N Besnier
Biographic Data
| ID | 31532 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Besnier |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Besnier |
| SIGNATURE | BESNIER N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6046-3494 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 73 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 745 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 73 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Les politiques identitaires entre le local et le global: La mobilisation transgenre aux îles Tonga (Pacifique sud)
Au cours des dernières décennies, des ONG internationales ont développé dans les pays dits du « Sud » des politiques d'émancipation fondées sur une lecture universalisante des pratiques et des identités de genre et de sexualité qui ne se conforment pas aux normes conventionnelles. Mais certains critiques soutiennent que, loin d'avoir un effet libératoire, ces politiques induisent de nouvelles formes de répression. Aux îles Tonga, tous les projets…
Le genre à l'épreuve du sport
Utopie
Peut-être plus qu’à aucun autre moment de l’histoire récente, nous vivons à une époque d’extrêmes. Les positions politiques sont polarisées d’une manière sans précédent, le populisme de droite et les programmes progressistes étant de moins en moins capables d’arriver à des compromis. Dans de nombreuses économies, le gouffre qui sépare les riches des démunis est plus profond que jamais depuis la révolution industrielle. Le changement climatique cr…
Sport
Depuis la plus profonde antiquité, les êtres humains se sont engagés dans des pratiques que l’on peut appeler « sport », dans le sens d’une pratique sociale située dans un contexte délimité où des participants affichent leur force ou leur dextérité, en général en compétition les uns contre les autres. Nous avons bien sûr l’exemple, célébré dans la culture occidentale, des jeux olympiques de la Grèce ancienne, pendant laquelle les villes-états con…
Polynesian Gender Liminality Through Time and Space
Sport and Society in Global France
To understand the workings of globalization and its effects on everyone’s life around the world, one can do much worse than to focus on sport. In its modern incarnation (dominated by record keeping, standardization, and so on), sport was itself the object of a proto-form of globalization, as it diffused from its European origins (principally the United Kingdom) to all four corners of the world in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries.…
Crisis, valor y esperanza: Repensar La Economía
Crisis, valor y esperanza son tres conceptos cuya intersección y mutua constitución permiten repensar la naturaleza de la vida económica, tomando distancia de los modelos abstractos alejados de las realidades cotidianas de las personas comunes -modelos cuyas deficiencias quedaron dramáticamente expuestas con la actual crisis económica mundial-. Esta propuesta busca poner de relieve los complejos modos en que las personas intentan construir "vidas…
The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitics
Few activities bring together physicality, emotions, politics, money, and morality as dramatically as sport. In Brazil’s stadiums or China’s parks, on Cuba’s baseball diamonds or Fiji’s rugby fields, human beings test their physical limits, invest emotional energy, bet money, perform witchcraft, and ingest substances. Sport is a microcosm of what life is about. The Anthropology of Sport explores how sport both shapes and is shaped by the social, …
Sport
Activities that one can retrospectively label as ‘sport’ have probably been part of human beings’ repertoire for millennia, but sports as we know them today are the product of a modernity that arose from the late eighteenth century at the juncture of civil society, industrial capitalism, muscular Christianity, and the colonial expansion of North Atlantic states. Today, it is deeply intertwined with neoliberal capital, media technology, and neocol…
Dessiner les frontières
En dépit d’une image stéréotypée d’un monde globalisé et ouvert, la notion de frontière ne cesse d’interpeller les chercheurs au travers de deux questions majeures : que deviennent alors les frontières entre espaces géographiques, linguistiques et culturels dans notre société cosmopolite, urbanisée, mobile ? Comment sont-elles produites, (re)produites et/ou configurées par les pratiques sociales ? À partir de disciplines aussi variées que sont la…
Value and Values in Global Sport
Since Antiquity, sporting bodies and performances have been assigned an economic value, and sporting events, particularly those with large audiences, have been organized with a view to their capacity to generate wealth and reinforce social hierarchies. At the same time, athletes have long embodied moral and ethical values such as virtue, beauty, purity, and sacrifice. Sport is thus a prime context in which a society negotiates the relationship be…
Transgender
