E Wilf
Biographic Data
| ID | 17730 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E Wilf |
| GIVEN NAMES | E |
| FAMILY NAME | Wilf |
| SIGNATURE | WILF E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0975-2826 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 178 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
New Media Ecologies, Old Occupational Subjectivities and Practices
Many artists in Europe now turn to online crowdfunding to fund their creative practices against the backdrop of cuts in state-funded subsidies for the arts. Based on an ethnographic analysis of online crowdfunding in the Netherlands, I suggest that this neoliberal context requires artists to cultivate occupational subjectivities and practices that share a number of dimensions with the occupational subjectivities and practices of artists in 15th-c…
I randomize, therefore I think
Scholars have theorized the use of chance processes in modern art in general, and in computer-based art in particular, as the expression of an aesthetics of nonintention and authorial abnegation. Although writers of computer-generated poetry in the United States make extensive use of computer-based randomization, their creative adventures with computational indeterminacy do not lead them to endorse an aesthetics of nonintention or authorial abneg…
Creative or Coercive
Discourses and practices that situate creativity as a recipe for success in different domains and at different levels of social reality have had an increasingly global reach in the last few decades. Creativity has become the focus of managerial theories, self-help books, and experts whose goal is to help individuals, firms, cities, and nation-states all over the world harness creativity as a resource for boosting productivity and for creating val…
Phaticity as a technical mystique
Innovation consultants belong to a professional group of people who claim that they can help organizations become more innovative by reconfiguring them in ways that can facilitate the unimpeded flow of information between as many of their employees as possible. They are thus a prime example of phatic experts, inasmuch as they present themselves as people whose expertise turns on establishing channels of communication and contact between employees…
To go with the free information flow
This article draws on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA to argue that neoliberal assumptions about how large-scale markets should be organised to maximise their efficiency now inform assumptions about how small-scale business firms should be organised to maximise their innovative potential. A key mediating concept between macro-level neoliberal theories and micro-level innovation strategies is ‘free information flow’. This concept …
Making Global MBAs
Reviewed by: Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture by Andrew Orta Eitan Wilf Andrew Orta. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp. Andrew Orta. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp. Making Global MBAs is an ethnography of the production …
The Closed-World Principle
Although many corporations make claims about the newness of their products in order to make the public interested in purchasing them, not all of them make the same kind of claims. Whereas previous studies have highlighted claims to newness that are based on emphasizing the newness of almost all the parts of new products in relation to the parts of those products' previous versions, I highlight claims to newness that are based on emphasizing the o…
Separating noise from signal
Because ethnomethodology was founded in cybernetics, it institutionalized the idea that interactants strive to maintain interactional order and compensate for disorder through negative feedback mechanisms such as "repair work." This idea informed a key strand in the study of human-machine interaction in the United States, especially the idea that humans are inclined to repair the gaps in machines' behavior and thus sustain the feeling that they a…
Jazz
The anthropological interest in jazz can be divided to three main categories. First, because jazz is inherently an improvised form of music, it provides an opportunity to theorize the emergently creative, real‐time nature of human interaction. Second, efforts to institutionalize jazz in bureaucratic structures throughout the twentieth century provide appropriate contexts in which to analyze the dynamics and contradictions of institutionalized cre…
Modernity
Modernity was long associated with a set of normative ideals and practices that were heavily indebted to the Enlightenment tradition, which posited an inevitable historical trajectory of humanity's gradual progress and perfectibility through the advancement of science and reason. The culmination of this progress was supposed to be the modern West. Whereas anthropologists reproduced this master narrative in the early days of the discipline, today …
The Post-it Note Economy
This essay seeks to clarify an undertheorized dimension of capitalism's transition to post-Fordist flexible accumulation-namely, the "acceleration in the pace of product innovation" (Harvey 1990:156). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in innovation workshops organized in New York City by consultants and attended by business entrepreneurs, this essay argues that whereas cutting-edge technologies such as computerized algorithms and robotic technologi…
Two. The “Cool” Organization Man
This chapter explores the ways in which the idea of jazz music as the quintessential art of productive risk-taking and flexibility in the face of uncertainty has been incorporated into organizational theories and practices aimed at improving the functionality of the 21st century organization. It argues, first, that the incorporation of the jazz metaphor into the business world has been motivated by the realization that this metaphor is productive…
