Aurora Donzelli
Biographic Data
| ID | 107393 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Aurora Donzelli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Aurora |
| FAMILY NAME | Donzelli |
| SIGNATURE | DONZELLI A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Sarah Lawrence College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5523-9463 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Translation Machine
In a contemporary global political economy marked by the increasing semiotization of economic production, the commodification of political communication, and the fusion between media and capital, this special issue turns to the notion of “translation” to further our understanding of the role of language and semiosis within contemporary capitalism. Contrary to its conventional definition as inter-linguistic transfer of semantic meaning, we propose…
Translations Interrupted
Translation is key to the political economy of neorural revival in contemporary Italy. Drawing on fieldwork with neorural farmers, I show how translations across semiotic domains and displays of linguistic and pragmatic untranslatability simultaneously produce capitalist value and temporary disruptions of the subsumption of life under capital. To understand this apparent paradox, I analyze the complex relationship between contemporary neorural re…
QRcoding the Smart City
QR (Quick Response) codes have become ubiquitous graphic artifacts within our post-pandemic cityscapes, mediating a great variety of activities and reconfiguring routine practices and daily interactions. Drawing on a series of ethnographic observations on the use and display of QR codes collected in different global cities (Milan, New York, Jakarta, Toronto), this article explores the ideological and semiotic infrastructures underlying the contem…
From mandala to flowchart
With the dissolution of an authoritarian regime, novel semiotic technologies are mobilized in the service of producing new political imaginaries. Through what visual and discursive practices can "democracy" be made visible? How can "good governance" be convincingly attested? This paper explores the evidentiary infrastructures of Indonesia's s-driven democratic transition to introduce a broader reflection on the role of graphic artifacts in dissem…
On Metapragmatic Gaslighting
This article focuses on the nexus between political discourse and contemporary concerns about the arbitration of truth to argue that Trump’s way of using speech about speech (i.e., his metapragmatic discourse) resembles the manipulation tactic commonly called gaslighting. Based on examples drawn from 2020 (i.e., White House press conferences and electoral presidential debates), I explore Trump’s metapragmatic gaslighting both as an epistemic tact…
Book and Film Reviews
ALTNURME, Riho, ed., Old Religion, New Spirituality: Implications of Secularisation and Individualisation in Estonia. xii, 185 pp., 6 tables, 1 map, references, index. Leiden: Brill, 2023. Paperback, $54. ISBN: 978-90-04-52446-0. CHAMEL, Jean, and Yael DANSAC, eds., Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World. xvi, 254 pp., 25 b/w ills., index London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Hardback, $129. ISBN: 978-3-031-10293-6. CH…
Kinetic intensities and moral registers of pandemic place branding
Emblematic of late capitalist modes of value creation, place branding draws on semiotic processes as well as on affective mobilization both to structure the representation and fruition of specific locales and to produce publics. Such governmental projects of people and places, however, are always open to possible acts of recontextualization. This article discusses the complex forms of social and semiotic regimentation (and subversion) underlying …
The copycat paradigm
This article describes how the copycat implementation of foreign protocols of assessment is transforming the production of knowledge within the Italian social sciences. Focusing on the gatekeeping process whereby the national agency for the evaluation of university research (ANVUR) publishes yearly lists of “Class‐A” journals, my analysis draws on interviews, first-hand observations, my own experience as a returning migrant-scholar, as well as co…
Subjects to freedom
This article draws on fieldwork in upland Indonesia to explore how discursive genres mediate political and affective transformations. Since the millennium, IMF-driven governance reforms have disseminated novel ideals of transparent accountability, representative democracy, and individual entrepreneurialism, which at once presuppose and generate a market-oriented subject endowed with the freedom to express desires and choose among multiple options…
Persuasion
Persuasion is a form of goal‐oriented and audience‐targeted use of language. In the Greco‐Roman tradition, persuasion was the object of rhetoric, understood both as the practice of persuasive argumentation ( rhetorica utens ) and as the study of the compositional structure of effective public speaking ( rhetorica docens ). In a broader and more contemporary perspective, persuasion can be pursued in a variety of discursive genres and social settin…
