A Bernstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 37750 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Bernstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Bernstein |
| SIGNATURE | BERNSTEIN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0822-4282 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 130 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1889 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Resurrection Is Possible Not Only for People
, , - . , - , -
Pleistocene Park: Engineering Wilderness in a More-than-Human World
Saying What the Law Is
Exploring what it means to take formal law as an ethnographic object—a social phenomenon that both reflects and affects the society that produced it—this article analyzes the legal doctrine governing the judicial review of agency action. This doctrine is split into two streams: one evaluates agency interpretations of law, the other, agency policy decisions. In choosing to use one or the other, courts thus implicitly categorize the agency action u…
The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia
Porous Bureaucracy: Legitimating the Administrative State in Taiwan
Scholars and politicians have sometimes presented bureaucracy as inherently conflicting with democracy. But bureaucrats themselves are rarely consulted about that relationship. In contrast, I draw on interviews and participant observation to illuminate how government administrators understand their own place in the government of Taiwan, one of the few successful third wave democracies. The administrators I work with root their own legitimacy not …
Life, unlimited: Russian archives of the digital and the human
Since the end of the Soviet Union, questions of memory and history have been at the centre of public debates, often focused on the institutions of archives and libraries. This article considers a particular incarnation ofarkhivnaia bolezn'(archival disease, roughly archival fever) with genealogies going back to the pre-revolutionary writings of the visionary nineteenth-century philosopher-librarian Nikolai Fedorov. Specifically, I examine practic…
The Songs of Other Birds
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Sacred necropolitics: A dialogue on Alexei Yurchak’s essay, “The canon and the mushroom: Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse
In this meditation, Anya Bernstein and Alexei Yurchak discuss Yurchak's essay, "The canon and the mushroom: Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse," which is published in the current issue. They elaborate on some points in the essay that are central for the understanding of the figure of "Lenin" and its role in Soviet history, take them in new directions, and link them to other topics that are relevant to anthropology. The themes discussed includ…
Love and Resurrection: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia
In this article, I discuss two "crimes of compassion"-one a mercy killing and the other what I refer to as a "mercy resurrection"-as key illustrations of the changing landscape of necropolitical governmentality in Russia some 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such practices present unanticipated challenges to the state control of death, producing irregular yet ultimately normative narratives of what counts as pathological, as life …
Freeze, die, come to life: The many paths to immortality in post-Soviet Russia
Through practices such as cryonics and plans to build robotic bodies for future "consciousness transfer," the Russian transhumanist movement has engendered competing practices of immortality as well as ontological debates over the immortal body and person. Drawing on an ethnography of these practices and plans, I explore controversies around religion and secularism within the movement as well as the conflict between transhumanists and the Russian…
The impossible object: Relics, property, and the secular in post‐Soviet Russia (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
The article analyzes a recent court case concerning the relics of two 14th‐century Russian Orthodox saints, during which the Russian state ruled to confiscate the relics from the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church. I examine the church's attempts to fight back, paying particular attention to how the conflicting parties have differently framed the disputed objects' materiality. In doing so, I link the ongoing debates over whether dead bodies can b…
Caution, Religion! Iconoclasm, Secularism, and Ways of Seeing in Post-Soviet Art Wars
This article looks at recent Russian lawsuits accusing artists and curators of “inciting religious hatred.” It seeks to explain the reasons behind these controversies by considering the respective scopic regimes informing several exhibits and subsequent trials from 1998 to 2010. One might expect members of the post-Soviet Russian intelligentsia to unanimously back the accused artists and thus to adhere to semiotic ideologies similar to those of t…
Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism
An Inadvertent Sacrifice: Body Politics and Sovereign Power in the Pussy Riot Affair
