platforms of social life, rather than asking how, why, and to what effect are scalar distinctions forged in the first place. How do scala…
Unusual Politics as Usual
Uncommon resemblance
Research on manual gesture has been preoccupied with unconventionalized and conventionalized extremes. Homesigns developed spontaneously by deaf children unexposed to standardized sign languages have been used as a window onto more general socio-cognitive processes of semiotic systemization. Spontaneous, idiosyncratic gesticulation has been contrasted with shared, highly regimented “emblematic” or “quotable” gestures to reveal a cline of conventi…
On the Pragmatic Poetry of Pose
Poetics matters in gestural pragmatics. The recurrent returns of cospeech manual gesture, which appear as “repetitions” and “parallelisms” of handshape and movement pattern, deserve close attention for their pragmatic potential. To appreciate how poetically dimensionalized gestures can contribute to everything from cohesion to speech-act performativity, we need a turn akin to what Michael Silverstein once called a “pragmatic-poetic turn” for disc…
Sociology (20 obras) · Philosophy (19 obras) · Epistemology (18 obras) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (16 obras) · Linguistics (13 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Political science (10 obras) · Psychology (10 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Aesthetics (8 obras)