The act of reading aloud
The global spreading of neoliberalism requires discursive technologies capable of producing forms of subjectivity congruent with the extension of market rationality to all dimensions of social life. Since the millennium, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-driven implementation of governance reform in Indonesia has entailed the dissemination of electoral mission statements – a discursive genre aimed at consolidating a new morality of accountabi…
Material words
This article examines the intersections between ritual speech, woodcarving, and painted sacred cloths among the Toraja of upland Sulawesi, Indonesia. The author argues that the longstanding division between studies of speechmaking and material culture has obfuscated significant overlaps between what in fact are related systems of semiotic expressions in Indonesia and beyond. By bringing within a single analytic field the forms of ritual speech, t…
Methods of Desire
Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growin…
The “Tiny Hand” of Donald Trump and the Metapragmatics of Typographic Parody
Since his rise to the political stage in 2015, Donald Trump’s heterodox style of self-presentation has stirred heated metapragmatic debates within the American and international public: Was that “locker-room talk,” or abusive speech? Is his verbal irreverence an unacceptable defiance of fundamental principles of interactional ethics, or a brave attempt at reforming contemporary American speech by dismissing the epistemic inaccuracy and moral hypo…
From the womb to the tree; Child-rearing practices and beliefs among the Toraja of Sulawesi
This article documents beliefs about pregnancy, birth, infant, and maternal health and infant death in Toraja, Sulawesi. We interviewed 42 mothers of babies between one week and six months old, a dozen traditional and contemporary midwives, the ritual specialist to minaa Tato’ Dena’, a physician and two traditional healers. We performed a cursory examination of the extent to which mothers and health professionals still adhere to the beliefs of to…
The Grammar of Politics
Voice alternations in Austronesian languages have typically been explained either in terms of clausal transitivity or in terms of nominal pragmatic salience. Here I combine grammatical and ethnographic analysis to argue that speakers of Toraja (a language of Sulawesi) select grammatical voice forms to represent moral and political stances with respect to ongoing actions; voice selection is connected to the micropolitics of situated interaction an…
Diversity in Unity
Tulisan ini menggambarkan sebuah eksplorasi etnografis di Tana Toraja pada masa kini,mengenai retorika nasional 'Bhinneka Tunggal Ika' (unity in diversity) yang diartikulasi secara lokal melalui ideologi pembangunan. Penulis menunjukkan bahwa di daerah Toraja retorika nasional mengenai pembangunan pada masa setelah penjajahan (poskolonial) berawal dari masa prakemerdekaan dan terkaitkan dengan sejarah penyebaran agama (missionarisasi). Penulis me…
Is ergativity always a marker of agency? Toraja and Samoan grammar of action and the contribution of emancipatory pragmatics to social theory
Article Is ergativity always a marker of agency? Toraja and Samoan grammar of action and the contribution of emancipatory pragmatics to social theory was published on June 14, 2010 in the journal Applied Linguistics Review (volume 1, issue 2010)
Words on the lips and meanings in the stomach
Previous studies have shown how forms of speech endowed with different types of unintelligibility have multiple consequences on social life. Semantic ambiguity and indirectness have been variously interpreted as means to promote social cohesion and avoid political conflict (Atkinson 1984; Brenneis 1984); essential technologies for the reproduction of hierarchical conceptions of knowledge and social stratification (Bloch 1975); or important device…
Kinetic intensities and moral registers of pandemic place branding
Emblematic of late capitalist modes of value creation, place branding draws on semiotic processes as well as on affective mobilization both to structure the representation and fruition of specific locales and to produce publics. Such governmental projects of people and places, however, are always open to possible acts of recontextualization. This article discusses the complex forms of social and semiotic regimentation (and subversion) underlying …
Subjects to freedom
This article draws on fieldwork in upland Indonesia to explore how discursive genres mediate political and affective transformations. Since the millennium, IMF-driven governance reforms have disseminated novel ideals of transparent accountability, representative democracy, and individual entrepreneurialism, which at once presuppose and generate a market-oriented subject endowed with the freedom to express desires and choose among multiple options…
From the womb to the tree; Child-rearing practices and beliefs among the Toraja of Sulawesi