Semiotic technologies, temporal reckoning, and the portability of meaning. Or: Modern modes of temporality – just how abstract are they
This essay is about meaning and measurement, with particular emphasis on the relation between semiotic technologies and temporal reckoning. It begins by theorizing four ways of framing time. Temporality as metricality focuses on the repetition of tokens of common types. Temporality as performativity focuses on the roots and fruits of a given event. Temporality as reckoning focuses on how one determines when an event occurred or how long an event …
More Alive Than All the Living: Sovereign Bodies and Cosmic Politics in Buddhist Siberia
This article explores religious practice among Buryats, a Siberian people, through scholarship on sovereignty and the body. Under conditions of rapid social transformation such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, certain religious bodies became key sites through which Buryats have negotiated their relationship with the Russian state and the larger Tibeto-Mongol and Eurasian Budd…
The Post-Soviet Treasure Hunt: Time, Space, and Necropolitics in Siberian Buddhism
In September 2002, Buddhist lamas of the Ivolginsk monastery in the post-Soviet Republic of Buryatia in southern Siberia accompanied by independent forensic experts performed an exhumation of the body of Dashi-Dorzho Itigelov, the last head lama from the time of the Russian empire, who died in 1927. The body of the lama, found in the lotus position, allegedly had not deteriorated, and soon rumors spread that the lama was alive and had returned to…
Pilgrims, Fieldworkers, and Secret Agents: Buryat Buddhologists and the History of an Eurasian Imaginary
This article looks at the pre-Revolutionary history of Buryats' engagement with greater Eurasia, drawing on the legacies of the long underappreciated Russian Buddhological school and exploring the intellectual and political context of its emergence in the late nineteenth century. Exploring the role of Russian Orientalists and political figures such as the Orientalists V.P. Vasil'ev and Prince E.E. Ukhtomskii, and taking a close look at the fieldw…
Remapping Sacred Landscapes: Shamanic Tourism and Cultural Production on the Olkhon Island
This article looks at the particular ways in which shamanic sacred places are being constructed through tourist performances. Focusing on the guided tours in Olkhon Island conducted by a Buryat shaman, the article maps out the various meanings of this tourist phenomenon in the context of Buryat shamanic revival. It interprets tourist performances as forms of social action and as a paradigmatic example of how contemporary Buryats fashion their eth…
The Social Life of Regulation in Taipei City Hall: The Role of Legality in the Administrative Bureaucracy
This article explores the role of legality in conceptions of state and society among bureaucrats in the Taipei, Taiwan city government. When administrators confront the global arena, the existence of law emblematizes modernity and the ability to participate in the international system. In interactions among administrators, law is laden with impossible ideals and fraught with assumptions of hypocrisy. In dealings with people outside the government…
The Moderation Dilemma: Legislative Coalitions and the Politics of Family and Medical Leave
effort to legislate family and medical leave policies in the United States illustrates a at the heart of the American political process. Faced with strong opposition from business lobbies, proponents of leaves in the late 1980s and early 1990s had to balance their desire to pass the policy they wanted against the desire to pass a policy at all. In this lucid and timely book, Anya Bernstein analyzes how this moderation dilemma played out at the fe…
The Moderation Dilemma: Legislative Coalitions and the Politics of Family and Medical Leave
Inside or Outside? The Politics of Family and Medical Leave
The efforts of interest groups to pass family and medical leave policies are illustrative of a dilemma confronting advocates of policy innovation. Faced with strong opposition from business lobbies and in many cases reluctant legislatures and veto‐wielding executives, proponents of family and medical leave had to balance their desire to pass the policy they wanted against their desire to pass a policy. This study examines the family and medical l…
Häufiger benutzte Abkürzungen
Commentary on Esther
An Inadvertent Sacrifice: Body Politics and Sovereign Power in the Pussy Riot Affair
Caution, Religion! Iconoclasm, Secularism, and Ways of Seeing in Post-Soviet Art Wars
This article looks at recent Russian lawsuits accusing artists and curators of “inciting religious hatred.” It seeks to explain the reasons behind these controversies by considering the respective scopic regimes informing several exhibits and subsequent trials from 1998 to 2010. One might expect members of the post-Soviet Russian intelligentsia to unanimously back the accused artists and thus to adhere to semiotic ideologies similar to those of t…
Semiotic technologies, temporal reckoning, and the portability of meaning. Or: Modern modes of temporality – just how abstract are they