Transgender is a heterogeneous sociocultural category of persons whose gender identification transgresses, in one way or another, the gender norms extant in the society of which they are part. In its most encompassing sense, the term can be applied to a broad variety of manifestations that differ from one another in terms of their practices and desires, their epistemological construction, and their relationship to the mainstream. The diversity of…
Intersex
Intersex people present nonnormative variations in the genetic and physiological constitution of their sex. The category is an umbrella term for a broad range of variations with different distribution within and across societies, and its boundaries are porous and contested. In technologically developed societies, infants born with visible intersex signs were subjected to invasive treatments until recent calls to rethink their usefulness
Gender and Sexuality: Contested Relations
If one defines gender as the social, cultural, and political construction of women and men in relation to one another and sexuality as libidinal desires and other sensations, the relationship between the two is contested in a number of ways. The relationship between the subject and object of desire can be gendered in different ways across ethnographic contexts and historical times, with the modern‐day Western contrast between heterosexuality and …
Sex Reassignment
Sex reassignment is the surgical or chemical modification of the body's secondary sexual characteristics, primarily to respond to the needs of transgender people. It can focus on the sexual organs or other gender‐ and sex‐marked features of the body. The availability and form of sex reassignment varies across different national contexts, being dependent on different medical traditions and legal systems, as well as on different funding regimes for…
Tell the story: How to write forAmerican Ethnologist
To write a successful article for a major anthropology journal, authors can employ a number of strategies. The first and most essential is to familiarize themselves with the journal's mission. ForAE, authors must ground their arguments in current debates in the discipline, make a clear contribution to anthropological theory, support this contribution with ethnography, and demonstrate its relevance to contemporary sociocultural problems. Moreover,…
Rethinking Masculinity in the Neoliberal Order: Cameroonian Footballers, Fijian Rugby Players, and Senegalese Wrestlers
In the Global South since the 1980s, when economic downturns under pressure from the forces of neoliberalism eroded social relations, sport and athletes' bodies have become major loci where masculinity is constituted and debated. Sport masculinity now fills a vacuum left by the evacuation of traditional forms of masculinity, which are no longer available to the new generations of men. For them, the possibility of employment in the sport industrie…
Peer Review and Academic Citizenship: A Call to Our Colleagues
Nation, Nationalism, and Sport: Fijian Rugby in the Local–Global Nexus
The changing architecture of the professional rugby union has created a seeming contradiction in Fijian nationalism: the best Fijian rugby players are now representing other nations and yet remain national heroes regarded by many Fijians as the embodiment of masculine indigenous Fijian ideals. Fijian ideologies about rugby problematize Benedict Anderson’s celebrated but problematic understanding of the nation as based on a territorially bounded, …
Sport Mega-Events and Global Political Economy
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Oceania, Sociocultural Overviews: Polynesia and Micronesia
Sports Mobilities Across Borders: Postcolonial Perspectives
The circulation of mobile professional athletes, a phenomenon whose visibility increased exponentially in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, poses important questions for postcolonial approaches to the human condition. At first glance, the orientation of entire segments of the population in some countries in the global South to the possibility of migrating to sport careers in the global North seems to reproduce patterns of econo…
Dyck, Noel: Fields of Play. An Ethnography of Children's Sports
Anthropos , Seite 273 - 274
On communicative worlds: A comment on Michael Carrithers’ “Anthropology as irony and philosophy
Previous articleNext article FreeOn communicative worlds A comment on Michael Carrithers' "Anthropology as irony and philosophyNiko BESNIERNiko BESNIERJohns Hopkins University Search for more articles by this author Johns Hopkins UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMichael Carrithers raises important questions abou…
Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy
Crisis, value, and hope are three concepts whose intersection and mutual constitution open the door for a rethinking of the nature of economic life away from abstract models divorced from the everyday realities of ordinary people, the inadequacies of which the current world economic crisis has exposed in particularly dramatic fashion. This rethinking seeks to bring to center stage the complex ways in which people attempt to make life worth living…
Language and Affect
