Martin Holbraad
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3580964 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Martin Holbraad |
| NOMBRES | Martin |
| APELLIDO | Holbraad |
| FIRMA | HOLBRAAD M |
| AFILIACIONES | University College London |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 40 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 1416 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 37 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1969 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Shapes in Revolution
Revolutions are cosmogonic. More than any other modern political form, their deliberate goal is to precipitate change as a total, all-embracing project: not just a radically new political order but one that reaches deep into the fabric of social relationships, seeking to transform people at their very core, recasting the horizons that give their lives shape and meaning. Combining ethnographic and historiographic research, Shapes in Revolution tel…
Book Symposium
On the Emic Gesture: Difference and Ethnography in Roy Wagner, by Iracema Dulley. New York: Routledge, 2019
Revolutionary circles
Drawing on the contributions of this theme section, this introduction stakes out an agenda for the anthropological study of revolutionary circles. Understood as a powerful model of and for political action, the revolutionary circle renders the desire for radical political change as a function of the circular configuration of the group of people who pursue it. This correlation of political ends with social means puts questions of “political morpho…
The House of Spirits
With reference to one man's remarkable struggle to rebuild his home in Havana following its partial collapse, this article contributes to the emerging anthropological literature on care by thematising the role of the state as carer-in-chief. Experiences such as that of Lázaro, the protagonist of the article, demonstrate the central paradox of care as a state project-one that receives its most extreme expression in the totalising project of revolu…
Anthropologies of Revolution
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org . What can anthropological thinking contribute to the study of revolutions? The first book-length attempt to develop an anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthropologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted attempts to radically reconstitute the worlds people inhabit. Viewing revolutions as all-embracing, world-creating pro…
The Shapes of Relations
Building critically on anthropology’s “ontological turn,” this article isolates conceptualization (as distinct from explanation and interpretation) as a core concern for anthropological thinking: anthropology as the activity of transfiguring the contingency of ethnographic materials in the formal language of conceptual relations and distinctions. Focusing on works by Mauss and Evans-Pritchard, as well as my own research, the article articulates t…
Anthropologies of Revolution
What can anthropological thinking contribute to the study of revolutions? The first book-length anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthropologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted attempts to radically reconstitute the worlds people inhabit. Viewing revolutions as all-embracing, world-creating projects, the authors ask readers to move beyond the idea of revolutions as acts of violent political rupture, and …
Think Pieces in Analytics
Experimenting with the many potentials of anthropological analysis—that shifting interface between the empirical and the conceptual, the space and perhaps the time between ethnography and theory—is at the heart of our journal’s intellectual mission. Our aim is to publish articles that display a spirit of analytical exploration by dealing in fresh ways with their empirical materials and showing in the action of their analytical treatment new paths…
Channels and Barriers in the Nascent Dialogue Between Cuban and Foreign Anthropologists
Anthropology in Cuba finds itself at a critical juncture.The generation of Cuban anthropologists trained in the 1970s and '80s in the Soviet tradition of ethnography are gradually retiring, leaving the helm of key institutions in the field to younger colleagues.These younger generations of scholars, however, have not been afforded opportunities for systematic training on the island, since longstanding attempts to establish degree programs in soci…
Recovering the Human Subject
This volume responds to the often-proclaimed 'death of the subject' in post-structuralist theorizing, and to calls from across the social sciences for 'post-humanist' alternatives to liberal humanism in a distinctively anthropological manner. It asks: can we use the intellectual resources developed in those approaches and debates to reconstruct a new account of how individual human subjects are contingently put together in diverse historical and …
What Is Analysis
Recent years in anthropology have seen a noticeable trend, moving from debates about theory to a concern with method. So while some generations ago we would tend to identify ourselves as anthropologists with reference to particular theoretical paradigms-for example, Marxism, (post-)structuralism, cognitivism, cultural materialism, interpretivism-these days our tendency is to align ourselves, often eclectically, with proposals conceived as methodo…
A celebration of Roy Wagner and ‘The reciprocity of perspectives’
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A Note from the Incoming Editor
A Note from the INcomINg edItorHaving now completely 'transitioned' from the previous editorial team, this issue of Social Analysis is the first for which I am more or less fully responsible.Instead of a more elaborate 'letter from the editor' to mark the occasion, I gave an interview to the staff at Berghahn, our publishers, for their online blog.Better than a more formal letter, I hope, the interview, which follows, conveys the spirit in which …