Ritual Semiosis in the Business Corporation
This essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation consultancy group and attended by representatives of different business corporations. In this workshop, participants are supposed to learn a set of innovation techniques for generating new products and services and to become convinced that there can be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies …
Routinized Business Innovation
Scholars of cultural evolution and change have tended to conceptualize innovation as a process that results from individual experimentation involving random or very loosely guided trial-and-error alterations to existing cultural elements. Alternatively, they have focused on individual experimentation via decision rules and different heuristics with already existing, potentially innovative cultural elements whose emergence is left unexplained. Bas…
Semiotic Dimensions of Creativity
Recurrent, most recently Romantic, ideologies conceptualize creativity as the solitary, ex nihilo creation of products of self-evident and universal value-most emblematically in the field of art-by highly exceptional individuals. Such ideologies obscure the social dimensions of creativity that come into view via anthropological analysis: (a) the nature and ubiquity of creative processes as communicative and improvisational events, with real-time …
From Media Technologies That Reproduce Seconds to Media Technologies That Reproduce Thirds
Against the backdrop of a long research tradition in linguistic and semiotic anthropology that has focused almost exclusively on media technologies that reproduce Seconds, that is, specific texts in modalities such as sound and the visual image, this article focuses on media technologies that reproduce Thirds, that is, generative dispositions responsible for the production of such Seconds. It explores contemporary attempts in the United States an…
Literature and agency in English fiction reading
Modernity, Cultural Anesthesia, and Sensory Agency
In this article, I rely on Michel Foucault's notion of 'technologies of the self' to theorize the micro-practices by which individuals actively negotiate the reconfiguration of their sensory skills as a result of modernization processes. In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a collegiate jazz music program in the USA. By exploring a number of interactional games in which jazz students attempt to negotiate the challenge of c…
Streamlining the Muse
In this article I seek to theorize recent institutional transformations of creative agency that involve the increasing embeddedness of art socialization in the professional and bureaucratic infrastructure of various sorts of educational organizations in the contemporary West. I argue that institutional art education involves the reconfiguration of charismatic education as professional training, and I suggest that this provides an opportunity to t…
Sociable robots, jazz music, and divination
In practices that range from mechanical divination in Central Africa to gamelike interactions among jazz students and the development of a jazz-improvising humanoid robot marimba player in the United States, contextually meaningful contingency is widely used as a cultural resource for negotiating problems of intentionality. Whereas anthropologists have been concerned with the use of contingency mostly as a cultural resource for increasing predict…
Toward an Anthropology of Computer-Mediated, Algorithmic Forms of Sociality
This article argues that contemporary, computer-mediated, algorithmic forms of sociality problematize a long and major tradition in cultural anthropology, which has appropriated the notion of artistic style to theorize culture as a relatively distinct, coherent, and durable configuration of behavioral dispositions. The article's ethnographic site is a lab in a major institute of technology in the United States, in which computer scientists develo…
Rituals of Creativity
In this article, I seek to complicate the distinction between imitation and creativity, which has played a dominant role in the modern imaginary and anthropological theory. I focus on a U.S. collegiate jazz music program, in which jazz educators use advanced sound technologies to reestablish immersive interaction with the sounds of past jazz masters against the backdrop of the disappearance of performance venues for jazz. I analyze a key pedagogi…
Sincerity Versus Self-Expression
Existing anthropological accounts have tended to portray the normative ideal of the modern subject as predicated on the demand that the materiality of semiotic forms such as the body and words be subordinate to the subject's interiority as a condition of possibility for his or her freedom and moral autonomy. In this article, I seek to contribute to the ongoing and fruitful conversation in anthropology over the idea of the modern subject by highli…
Listening to Modernity
Keywords: commentary, modernity, creativity, aurality, cultural reproduction, jazz music, music education
Swinging within the iron cage
In this article, I seek to contribute to the anthropology of embodied practice by asking, what would embodied practical mastery that mandates constant differentiation look like, and what would be its cultural and social determinants? In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a postsecondary jazz school in the United States. Through an exploration of how jazz educators cope with the paradoxical task of training the body and libe…
Semiotic Dimensions of Creativity
Recurrent, most recently Romantic, ideologies conceptualize creativity as the solitary, ex nihilo creation of products of self-evident and universal value-most emblematically in the field of art-by highly exceptional individuals. Such ideologies obscure the social dimensions of creativity that come into view via anthropological analysis: (a) the nature and ubiquity of creative processes as communicative and improvisational events, with real-time …