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Information withholding as a manipulative and collusive strategy in Nukulaelae gossip
This article examines the organization and function of information-withholding sequences, a conversational strategy used by participants in gossip interactions on Nukulaelae, a Polynesian atoll of the Central Pacific. A withholding sequence is a three-turn sequence whereby a piece of information is withheld in the first turn, an other-repair is initiated in the second turn, and the withheld material is provided in the third turn. Information-with…
Sport, Modernity, and the Body
Over the past three decades, the important role that anthropological theory has bestowed on the body, modernity, nationalism, the state, citizenship, transnationalism, globalization, gender, and sexuality has placed sports at the center of questions central to the discipline. New approaches to the body, based on practice theory, view the sporting body as more than just a biological entity, allowing us to observe sports as they "travel" transnatio…
Transgenderism, Locality, and the Miss Galaxy beauty pageant in Tonga
The Miss Galaxy beauty pageant held annually in Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga, is, at first glance, a show of transgendered glamour, but it is equally a display of translocality. Through the performance of an exotic otherness (through costumes, names, dances, etc.), the socially marginalized contestants claim to define the local, in ways that may oppose the received order, in which the difference between locality and nonlocality is controlled …
The athlete's body and the global condition: Tongan rugby players in Japan
The mobility of rugby professionals from Tonga to Japan and points beyond poses new questions about the role of the body as a mediator between the subjective and the objective, which anthropologists and other social scientists have generally examined within the confines of specific societies. Increasingly, mobility across different regimes of valuation offers highly skilled bodies both new possibilities for agency and new constraints on agency. T…
Rethinking Masculinity in the Neoliberal Order: Cameroonian Footballers, Fijian Rugby Players, and Senegalese Wrestlers
In the Global South since the 1980s, when economic downturns under pressure from the forces of neoliberalism eroded social relations, sport and athletes' bodies have become major loci where masculinity is constituted and debated. Sport masculinity now fills a vacuum left by the evacuation of traditional forms of masculinity, which are no longer available to the new generations of men. For them, the possibility of employment in the sport industrie…
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Consumption and Cosmopolitanism: Practicing Modernity at the Second-Hand Marketplace in Nuku'alofa, Tonga
At the second-hand marketplace in Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga, Tongans buy and sell objects that their diasporic relatives send them instead of remittances. While selling objects goes against the grain of a traditional moral order, the marketplace is immensely popular but dominated by local Others. It enables participants to articulate and practice consumption and, more generally, a modern but locally relevant self, while at the same time qu…
The Linguistic Relationships of Spoken and Written Nukulaelae Registers
This study is an investigation of the structural relationships between spoken and written Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, a Polynesian language spoken in a restrictedly literate society in the Central Pacific. The results of a factor analysis of the frequency of co-occurrence of 42 linguistic features across a computerized corpus of naturalistic spoken and written texts show that three dimensions must be identified to account for variation between Nukulaela…
When gifts become commodities: Pawnshops, valuables, and shame in Tonga and the Tongan diaspora
Far from being displaced by modernity, the exchange of women's textile valuables of little practical value but enormous ritual significance is increasing in importance in Tonga and amongst Tongan migrants in the industrial West. The dwindling production of and increasing demand for these textile valuables have prompted entrepreneurs to open pawnshops, where customers who are monetarily poor mortgage valuables and customers lacking in exchange net…
Sluts and superwomen: The politics of gender liminality in urban Tonga
In urban Tonga, certain men identify themselves and are identified by others as taking on some attributes of womanhood on a regular basis. This process, however, yields a heterogeneous category of persons, who are variously positioned in the socio-economic structure and moral order. At one extreme, some transgendered men are highly productive individuals in the market economy, while, at the other extreme, others are principally preoccupied by the…
Sports Mobilities Across Borders: Postcolonial Perspectives