I Have Been Formed in This Revolution
Cómo forman personas las revoluciones? Basado en un total de nueve meses de trabajo etnográfico realizado en la habana, este trabajo toma como punto de partida la narración de una mujer de mediana edad sobre su involucramiento con estructuras e instituciones estatales durante el curso de la construcción de la casa en la que vive. Al describir etnográficamente las formas en que estos involucramientos personales con el estado se entrelazan con otra…
The Ontological Turn
A new and often controversial theoretical orientation that resonates strongly with wider developments in contemporary philosophy and social theory, the so-called 'ontological turn' is receiving a great deal of attention in anthropology and cognate disciplines at present. This book provides the first anthropological exposition of this recent intellectual development. It traces the roots of the ontological turn in the history of anthropology and el…
Money and the Morality of Commensuration
Based on ethnographic research in Havana over the past two decades, this article examines how Cubans’ experience of poverty, or ‘need’, is linked to the increasing dollarization of the Cuban economy. Dollars, I argue, are not just the emblem of a new moral disorder, but also its main catalyst, inasmuch as they expand the realm of ‘need’, as defined by a socialist paradigm of consumption rooted in the era before the introduction of the dollar, by …
Social Media in Rural China
for inviting me to present and receive feedback on
Relative Native
Revolución o muerte
With reference to the experience of the Cuban Revolution, this article addresses what may be called the 'late revolutionary paradox': How can so many people in countries such as Cuba continue to pledge visceral allegiance to their revolution while at the same time expressing deep disaffection with it? My main claim is that the paradox is a product of an undue analytical emphasis on the ideological content of revolutionary discourse, with its mant…
Times of Security
In the current world disorder, security is on everyone's lips. But what is security from a cross-cultural perspective? How is it imagined and experienced by people on the ground? Crucially, what visions of the future are at stake in people's potentially divergent concerns with security: what, and when, is the time of security? Exploring diverse notions and experiences of time involved in security practices across the globe, this volume brings tog…
Times of security
In the current world disorder, security is on everyone's lips. But what is security from a cross-cultural perspective? How is it imagined and experienced by people on the ground? Crucially, what visions of the future are at stake in people's potentially divergent concerns with security: what, and when, is the time of security? Exploring diverse notions and experiences of time involved in security practices across the globe, this volume brings tog…
Scoping Recursivity
Commenting on two articles that have appealed to the notion of 'recursivity' to articulate new directions for anthropological thinking, this piece seeks to clarify the scope of a recursive turn in contemporary anthropology, distinguishing it from elements of recursivity that have always been present in the discipline's epistemic procedures
Revolutionary securitization
This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of securitization in International Relations. In contrast to existing attempts to show how, suitably elaborated, this model can be ‘applied’ to various non-Western contexts, our anthropological strategy is to use the contingency of empirical materials (namely the Cuban Revolution and the political forms it instantiates) as a means for transforming the bas…
Contemporary Cosmologies, Critical Reimaginings
How far is the ethnographic study of 'cosmologies' relevant to contemporary anthropology, and how might it illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? In this article we argue for a renewed anthropological interest in matters cosmological by seeking to disentangle the study of cosmology from the concomitants with which it was associated in earlier periods of anthropological research. In particular, we argue that an orientation toward cos…
Truth in Motion
In Truth in Motion, Martin Holbraad takes on the challenge of explaining why Cuban diviners, when consulting the deities orisha, sometimes appear to produce demonstrably false statements. Rather than dismissing such statements as evidence of faulty reasoning, Holbraad argues that they are in fact generative of truth. He draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Cuban Ifá and Santería practitioners to develop a radical, practice-based theory of truth.…
Thinking Through Things
Book description: Drawing upon the work of some of the most influential theorists in the field, Thinking Through Things demonstrates the quiet revolution growing in anthropology and its related disciplines, shifting its philosophical foundations. The first text to offer a direct and provocative challenge to disciplinary fragmentation - arguing for the futility of segregating the study of artefacts and society - this collection expands on the conc…
Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture
Worlds Otherwise
The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University ("'Worlds Otherwise': Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference," convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss…
Technologies of the Imagination
Truth in Motion