This article documents beliefs about pregnancy, birth, infant, and maternal health and infant death in Toraja, Sulawesi. We interviewed 42 mothers of babies between one week and six months old, a dozen traditional and contemporary midwives, the ritual specialist to minaa Tato’ Dena’, a physician and two traditional healers. We performed a cursory examination of the extent to which mothers and health professionals still adhere to the beliefs of to…
The copycat paradigm
This article describes how the copycat implementation of foreign protocols of assessment is transforming the production of knowledge within the Italian social sciences. Focusing on the gatekeeping process whereby the national agency for the evaluation of university research (ANVUR) publishes yearly lists of “Class‐A” journals, my analysis draws on interviews, first-hand observations, my own experience as a returning migrant-scholar, as well as co…
The act of reading aloud
The global spreading of neoliberalism requires discursive technologies capable of producing forms of subjectivity congruent with the extension of market rationality to all dimensions of social life. Since the millennium, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-driven implementation of governance reform in Indonesia has entailed the dissemination of electoral mission statements – a discursive genre aimed at consolidating a new morality of accountabi…
Words on the lips and meanings in the stomach
Previous studies have shown how forms of speech endowed with different types of unintelligibility have multiple consequences on social life. Semantic ambiguity and indirectness have been variously interpreted as means to promote social cohesion and avoid political conflict (Atkinson 1984; Brenneis 1984); essential technologies for the reproduction of hierarchical conceptions of knowledge and social stratification (Bloch 1975); or important device…
Is ergativity always a marker of agency? Toraja and Samoan grammar of action and the contribution of emancipatory pragmatics to social theory
Article Is ergativity always a marker of agency? Toraja and Samoan grammar of action and the contribution of emancipatory pragmatics to social theory was published on June 14, 2010 in the journal Applied Linguistics Review (volume 1, issue 2010)
Diversity in Unity
Tulisan ini menggambarkan sebuah eksplorasi etnografis di Tana Toraja pada masa kini,mengenai retorika nasional 'Bhinneka Tunggal Ika' (unity in diversity) yang diartikulasi secara lokal melalui ideologi pembangunan. Penulis menunjukkan bahwa di daerah Toraja retorika nasional mengenai pembangunan pada masa setelah penjajahan (poskolonial) berawal dari masa prakemerdekaan dan terkaitkan dengan sejarah penyebaran agama (missionarisasi). Penulis me…
The Grammar of Politics
Voice alternations in Austronesian languages have typically been explained either in terms of clausal transitivity or in terms of nominal pragmatic salience. Here I combine grammatical and ethnographic analysis to argue that speakers of Toraja (a language of Sulawesi) select grammatical voice forms to represent moral and political stances with respect to ongoing actions; voice selection is connected to the micropolitics of situated interaction an…
From the womb to the tree; Child-rearing practices and beliefs among the Toraja of Sulawesi
This article documents beliefs about pregnancy, birth, infant, and maternal health and infant death in Toraja, Sulawesi. We interviewed 42 mothers of babies between one week and six months old, a dozen traditional and contemporary midwives, the ritual specialist to minaa Tato’ Dena’, a physician and two traditional healers. We performed a cursory examination of the extent to which mothers and health professionals still adhere to the beliefs of to…
Methods of Desire
Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growin…
The “Tiny Hand” of Donald Trump and the Metapragmatics of Typographic Parody
Since his rise to the political stage in 2015, Donald Trump’s heterodox style of self-presentation has stirred heated metapragmatic debates within the American and international public: Was that “locker-room talk,” or abusive speech? Is his verbal irreverence an unacceptable defiance of fundamental principles of interactional ethics, or a brave attempt at reforming contemporary American speech by dismissing the epistemic inaccuracy and moral hypo…
Persuasion
Persuasion is a form of goal‐oriented and audience‐targeted use of language. In the Greco‐Roman tradition, persuasion was the object of rhetoric, understood both as the practice of persuasive argumentation ( rhetorica utens ) and as the study of the compositional structure of effective public speaking ( rhetorica docens ). In a broader and more contemporary perspective, persuasion can be pursued in a variety of discursive genres and social settin…
The act of reading aloud
The global spreading of neoliberalism requires discursive technologies capable of producing forms of subjectivity congruent with the extension of market rationality to all dimensions of social life. Since the millennium, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-driven implementation of governance reform in Indonesia has entailed the dissemination of electoral mission statements – a discursive genre aimed at consolidating a new morality of accountabi…