The circulation of mobile professional athletes, a phenomenon whose visibility increased exponentially in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, poses important questions for postcolonial approaches to the human condition. At first glance, the orientation of entire segments of the population in some countries in the global South to the possibility of migrating to sport careers in the global North seems to reproduce patterns of econo…
Literacy and the Notion of Person on Nukulaelae Atoll
Written discourse produced on Nukulaelae atoll of Western Polynesia falls principally in two categories: personal letters and religious sermons. Personal-letter writing is a highly affective communicative context, in which the vulnerable aspects of the person are highlighted. Sermons, in contrast, elaborate authoritarianism and directness. The divergent characteristics of Nukulaelae literacy practices are best understood in terms of their relatio…
Involvement in linguistic practice: An ethnographic appraisal
This paper is a critical examination of ‘involvement’ as an analytic category in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. The discussion first identifies a variety of conceptual problems associated with the nature and locus of involvement. Then a number of ethnographic studies focusing on the relationship between language use, emotionally, society, and culture are described, and the usefulness of involvement as a descriptive and theoretical tool …
Nation, Nationalism, and Sport: Fijian Rugby in the Local–Global Nexus
The changing architecture of the professional rugby union has created a seeming contradiction in Fijian nationalism: the best Fijian rugby players are now representing other nations and yet remain national heroes regarded by many Fijians as the embodiment of masculine indigenous Fijian ideals. Fijian ideologies about rugby problematize Benedict Anderson’s celebrated but problematic understanding of the nation as based on a territorially bounded, …
Tell the story: How to write forAmerican Ethnologist
To write a successful article for a major anthropology journal, authors can employ a number of strategies. The first and most essential is to familiarize themselves with the journal's mission. ForAE, authors must ground their arguments in current debates in the discipline, make a clear contribution to anthropological theory, support this contribution with ethnography, and demonstrate its relevance to contemporary sociocultural problems. Moreover,…
Language on the edge of the global: Communicative competence, agency, and the complexity of the local
Decentering and recentering communicative competence
Crisis, valor y esperanza: Repensar La Economía
Crisis, valor y esperanza son tres conceptos cuya intersección y mutua constitución permiten repensar la naturaleza de la vida económica, tomando distancia de los modelos abstractos alejados de las realidades cotidianas de las personas comunes -modelos cuyas deficiencias quedaron dramáticamente expuestas con la actual crisis económica mundial-. Esta propuesta busca poner de relieve los complejos modos en que las personas intentan construir "vidas…
Language and gender research at the intersection of the global and local
While globalization has become a central lens through which social scientists have reframed old questions in the last couple of decades, students of language and gender in their sociocultural context have been slower to do so. Yet global processes are of concern to people’s daily lives in all contemporary societies, as they gender themselves and each other through the intersubjective negotiation of the intersection of the global and the local. Th…
The Demise of the Man Who Would Be King: Sorcery and Ambition on Nukulaelae Atoll
This article examines the intersection of ambition, sorcery accusations, and traditional leadership on Nukulaelae Atoll in Tuvalu. It focuses on the downfall of a charismatic leader, Temu, whose aspirations for paramount chieftainship were thwarted by accusations of sorcery. Besnier argues that sorcery beliefs serve as a powerful mechanism for social control, limiting the accumulation of power and reinforcing the egalitarian ethos of Polynesian s…
Literacy and feelings: The encoding of affect in Nukulaelae letters
This article examines the encoding of affect in letters written by Nukulaelae speakers, focusing on how literacy skills acquired through formal schooling influence the expression of emotions. It argues that literacy, by objectifying language, allows for a greater degree of reflexivity and control over emotional displays, leading to a distinctive literate style of affect encoding. This style is characterized by a tendency towards explicitness and …
Literacy, Emotion and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll
On communicative worlds: A comment on Michael Carrithers’ “Anthropology as irony and philosophy
Previous articleNext article FreeOn communicative worlds A comment on Michael Carrithers' "Anthropology as irony and philosophyNiko BESNIERNiko BESNIERJohns Hopkins University Search for more articles by this author Johns Hopkins UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreMichael Carrithers raises important questions abou…