In Truth in Motion, Martin Holbraad takes on the challenge of explaining why Cuban diviners, when consulting the deities orisha, sometimes appear to produce demonstrably false statements. Rather than dismissing such statements as evidence of faulty reasoning, Holbraad argues that they are in fact generative of truth. He draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Cuban Ifá and Santería practitioners to develop a radical, practice-based theory of truth.…
Ontology, Ethnography, Archaeology
In commenting on the preceding articles of the Special Section, this afterword elaborates on the methodological and analytical implications for archaeology of the ontological alterity of animist phenomena. If such phenomena are challenging because they transgress the conceptual coordinates of archaeologists' habitual interpretive repertoires (mind vs matter, materiality vs culture, etc.), then what might archaeology's response to such challenges …
Revolución o muerte
With reference to the experience of the Cuban Revolution, this article addresses what may be called the 'late revolutionary paradox': How can so many people in countries such as Cuba continue to pledge visceral allegiance to their revolution while at the same time expressing deep disaffection with it? My main claim is that the paradox is a product of an undue analytical emphasis on the ideological content of revolutionary discourse, with its mant…
Introduction
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
Truth beyond doubt
This article analyzes the concept of truth on which the practice of Ifá divination in Cuba turns. Motivated ethnographically by Ifá practitioners' claims that the truths their oracles issue are indubitable, I argue that from the viewpoint of commonplace conceptions of truth such an assumption can only be interpreted as absurd. To avoid such an imputation, the article is devoted to reconceptualizing what might count as truth in such an ethnographi…
Revolutionary securitization
This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of securitization in International Relations. In contrast to existing attempts to show how, suitably elaborated, this model can be ‘applied’ to various non-Western contexts, our anthropological strategy is to use the contingency of empirical materials (namely the Cuban Revolution and the political forms it instantiates) as a means for transforming the bas…
Estimando a necessidade
O objeto deste artigo é o conceito de verdade tal como se articula no oráculo de Ifá cubano; seu objetivo é ilustrar a fecundidade de um "método ontográfico" que procure mapear as premissas ontológicas do discurso nativo por meio da produção de conceitos que, não sendo os conceitos nativos eles mesmos, constituam equivalentes aproximados destes. Enfatizando a afirmação dos praticantes de que o Ifá é infalível, propõe-se que os vereditos divinatór…
The Shapes of Relations
Building critically on anthropology’s “ontological turn,” this article isolates conceptualization (as distinct from explanation and interpretation) as a core concern for anthropological thinking: anthropology as the activity of transfiguring the contingency of ethnographic materials in the formal language of conceptual relations and distinctions. Focusing on works by Mauss and Evans-Pritchard, as well as my own research, the article articulates t…
I Have Been Formed in This Revolution
Cómo forman personas las revoluciones? Basado en un total de nueve meses de trabajo etnográfico realizado en la habana, este trabajo toma como punto de partida la narración de una mujer de mediana edad sobre su involucramiento con estructuras e instituciones estatales durante el curso de la construcción de la casa en la que vive. Al describir etnográficamente las formas en que estos involucramientos personales con el estado se entrelazan con otra…
Anthropologies of Revolution
What can anthropological thinking contribute to the study of revolutions? The first book-length anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthropologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted attempts to radically reconstitute the worlds people inhabit. Viewing revolutions as all-embracing, world-creating projects, the authors ask readers to move beyond the idea of revolutions as acts of violent political rupture, and …
Contemporary Cosmologies, Critical Reimaginings
How far is the ethnographic study of 'cosmologies' relevant to contemporary anthropology, and how might it illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? In this article we argue for a renewed anthropological interest in matters cosmological by seeking to disentangle the study of cosmology from the concomitants with which it was associated in earlier periods of anthropological research. In particular, we argue that an orientation toward cos…
Religious 'Speculation
With an ethnographic focus on the prestigious cult of Ifá, this article seeks to account for the recent effervescence of Afro-Cuban cult worship in urban Cuba. It is argued that, since worship involves a marked emphasis on ritual consumption, the cult's rise can be related to wider transformations that have taken place in the field of everyday consumption in Havana during the economic crisis that has followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc. In p…
Social Media in Rural China
for inviting me to present and receive feedback on
Channels and Barriers in the Nascent Dialogue Between Cuban and Foreign Anthropologists
Anthropology in Cuba finds itself at a critical juncture.The generation of Cuban anthropologists trained in the 1970s and '80s in the Soviet tradition of ethnography are gradually retiring, leaving the helm of key institutions in the field to younger colleagues.These younger generations of scholars, however, have not been afforded opportunities for systematic training on the island, since longstanding attempts to establish degree programs in soci…
Scoping Recursivity