Sincerity Versus Self-Expression
Existing anthropological accounts have tended to portray the normative ideal of the modern subject as predicated on the demand that the materiality of semiotic forms such as the body and words be subordinate to the subject's interiority as a condition of possibility for his or her freedom and moral autonomy. In this article, I seek to contribute to the ongoing and fruitful conversation in anthropology over the idea of the modern subject by highli…
Toward an Anthropology of Computer-Mediated, Algorithmic Forms of Sociality
This article argues that contemporary, computer-mediated, algorithmic forms of sociality problematize a long and major tradition in cultural anthropology, which has appropriated the notion of artistic style to theorize culture as a relatively distinct, coherent, and durable configuration of behavioral dispositions. The article's ethnographic site is a lab in a major institute of technology in the United States, in which computer scientists develo…
Swinging within the iron cage
In this article, I seek to contribute to the anthropology of embodied practice by asking, what would embodied practical mastery that mandates constant differentiation look like, and what would be its cultural and social determinants? In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a postsecondary jazz school in the United States. Through an exploration of how jazz educators cope with the paradoxical task of training the body and libe…
The Post-it Note Economy
This essay seeks to clarify an undertheorized dimension of capitalism's transition to post-Fordist flexible accumulation-namely, the "acceleration in the pace of product innovation" (Harvey 1990:156). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in innovation workshops organized in New York City by consultants and attended by business entrepreneurs, this essay argues that whereas cutting-edge technologies such as computerized algorithms and robotic technologi…
Rituals of Creativity
In this article, I seek to complicate the distinction between imitation and creativity, which has played a dominant role in the modern imaginary and anthropological theory. I focus on a U.S. collegiate jazz music program, in which jazz educators use advanced sound technologies to reestablish immersive interaction with the sounds of past jazz masters against the backdrop of the disappearance of performance venues for jazz. I analyze a key pedagogi…
Sociable robots, jazz music, and divination
In practices that range from mechanical divination in Central Africa to gamelike interactions among jazz students and the development of a jazz-improvising humanoid robot marimba player in the United States, contextually meaningful contingency is widely used as a cultural resource for negotiating problems of intentionality. Whereas anthropologists have been concerned with the use of contingency mostly as a cultural resource for increasing predict…
Routinized Business Innovation
Scholars of cultural evolution and change have tended to conceptualize innovation as a process that results from individual experimentation involving random or very loosely guided trial-and-error alterations to existing cultural elements. Alternatively, they have focused on individual experimentation via decision rules and different heuristics with already existing, potentially innovative cultural elements whose emergence is left unexplained. Bas…
Separating noise from signal
Because ethnomethodology was founded in cybernetics, it institutionalized the idea that interactants strive to maintain interactional order and compensate for disorder through negative feedback mechanisms such as "repair work." This idea informed a key strand in the study of human-machine interaction in the United States, especially the idea that humans are inclined to repair the gaps in machines' behavior and thus sustain the feeling that they a…
Streamlining the Muse
In this article I seek to theorize recent institutional transformations of creative agency that involve the increasing embeddedness of art socialization in the professional and bureaucratic infrastructure of various sorts of educational organizations in the contemporary West. I argue that institutional art education involves the reconfiguration of charismatic education as professional training, and I suggest that this provides an opportunity to t…
From Media Technologies That Reproduce Seconds to Media Technologies That Reproduce Thirds
Against the backdrop of a long research tradition in linguistic and semiotic anthropology that has focused almost exclusively on media technologies that reproduce Seconds, that is, specific texts in modalities such as sound and the visual image, this article focuses on media technologies that reproduce Thirds, that is, generative dispositions responsible for the production of such Seconds. It explores contemporary attempts in the United States an…
Modernity, Cultural Anesthesia, and Sensory Agency
In this article, I rely on Michel Foucault's notion of 'technologies of the self' to theorize the micro-practices by which individuals actively negotiate the reconfiguration of their sensory skills as a result of modernization processes. In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a collegiate jazz music program in the USA. By exploring a number of interactional games in which jazz students attempt to negotiate the challenge of c…
Ritual Semiosis in the Business Corporation
This essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation consultancy group and attended by representatives of different business corporations. In this workshop, participants are supposed to learn a set of innovation techniques for generating new products and services and to become convinced that there can be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies …
Phaticity as a technical mystique
