Rebecca Lemov
Biographic Data
| ID | 1029236 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Lemov |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca |
| FAMILY NAME | Lemov |
| SIGNATURE | LEMOV R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Society |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Von ‹harter› Zu ‹sanfter› Gehirnwäsche: Rebecca Lemov erforscht die Realitäten und Imaginationen von Mind Control
Hopi Dreams and Anthropologists’ Dream Collection Strategies: Notes on the Research of Dorothy Eggan and Don Talayesva
A unique collection of over five hundred dreams transcribed from Hopi people—Native American families from the Hopi Pueblo group in the American Southwest—lies almost entirely forgotten in the archives and microcard records of a mid-20th century anthropologist named Dorothy Way Eggan (1901-1965). The article delves into the relationships Eggan pursued with Hopi people, especially Don Talayesva, a man who became quite famous in the 1940s and 1950s…
Liberate yourself by examining and analyzing
This essay explores touchstones in the thought and teaching of Paul Rabinow, connecting his work on biosociality and modernizing practices to deeper commitments. The theme of “experiments in form” is explored and the question of the value of a life of inquiry is touched on
Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity
An acclaimed science historian uncovers the fascinating story of a “lost” project to unlock humanity’s common denominator that prefigured the emergence of Big Data Just a few years before the dawn of the digital age, Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan set out to build the largest database of sociological information ever assembled. It was the mid-1950s, and social scientists were entranced by the human insights promised by Rorschach tests and other…
Archiving Endangerment, Endangered Archives: Journeys through the Sound Archives of Americanist Anthropology and Linguistics, 1911-2016
Under the salvage paradigm of Americanist anthropology during the early twentieth century, researchers gathered up all the evidence of groups under study-probing subjective experience, fixing elusive gestures, surveying cultures more globally and thoroughly than ever before. Fears about the widespread loss of "world" cultures motivated a variety of efforts to collect the most fleeting phenomena-dreams, rituals, rhythm, even the "life" of language…
On being psychotic in the South Seas, circa 1947
This article tells the story of an anthropologist and a research subject who encountered each other in the middle of the 20th century on an island in the southwestern Pacific. In the midst of an intensive spate of evidence gathering for his dissertation, anthropologist Melford Spiro noted that one of his would-be interlocutors, a man named Tarev – notable for failing all of his psychological tests – still managed to contribute a different form of…
Anthropology’s Most Documented Man, Ca. 1947: A Prefiguration of Big Data from the Big Social Science Era
Big Data," a descriptive term of relatively recent origin, has as one of its key effects the radically increased harnessing of ever-more-personal information accrued in the course of pedestrian life. This essay takes a historical view of the amassing and sharing of personal data, examining the genealogy of the "personal" and psychological elements inherent in Big Data through the case of an American Indian man who (the reigning experts claimed) g…
Guantánamo’s Catch-22
This chapter explores how the United States' detention center at Guantanamo Bay (GBDC) has created a situation in which over one hundred fifty remaining detainees, most held for more than a decade without being charged or tried, become a new source of paralyzing uncertainty. Prisoners' dossiers and data-sets stack up as the result of ongoing interrogations—circulating online via Wikileaks and other projects—even as their sources' status as legal,…
Anthropological data in danger, c. 1941–1965
This chapter deals with Anthropology. The anthropologists took the opportunity to perform sweeping assessments and the particular way of arranging objects and ordering systems. The chapter briefly describes the culture and personality school. It talks about second world war which has no evident memorial urge or protective calling toward non-literate groups, even in the face of inexorable process of cultural extinction. The chapter examines a port…
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality
Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron
X-rays of inner worlds: The mid-twentieth-century American Projective Test Movement
This essay begins to tell the neglected history of the projective test movement in the U.S. behavioral sciences from approximately 1941 to 1968. This cross-disciplinary enterprise attempted to use projective techniques as "X-ray" machines to see into the psyches of subjects tested around the world. The aim was to gather subjective materials en masse, pursuing data on a scope, scale, and manner rarely hazarded before in any science. In particular,…
Hypothetical Machines: The Science Fiction Dreams of Cold War Social Science