Commenting on two articles that have appealed to the notion of 'recursivity' to articulate new directions for anthropological thinking, this piece seeks to clarify the scope of a recursive turn in contemporary anthropology, distinguishing it from elements of recursivity that have always been present in the discipline's epistemic procedures
Relationships in motion
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Havana among initiates of the male diviner-cult of Ifá, this paper addresses the classical anthropological conundrum of how to make sense of practitioners’ contention that initiation transforms them into «new people». Taking into account the role of divination in «calling» neophytes, it is shown that Ifá initiation involves an accumulation of relationships with deities and fellow initiates that are «internal» in…
The House of Spirits
With reference to one man's remarkable struggle to rebuild his home in Havana following its partial collapse, this article contributes to the emerging anthropological literature on care by thematising the role of the state as carer-in-chief. Experiences such as that of Lázaro, the protagonist of the article, demonstrate the central paradox of care as a state project-one that receives its most extreme expression in the totalising project of revolu…
Raising the Anti-, or Relativism Squared
This response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, "The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy," presents some thoughts on how the debates about "relativism" upon which Smith comments could be refigured in the light of this symposium's theme of "comparative relativism." If the notion of relativism can be rendered relative unto itself, as the notion of a "comparative" relativism would seem to suggest, then how might one understand its "position" w…
No Sugar, Please! Tobacco Anthropology and the Merits of Contingent Conceptualisation
Deploying Fernando Ortiz's ethnological contrast, in Cuban Counterpoint, between the generality of sugar and the particularity of tobacco, this article argues that the practice of anthropology is best compared to the latter. Anthropology's constitutive investment in the particulars of ethnography renders it a "science of the contingent" par excellence, inherently averse to necessities and generalisations of all types. With reference to the recent…
Pas de sucre, merci ! L'anthropologie du tabac et les vertus de la conceptualisation contingente
Reprenant l'opposition ethnologique opérée par Fernando Ortiz, dans Cuban Counterpoint, entre universalité du sucre et particularité du tabac, cet article affirme que la pratique anthropologique s'apparente davantage à cette dernière. L'investissement des particularités ethnographiques constitutif de l'anthropologie fait de celle-ci la « science du contingent » par excellence, à savoir une science intrinsèquement antinomique avec les nécessités e…
No Sugar, Please! Tobacco Anthropology and the Merits of Contingent Conceptualisation
Deploying Fernando Ortiz's ethnological contrast, in Cuban Counterpoint, between the generality of sugar and the particularity of tobacco, this article argues that the practice of anthropology is best compared to the latter. Anthropology's constitutive investment in the particulars of ethnography renders it a "science of the contingent" par excellence, inherently averse to necessities and generalisations of all types. With reference to the recent…
Estimando a necessidade
O objeto deste artigo é o conceito de verdade tal como se articula no oráculo de Ifá cubano; seu objetivo é ilustrar a fecundidade de um "método ontográfico" que procure mapear as premissas ontológicas do discurso nativo por meio da produção de conceitos que, não sendo os conceitos nativos eles mesmos, constituam equivalentes aproximados destes. Enfatizando a afirmação dos praticantes de que o Ifá é infalível, propõe-se que os vereditos divinatór…
Religious 'Speculation
With an ethnographic focus on the prestigious cult of Ifá, this article seeks to account for the recent effervescence of Afro-Cuban cult worship in urban Cuba. It is argued that, since worship involves a marked emphasis on ritual consumption, the cult's rise can be related to wider transformations that have taken place in the field of everyday consumption in Havana during the economic crisis that has followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc. In p…
Thinking Through Things
Book description: Drawing upon the work of some of the most influential theorists in the field, Thinking Through Things demonstrates the quiet revolution growing in anthropology and its related disciplines, shifting its philosophical foundations. The first text to offer a direct and provocative challenge to disciplinary fragmentation - arguing for the futility of segregating the study of artefacts and society - this collection expands on the conc…
The Anthropology of Names and Naming, by Gabrielle Vom Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn
Relationships in motion
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Havana among initiates of the male diviner-cult of Ifá, this paper addresses the classical anthropological conundrum of how to make sense of practitioners’ contention that initiation transforms them into «new people». Taking into account the role of divination in «calling» neophytes, it is shown that Ifá initiation involves an accumulation of relationships with deities and fellow initiates that are «internal» in…
Ontography and Alterity
This article holds that deeply entrenched assumptions about the nature, provenance, and value of truth can be brought into view and examined critically when set against the backdrop of a radically different set of concepts and practices that are associated with truth seeking in contemporary Afro-Cuban divination. Drawing briefly on an ethnographic analysis of the ways in which Cuban cult practitioners use oracles, the article seeks to formulate a…
Ontology, Ethnography, Archaeology