This essay is about meaning and measurement, with particular emphasis on the relation between semiotic technologies and temporal reckoning. It begins by theorizing four ways of framing time. Temporality as metricality focuses on the repetition of tokens of common types. Temporality as performativity focuses on the roots and fruits of a given event. Temporality as reckoning focuses on how one determines when an event occurred or how long an event …
The Post-Soviet Treasure Hunt: Time, Space, and Necropolitics in Siberian Buddhism
In September 2002, Buddhist lamas of the Ivolginsk monastery in the post-Soviet Republic of Buryatia in southern Siberia accompanied by independent forensic experts performed an exhumation of the body of Dashi-Dorzho Itigelov, the last head lama from the time of the Russian empire, who died in 1927. The body of the lama, found in the lotus position, allegedly had not deteriorated, and soon rumors spread that the lama was alive and had returned to…
Freeze, die, come to life: The many paths to immortality in post-Soviet Russia
Through practices such as cryonics and plans to build robotic bodies for future "consciousness transfer," the Russian transhumanist movement has engendered competing practices of immortality as well as ontological debates over the immortal body and person. Drawing on an ethnography of these practices and plans, I explore controversies around religion and secularism within the movement as well as the conflict between transhumanists and the Russian…
More Alive Than All the Living: Sovereign Bodies and Cosmic Politics in Buddhist Siberia
This article explores religious practice among Buryats, a Siberian people, through scholarship on sovereignty and the body. Under conditions of rapid social transformation such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, certain religious bodies became key sites through which Buryats have negotiated their relationship with the Russian state and the larger Tibeto-Mongol and Eurasian Budd…
The Social Life of Regulation in Taipei City Hall: The Role of Legality in the Administrative Bureaucracy
This article explores the role of legality in conceptions of state and society among bureaucrats in the Taipei, Taiwan city government. When administrators confront the global arena, the existence of law emblematizes modernity and the ability to participate in the international system. In interactions among administrators, law is laden with impossible ideals and fraught with assumptions of hypocrisy. In dealings with people outside the government…
Love and Resurrection: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia
In this article, I discuss two "crimes of compassion"-one a mercy killing and the other what I refer to as a "mercy resurrection"-as key illustrations of the changing landscape of necropolitical governmentality in Russia some 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such practices present unanticipated challenges to the state control of death, producing irregular yet ultimately normative narratives of what counts as pathological, as life …
Remapping Sacred Landscapes: Shamanic Tourism and Cultural Production on the Olkhon Island
This article looks at the particular ways in which shamanic sacred places are being constructed through tourist performances. Focusing on the guided tours in Olkhon Island conducted by a Buryat shaman, the article maps out the various meanings of this tourist phenomenon in the context of Buryat shamanic revival. It interprets tourist performances as forms of social action and as a paradigmatic example of how contemporary Buryats fashion their eth…
Saying What the Law Is
Exploring what it means to take formal law as an ethnographic object—a social phenomenon that both reflects and affects the society that produced it—this article analyzes the legal doctrine governing the judicial review of agency action. This doctrine is split into two streams: one evaluates agency interpretations of law, the other, agency policy decisions. In choosing to use one or the other, courts thus implicitly categorize the agency action u…
Pleistocene Park: Engineering Wilderness in a More-than-Human World
Pilgrims, Fieldworkers, and Secret Agents: Buryat Buddhologists and the History of an Eurasian Imaginary
This article looks at the pre-Revolutionary history of Buryats' engagement with greater Eurasia, drawing on the legacies of the long underappreciated Russian Buddhological school and exploring the intellectual and political context of its emergence in the late nineteenth century. Exploring the role of Russian Orientalists and political figures such as the Orientalists V.P. Vasil'ev and Prince E.E. Ukhtomskii, and taking a close look at the fieldw…
Porous Bureaucracy: Legitimating the Administrative State in Taiwan
Scholars and politicians have sometimes presented bureaucracy as inherently conflicting with democracy. But bureaucrats themselves are rarely consulted about that relationship. In contrast, I draw on interviews and participant observation to illuminate how government administrators understand their own place in the government of Taiwan, one of the few successful third wave democracies. The administrators I work with root their own legitimacy not …