The introspectometer was a "hypothetical machine" Robert K. Merton introduced in the course of a 1956 how-to manual describing an actual research technique, the focused interview. This technique, in turn, formed the basis of wartime morale research and consumer behavior studies as well as perhaps the most ubiquitous social science tool, the focus group. This essay explores a new perspective on Cold War social science made possible by comparing tw…
Towards a Data Base of Dreams: Assembling an Archive of Elusive Materials, c. 1947-61
Whereas social science surveyors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated on gathering records of the material aspects of culture and society (tools, ritual objects, rites of passage, decorative items), mid-century moderns turned their efforts to the fleeting and insubstantial: people’s dreams, hopes, fears, evanescent desires, states of madness, and inchoate beliefs. Researchers aimed to collect the stuff of subjectivity, as …
X-rays of inner worlds: The mid-twentieth-century American Projective Test Movement
This essay begins to tell the neglected history of the projective test movement in the U.S. behavioral sciences from approximately 1941 to 1968. This cross-disciplinary enterprise attempted to use projective techniques as "X-ray" machines to see into the psyches of subjects tested around the world. The aim was to gather subjective materials en masse, pursuing data on a scope, scale, and manner rarely hazarded before in any science. In particular,…
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality
Hypothetical Machines: The Science Fiction Dreams of Cold War Social Science
The introspectometer was a "hypothetical machine" Robert K. Merton introduced in the course of a 1956 how-to manual describing an actual research technique, the focused interview. This technique, in turn, formed the basis of wartime morale research and consumer behavior studies as well as perhaps the most ubiquitous social science tool, the focus group. This essay explores a new perspective on Cold War social science made possible by comparing tw…
Towards a Data Base of Dreams: Assembling an Archive of Elusive Materials, c. 1947-61
Whereas social science surveyors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated on gathering records of the material aspects of culture and society (tools, ritual objects, rites of passage, decorative items), mid-century moderns turned their efforts to the fleeting and insubstantial: people’s dreams, hopes, fears, evanescent desires, states of madness, and inchoate beliefs. Researchers aimed to collect the stuff of subjectivity, as …
Anthropology’s Most Documented Man, Ca. 1947: A Prefiguration of Big Data from the Big Social Science Era
Big Data," a descriptive term of relatively recent origin, has as one of its key effects the radically increased harnessing of ever-more-personal information accrued in the course of pedestrian life. This essay takes a historical view of the amassing and sharing of personal data, examining the genealogy of the "personal" and psychological elements inherent in Big Data through the case of an American Indian man who (the reigning experts claimed) g…
Archiving Endangerment, Endangered Archives: Journeys through the Sound Archives of Americanist Anthropology and Linguistics, 1911-2016
Under the salvage paradigm of Americanist anthropology during the early twentieth century, researchers gathered up all the evidence of groups under study-probing subjective experience, fixing elusive gestures, surveying cultures more globally and thoroughly than ever before. Fears about the widespread loss of "world" cultures motivated a variety of efforts to collect the most fleeting phenomena-dreams, rituals, rhythm, even the "life" of language…
On being psychotic in the South Seas, circa 1947
This article tells the story of an anthropologist and a research subject who encountered each other in the middle of the 20th century on an island in the southwestern Pacific. In the midst of an intensive spate of evidence gathering for his dissertation, anthropologist Melford Spiro noted that one of his would-be interlocutors, a man named Tarev – notable for failing all of his psychological tests – still managed to contribute a different form of…
Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron
Towards a Data Base of Dreams: Assembling an Archive of Elusive Materials, c. 1947-61
Whereas social science surveyors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated on gathering records of the material aspects of culture and society (tools, ritual objects, rites of passage, decorative items), mid-century moderns turned their efforts to the fleeting and insubstantial: people’s dreams, hopes, fears, evanescent desires, states of madness, and inchoate beliefs. Researchers aimed to collect the stuff of subjectivity, as …
Hypothetical Machines: The Science Fiction Dreams of Cold War Social Science
The introspectometer was a "hypothetical machine" Robert K. Merton introduced in the course of a 1956 how-to manual describing an actual research technique, the focused interview. This technique, in turn, formed the basis of wartime morale research and consumer behavior studies as well as perhaps the most ubiquitous social science tool, the focus group. This essay explores a new perspective on Cold War social science made possible by comparing tw…
Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron
X-rays of inner worlds: The mid-twentieth-century American Projective Test Movement
This essay begins to tell the neglected history of the projective test movement in the U.S. behavioral sciences from approximately 1941 to 1968. This cross-disciplinary enterprise attempted to use projective techniques as "X-ray" machines to see into the psyches of subjects tested around the world. The aim was to gather subjective materials en masse, pursuing data on a scope, scale, and manner rarely hazarded before in any science. In particular,…
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality
Guantánamo’s Catch-22
This chapter explores how the United States' detention center at Guantanamo Bay (GBDC) has created a situation in which over one hundred fifty remaining detainees, most held for more than a decade without being charged or tried, become a new source of paralyzing uncertainty. Prisoners' dossiers and data-sets stack up as the result of ongoing interrogations—circulating online via Wikileaks and other projects—even as their sources' status as legal,…
Anthropological data in danger, c. 1941–1965
This chapter deals with Anthropology. The anthropologists took the opportunity to perform sweeping assessments and the particular way of arranging objects and ordering systems. The chapter briefly describes the culture and personality school. It talks about second world war which has no evident memorial urge or protective calling toward non-literate groups, even in the face of inexorable process of cultural extinction. The chapter examines a port…
Anthropology’s Most Documented Man, Ca. 1947: A Prefiguration of Big Data from the Big Social Science Era
Big Data," a descriptive term of relatively recent origin, has as one of its key effects the radically increased harnessing of ever-more-personal information accrued in the course of pedestrian life. This essay takes a historical view of the amassing and sharing of personal data, examining the genealogy of the "personal" and psychological elements inherent in Big Data through the case of an American Indian man who (the reigning experts claimed) g…
On being psychotic in the South Seas, circa 1947
This article tells the story of an anthropologist and a research subject who encountered each other in the middle of the 20th century on an island in the southwestern Pacific. In the midst of an intensive spate of evidence gathering for his dissertation, anthropologist Melford Spiro noted that one of his would-be interlocutors, a man named Tarev – notable for failing all of his psychological tests – still managed to contribute a different form of…
Archiving Endangerment, Endangered Archives: Journeys through the Sound Archives of Americanist Anthropology and Linguistics, 1911-2016
Under the salvage paradigm of Americanist anthropology during the early twentieth century, researchers gathered up all the evidence of groups under study-probing subjective experience, fixing elusive gestures, surveying cultures more globally and thoroughly than ever before. Fears about the widespread loss of "world" cultures motivated a variety of efforts to collect the most fleeting phenomena-dreams, rituals, rhythm, even the "life" of language…
Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity
An acclaimed science historian uncovers the fascinating story of a “lost” project to unlock humanity’s common denominator that prefigured the emergence of Big Data Just a few years before the dawn of the digital age, Harvard psychologist Bert Kaplan set out to build the largest database of sociological information ever assembled. It was the mid-1950s, and social scientists were entranced by the human insights promised by Rorschach tests and other…
Liberate yourself by examining and analyzing
This essay explores touchstones in the thought and teaching of Paul Rabinow, connecting his work on biosociality and modernizing practices to deeper commitments. The theme of “experiments in form” is explored and the question of the value of a life of inquiry is touched on
Hopi Dreams and Anthropologists’ Dream Collection Strategies: Notes on the Research of Dorothy Eggan and Don Talayesva
A unique collection of over five hundred dreams transcribed from Hopi people—Native American families from the Hopi Pueblo group in the American Southwest—lies almost entirely forgotten in the archives and microcard records of a mid-20th century anthropologist named Dorothy Way Eggan (1901-1965). The article delves into the relationships Eggan pursued with Hopi people, especially Don Talayesva, a man who became quite famous in the 1940s and 1950s…
Von ‹harter› Zu ‹sanfter› Gehirnwäsche: Rebecca Lemov erforscht die Realitäten und Imaginationen von Mind Control
Sociology (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology (3 works) · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · History (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Psychoanalysis (3 works)