Innovation consultants belong to a professional group of people who claim that they can help organizations become more innovative by reconfiguring them in ways that can facilitate the unimpeded flow of information between as many of their employees as possible. They are thus a prime example of phatic experts, inasmuch as they present themselves as people whose expertise turns on establishing channels of communication and contact between employees…
The Closed-World Principle
Although many corporations make claims about the newness of their products in order to make the public interested in purchasing them, not all of them make the same kind of claims. Whereas previous studies have highlighted claims to newness that are based on emphasizing the newness of almost all the parts of new products in relation to the parts of those products' previous versions, I highlight claims to newness that are based on emphasizing the o…
Oprah Winfrey and the co-production of market and morality
It would be fairly uncontroversial to claim that the more media have become imbricated in the vast and complex machinery of capitalism, the more morally suspect they have become. That is because ec
Dynamic branding
This paper offers an analysis of the Oprah Winfrey talk show's success as emanating from an ideal typical form of branding that we term “dynamic branding”, in which the gap between production and consumption is almost entirely bridged. Oprah has managed to maintain a dynamic relationship with her viewers based on multiple feedback and feed-forward processes in which consumers' concerns are immediately translated into Oprah's performed identity in…
Listening to Modernity
Keywords: commentary, modernity, creativity, aurality, cultural reproduction, jazz music, music education
Swinging within the iron cage
In this article, I seek to contribute to the anthropology of embodied practice by asking, what would embodied practical mastery that mandates constant differentiation look like, and what would be its cultural and social determinants? In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a postsecondary jazz school in the United States. Through an exploration of how jazz educators cope with the paradoxical task of training the body and libe…
Sincerity Versus Self-Expression
Existing anthropological accounts have tended to portray the normative ideal of the modern subject as predicated on the demand that the materiality of semiotic forms such as the body and words be subordinate to the subject's interiority as a condition of possibility for his or her freedom and moral autonomy. In this article, I seek to contribute to the ongoing and fruitful conversation in anthropology over the idea of the modern subject by highli…
Rituals of Creativity
In this article, I seek to complicate the distinction between imitation and creativity, which has played a dominant role in the modern imaginary and anthropological theory. I focus on a U.S. collegiate jazz music program, in which jazz educators use advanced sound technologies to reestablish immersive interaction with the sounds of past jazz masters against the backdrop of the disappearance of performance venues for jazz. I analyze a key pedagogi…
From Media Technologies That Reproduce Seconds to Media Technologies That Reproduce Thirds
Against the backdrop of a long research tradition in linguistic and semiotic anthropology that has focused almost exclusively on media technologies that reproduce Seconds, that is, specific texts in modalities such as sound and the visual image, this article focuses on media technologies that reproduce Thirds, that is, generative dispositions responsible for the production of such Seconds. It explores contemporary attempts in the United States an…
Literature and agency in English fiction reading
Modernity, Cultural Anesthesia, and Sensory Agency
In this article, I rely on Michel Foucault's notion of 'technologies of the self' to theorize the micro-practices by which individuals actively negotiate the reconfiguration of their sensory skills as a result of modernization processes. In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a collegiate jazz music program in the USA. By exploring a number of interactional games in which jazz students attempt to negotiate the challenge of c…
Streamlining the Muse
In this article I seek to theorize recent institutional transformations of creative agency that involve the increasing embeddedness of art socialization in the professional and bureaucratic infrastructure of various sorts of educational organizations in the contemporary West. I argue that institutional art education involves the reconfiguration of charismatic education as professional training, and I suggest that this provides an opportunity to t…
Sociable robots, jazz music, and divination
In practices that range from mechanical divination in Central Africa to gamelike interactions among jazz students and the development of a jazz-improvising humanoid robot marimba player in the United States, contextually meaningful contingency is widely used as a cultural resource for negotiating problems of intentionality. Whereas anthropologists have been concerned with the use of contingency mostly as a cultural resource for increasing predict…
Toward an Anthropology of Computer-Mediated, Algorithmic Forms of Sociality
This article argues that contemporary, computer-mediated, algorithmic forms of sociality problematize a long and major tradition in cultural anthropology, which has appropriated the notion of artistic style to theorize culture as a relatively distinct, coherent, and durable configuration of behavioral dispositions. The article's ethnographic site is a lab in a major institute of technology in the United States, in which computer scientists develo…
Semiotic Dimensions of Creativity