The History of the Fijian Languages
Social/Cultural Anthropology: Tuvalu: A History. Hugh Laracy . ed
The Fijian Language
Greek Linguistic Elements in the Polynesian Languages (Hellenicum Pacificum)
Coherence and grounding in discourse
Semantic and pragmatic constraints on Tuvaluan raising
Linguistic Anthropology: Chinese. InterGrammar: Toward an Integrative Model of Verbal, Prosodic and Kinesic Choices in Speech . Horst Arndt and Richard Wayne Janney
The Linguistic Relationships of Spoken and Written Nukulaelae Registers
This study is an investigation of the structural relationships between spoken and written Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, a Polynesian language spoken in a restrictedly literate society in the Central Pacific. The results of a factor analysis of the frequency of co-occurrence of 42 linguistic features across a computerized corpus of naturalistic spoken and written texts show that three dimensions must be identified to account for variation between Nukulaela…
Social and Functional Approaches to Language and Thought
Information withholding as a manipulative and collusive strategy in Nukulaelae gossip
This article examines the organization and function of information-withholding sequences, a conversational strategy used by participants in gossip interactions on Nukulaelae, a Polynesian atoll of the Central Pacific. A withholding sequence is a three-turn sequence whereby a piece of information is withheld in the first turn, an other-repair is initiated in the second turn, and the withheld material is provided in the third turn. Information-with…
Literacy and feelings: The encoding of affect in Nukulaelae letters
This article examines the encoding of affect in letters written by Nukulaelae speakers, focusing on how literacy skills acquired through formal schooling influence the expression of emotions. It argues that literacy, by objectifying language, allows for a greater degree of reflexivity and control over emotional displays, leading to a distinctive literate style of affect encoding. This style is characterized by a tendency towards explicitness and …
Linguistics in Context: Connecting Observation and Understanding
Linguistic Anthropology: The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Jack Goody. : The Future of Literacy in a Changing World. Daniel A. Wagner , ed
Language and Affect
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Literacy and the Notion of Person on Nukulaelae Atoll
Written discourse produced on Nukulaelae atoll of Western Polynesia falls principally in two categories: personal letters and religious sermons. Personal-letter writing is a highly affective communicative context, in which the vulnerable aspects of the person are highlighted. Sermons, in contrast, elaborate authoritarianism and directness. The divergent characteristics of Nukulaelae literacy practices are best understood in terms of their relatio…
Society for Linguistic Anthropology
The Demise of the Man Who Would Be King: Sorcery and Ambition on Nukulaelae Atoll
This article examines the intersection of ambition, sorcery accusations, and traditional leadership on Nukulaelae Atoll in Tuvalu. It focuses on the downfall of a charismatic leader, Temu, whose aspirations for paramount chieftainship were thwarted by accusations of sorcery. Besnier argues that sorcery beliefs serve as a powerful mechanism for social control, limiting the accumulation of power and reinforcing the egalitarian ethos of Polynesian s…
Involvement in linguistic practice: An ethnographic appraisal
This paper is a critical examination of ‘involvement’ as an analytic category in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. The discussion first identifies a variety of conceptual problems associated with the nature and locus of involvement. Then a number of ethnographic studies focusing on the relationship between language use, emotionally, society, and culture are described, and the usefulness of involvement as a descriptive and theoretical tool …
Literacy, Emotion and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll
Literacy continues to be a central issue in anthropology, but methods of perceiving and examining it have changed in recent years. In this 1995 study Niko Besnier analyses the transformation of Nukulaelae from a non-literate into a literate society using a contemporary perspective which emphasizes literacy as a social practice embedded in a socio-cultural context. He shows how a small and isolated Polynesian community, with no access to print tec…
Society for Lingustic Anthropology
Society for Linguistic Anthripolgy
Literacy, Emotion, and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll
Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Sociology (54 works) · Philosophy (30 works) · Political science (28 works) · Linguistics (25 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Law (20 works) · History (19 works) · Anthropology (18 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (18 works) · Library science (17 works)