Material words
This article examines the intersections between ritual speech, woodcarving, and painted sacred cloths among the Toraja of upland Sulawesi, Indonesia. The author argues that the longstanding division between studies of speechmaking and material culture has obfuscated significant overlaps between what in fact are related systems of semiotic expressions in Indonesia and beyond. By bringing within a single analytic field the forms of ritual speech, t…
On Metapragmatic Gaslighting
This article focuses on the nexus between political discourse and contemporary concerns about the arbitration of truth to argue that Trump’s way of using speech about speech (i.e., his metapragmatic discourse) resembles the manipulation tactic commonly called gaslighting. Based on examples drawn from 2020 (i.e., White House press conferences and electoral presidential debates), I explore Trump’s metapragmatic gaslighting both as an epistemic tact…
Book and Film Reviews
ALTNURME, Riho, ed., Old Religion, New Spirituality: Implications of Secularisation and Individualisation in Estonia. xii, 185 pp., 6 tables, 1 map, references, index. Leiden: Brill, 2023. Paperback, $54. ISBN: 978-90-04-52446-0. CHAMEL, Jean, and Yael DANSAC, eds., Relating with More-than-Humans: Interbeing Rituality in a Living World. xvi, 254 pp., 25 b/w ills., index London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Hardback, $129. ISBN: 978-3-031-10293-6. CH…
Kinetic intensities and moral registers of pandemic place branding
Emblematic of late capitalist modes of value creation, place branding draws on semiotic processes as well as on affective mobilization both to structure the representation and fruition of specific locales and to produce publics. Such governmental projects of people and places, however, are always open to possible acts of recontextualization. This article discusses the complex forms of social and semiotic regimentation (and subversion) underlying …
The copycat paradigm
This article describes how the copycat implementation of foreign protocols of assessment is transforming the production of knowledge within the Italian social sciences. Focusing on the gatekeeping process whereby the national agency for the evaluation of university research (ANVUR) publishes yearly lists of “Class‐A” journals, my analysis draws on interviews, first-hand observations, my own experience as a returning migrant-scholar, as well as co…
Subjects to freedom
This article draws on fieldwork in upland Indonesia to explore how discursive genres mediate political and affective transformations. Since the millennium, IMF-driven governance reforms have disseminated novel ideals of transparent accountability, representative democracy, and individual entrepreneurialism, which at once presuppose and generate a market-oriented subject endowed with the freedom to express desires and choose among multiple options…
From mandala to flowchart
With the dissolution of an authoritarian regime, novel semiotic technologies are mobilized in the service of producing new political imaginaries. Through what visual and discursive practices can "democracy" be made visible? How can "good governance" be convincingly attested? This paper explores the evidentiary infrastructures of Indonesia's s-driven democratic transition to introduce a broader reflection on the role of graphic artifacts in dissem…
The Translation Machine
In a contemporary global political economy marked by the increasing semiotization of economic production, the commodification of political communication, and the fusion between media and capital, this special issue turns to the notion of “translation” to further our understanding of the role of language and semiosis within contemporary capitalism. Contrary to its conventional definition as inter-linguistic transfer of semantic meaning, we propose…
Translations Interrupted
Translation is key to the political economy of neorural revival in contemporary Italy. Drawing on fieldwork with neorural farmers, I show how translations across semiotic domains and displays of linguistic and pragmatic untranslatability simultaneously produce capitalist value and temporary disruptions of the subsumption of life under capital. To understand this apparent paradox, I analyze the complex relationship between contemporary neorural re…
QRcoding the Smart City
QR (Quick Response) codes have become ubiquitous graphic artifacts within our post-pandemic cityscapes, mediating a great variety of activities and reconfiguring routine practices and daily interactions. Drawing on a series of ethnographic observations on the use and display of QR codes collected in different global cities (Milan, New York, Jakarta, Toronto), this article explores the ideological and semiotic infrastructures underlying the contem…
Sociology (15 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Linguistics (7 works) · Asian Studies and History (6 works) · Law (5 works)