Recurrent, most recently Romantic, ideologies conceptualize creativity as the solitary, ex nihilo creation of products of self-evident and universal value-most emblematically in the field of art-by highly exceptional individuals. Such ideologies obscure the social dimensions of creativity that come into view via anthropological analysis: (a) the nature and ubiquity of creative processes as communicative and improvisational events, with real-time …
Two. The “Cool” Organization Man
This chapter explores the ways in which the idea of jazz music as the quintessential art of productive risk-taking and flexibility in the face of uncertainty has been incorporated into organizational theories and practices aimed at improving the functionality of the 21st century organization. It argues, first, that the incorporation of the jazz metaphor into the business world has been motivated by the realization that this metaphor is productive…
Ritual Semiosis in the Business Corporation
This essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation consultancy group and attended by representatives of different business corporations. In this workshop, participants are supposed to learn a set of innovation techniques for generating new products and services and to become convinced that there can be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies …
Routinized Business Innovation
Scholars of cultural evolution and change have tended to conceptualize innovation as a process that results from individual experimentation involving random or very loosely guided trial-and-error alterations to existing cultural elements. Alternatively, they have focused on individual experimentation via decision rules and different heuristics with already existing, potentially innovative cultural elements whose emergence is left unexplained. Bas…
The Post-it Note Economy
This essay seeks to clarify an undertheorized dimension of capitalism's transition to post-Fordist flexible accumulation-namely, the "acceleration in the pace of product innovation" (Harvey 1990:156). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in innovation workshops organized in New York City by consultants and attended by business entrepreneurs, this essay argues that whereas cutting-edge technologies such as computerized algorithms and robotic technologi…
Jazz
The anthropological interest in jazz can be divided to three main categories. First, because jazz is inherently an improvised form of music, it provides an opportunity to theorize the emergently creative, real‐time nature of human interaction. Second, efforts to institutionalize jazz in bureaucratic structures throughout the twentieth century provide appropriate contexts in which to analyze the dynamics and contradictions of institutionalized cre…
Modernity
Modernity was long associated with a set of normative ideals and practices that were heavily indebted to the Enlightenment tradition, which posited an inevitable historical trajectory of humanity's gradual progress and perfectibility through the advancement of science and reason. The culmination of this progress was supposed to be the modern West. Whereas anthropologists reproduced this master narrative in the early days of the discipline, today …
Separating noise from signal
Because ethnomethodology was founded in cybernetics, it institutionalized the idea that interactants strive to maintain interactional order and compensate for disorder through negative feedback mechanisms such as "repair work." This idea informed a key strand in the study of human-machine interaction in the United States, especially the idea that humans are inclined to repair the gaps in machines' behavior and thus sustain the feeling that they a…
To go with the free information flow
This article draws on fieldwork with innovation consultants in the USA to argue that neoliberal assumptions about how large-scale markets should be organised to maximise their efficiency now inform assumptions about how small-scale business firms should be organised to maximise their innovative potential. A key mediating concept between macro-level neoliberal theories and micro-level innovation strategies is ‘free information flow’. This concept …
Making Global MBAs
Reviewed by: Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture by Andrew Orta Eitan Wilf Andrew Orta. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp. Andrew Orta. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 256 pp. Making Global MBAs is an ethnography of the production …
The Closed-World Principle
Although many corporations make claims about the newness of their products in order to make the public interested in purchasing them, not all of them make the same kind of claims. Whereas previous studies have highlighted claims to newness that are based on emphasizing the newness of almost all the parts of new products in relation to the parts of those products' previous versions, I highlight claims to newness that are based on emphasizing the o…
Creative or Coercive
Discourses and practices that situate creativity as a recipe for success in different domains and at different levels of social reality have had an increasingly global reach in the last few decades. Creativity has become the focus of managerial theories, self-help books, and experts whose goal is to help individuals, firms, cities, and nation-states all over the world harness creativity as a resource for boosting productivity and for creating val…
Phaticity as a technical mystique
Innovation consultants belong to a professional group of people who claim that they can help organizations become more innovative by reconfiguring them in ways that can facilitate the unimpeded flow of information between as many of their employees as possible. They are thus a prime example of phatic experts, inasmuch as they present themselves as people whose expertise turns on establishing channels of communication and contact between employees…
Sociology (25 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Art (14 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Social science (10 works) · Law (9 works)