In commenting on the preceding articles of the Special Section, this afterword elaborates on the methodological and analytical implications for archaeology of the ontological alterity of animist phenomena. If such phenomena are challenging because they transgress the conceptual coordinates of archaeologists' habitual interpretive repertoires (mind vs matter, materiality vs culture, etc.), then what might archaeology's response to such challenges …
Technologies of the Imagination
Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture
Introduction
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
Raising the Anti-, or Relativism Squared
This response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, "The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy," presents some thoughts on how the debates about "relativism" upon which Smith comments could be refigured in the light of this symposium's theme of "comparative relativism." If the notion of relativism can be rendered relative unto itself, as the notion of a "comparative" relativism would seem to suggest, then how might one understand its "position" w…
Worlds Otherwise
The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University ("'Worlds Otherwise': Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference," convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss…
Revolutionary securitization
This article proposes an anthropological extension of the so-called Copenhagen School theory of securitization in International Relations. In contrast to existing attempts to show how, suitably elaborated, this model can be ‘applied’ to various non-Western contexts, our anthropological strategy is to use the contingency of empirical materials (namely the Cuban Revolution and the political forms it instantiates) as a means for transforming the bas…
Contemporary Cosmologies, Critical Reimaginings
How far is the ethnographic study of 'cosmologies' relevant to contemporary anthropology, and how might it illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? In this article we argue for a renewed anthropological interest in matters cosmological by seeking to disentangle the study of cosmology from the concomitants with which it was associated in earlier periods of anthropological research. In particular, we argue that an orientation toward cos…
Truth in Motion
In Truth in Motion, Martin Holbraad takes on the challenge of explaining why Cuban diviners, when consulting the deities orisha, sometimes appear to produce demonstrably false statements. Rather than dismissing such statements as evidence of faulty reasoning, Holbraad argues that they are in fact generative of truth. He draws on ethnographic fieldwork among Cuban Ifá and Santería practitioners to develop a radical, practice-based theory of truth.…
Truth beyond doubt
This article analyzes the concept of truth on which the practice of Ifá divination in Cuba turns. Motivated ethnographically by Ifá practitioners' claims that the truths their oracles issue are indubitable, I argue that from the viewpoint of commonplace conceptions of truth such an assumption can only be interpreted as absurd. To avoid such an imputation, the article is devoted to reconceptualizing what might count as truth in such an ethnographi…
Times of Security
In the current world disorder, security is on everyone's lips. But what is security from a cross-cultural perspective? How is it imagined and experienced by people on the ground? Crucially, what visions of the future are at stake in people's potentially divergent concerns with security: what, and when, is the time of security? Exploring diverse notions and experiences of time involved in security practices across the globe, this volume brings tog…
Times of security
In the current world disorder, security is on everyone's lips. But what is security from a cross-cultural perspective? How is it imagined and experienced by people on the ground? Crucially, what visions of the future are at stake in people's potentially divergent concerns with security: what, and when, is the time of security? Exploring diverse notions and experiences of time involved in security practices across the globe, this volume brings tog…
Scoping Recursivity
Commenting on two articles that have appealed to the notion of 'recursivity' to articulate new directions for anthropological thinking, this piece seeks to clarify the scope of a recursive turn in contemporary anthropology, distinguishing it from elements of recursivity that have always been present in the discipline's epistemic procedures
Revolución o muerte
With reference to the experience of the Cuban Revolution, this article addresses what may be called the 'late revolutionary paradox': How can so many people in countries such as Cuba continue to pledge visceral allegiance to their revolution while at the same time expressing deep disaffection with it? My main claim is that the paradox is a product of an undue analytical emphasis on the ideological content of revolutionary discourse, with its mant…
Relative Native
Social Media in Rural China
for inviting me to present and receive feedback on
The Ontological Turn
A new and often controversial theoretical orientation that resonates strongly with wider developments in contemporary philosophy and social theory, the so-called 'ontological turn' is receiving a great deal of attention in anthropology and cognate disciplines at present. This book provides the first anthropological exposition of this recent intellectual development. It traces the roots of the ontological turn in the history of anthropology and el…
Sociology (28 obras) · Philosophy (21 obras) · Epistemology (20 obras) · Political science (19 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (16 obras) · Anthropology (13 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Computer Science (12 obras) · Ethnography (12 obras) · Cuban History and Society (10 obras)