Life, unlimited: Russian archives of the digital and the human
Since the end of the Soviet Union, questions of memory and history have been at the centre of public debates, often focused on the institutions of archives and libraries. This article considers a particular incarnation ofarkhivnaia bolezn'(archival disease, roughly archival fever) with genealogies going back to the pre-revolutionary writings of the visionary nineteenth-century philosopher-librarian Nikolai Fedorov. Specifically, I examine practic…
Sacred necropolitics: A dialogue on Alexei Yurchak’s essay, “The canon and the mushroom: Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse
In this meditation, Anya Bernstein and Alexei Yurchak discuss Yurchak's essay, "The canon and the mushroom: Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse," which is published in the current issue. They elaborate on some points in the essay that are central for the understanding of the figure of "Lenin" and its role in Soviet history, take them in new directions, and link them to other topics that are relevant to anthropology. The themes discussed includ…
The impossible object: Relics, property, and the secular in post‐Soviet Russia (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
The article analyzes a recent court case concerning the relics of two 14th‐century Russian Orthodox saints, during which the Russian state ruled to confiscate the relics from the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church. I examine the church's attempts to fight back, paying particular attention to how the conflicting parties have differently framed the disputed objects' materiality. In doing so, I link the ongoing debates over whether dead bodies can b…
Inside or Outside? The Politics of Family and Medical Leave
The efforts of interest groups to pass family and medical leave policies are illustrative of a dilemma confronting advocates of policy innovation. Faced with strong opposition from business lobbies and in many cases reluctant legislatures and veto‐wielding executives, proponents of family and medical leave had to balance their desire to pass the policy they wanted against their desire to pass a policy. This study examines the family and medical l…
Commentary on Esther
Häufiger benutzte Abkürzungen
Inside or Outside? The Politics of Family and Medical Leave
The efforts of interest groups to pass family and medical leave policies are illustrative of a dilemma confronting advocates of policy innovation. Faced with strong opposition from business lobbies and in many cases reluctant legislatures and veto‐wielding executives, proponents of family and medical leave had to balance their desire to pass the policy they wanted against their desire to pass a policy. This study examines the family and medical l…
The Moderation Dilemma: Legislative Coalitions and the Politics of Family and Medical Leave
The Moderation Dilemma: Legislative Coalitions and the Politics of Family and Medical Leave
effort to legislate family and medical leave policies in the United States illustrates a at the heart of the American political process. Faced with strong opposition from business lobbies, proponents of leaves in the late 1980s and early 1990s had to balance their desire to pass the policy they wanted against the desire to pass a policy at all. In this lucid and timely book, Anya Bernstein analyzes how this moderation dilemma played out at the fe…
Remapping Sacred Landscapes: Shamanic Tourism and Cultural Production on the Olkhon Island
This article looks at the particular ways in which shamanic sacred places are being constructed through tourist performances. Focusing on the guided tours in Olkhon Island conducted by a Buryat shaman, the article maps out the various meanings of this tourist phenomenon in the context of Buryat shamanic revival. It interprets tourist performances as forms of social action and as a paradigmatic example of how contemporary Buryats fashion their eth…
The Social Life of Regulation in Taipei City Hall: The Role of Legality in the Administrative Bureaucracy
This article explores the role of legality in conceptions of state and society among bureaucrats in the Taipei, Taiwan city government. When administrators confront the global arena, the existence of law emblematizes modernity and the ability to participate in the international system. In interactions among administrators, law is laden with impossible ideals and fraught with assumptions of hypocrisy. In dealings with people outside the government…
Pilgrims, Fieldworkers, and Secret Agents: Buryat Buddhologists and the History of an Eurasian Imaginary
This article looks at the pre-Revolutionary history of Buryats' engagement with greater Eurasia, drawing on the legacies of the long underappreciated Russian Buddhological school and exploring the intellectual and political context of its emergence in the late nineteenth century. Exploring the role of Russian Orientalists and political figures such as the Orientalists V.P. Vasil'ev and Prince E.E. Ukhtomskii, and taking a close look at the fieldw…
The Post-Soviet Treasure Hunt: Time, Space, and Necropolitics in Siberian Buddhism
In September 2002, Buddhist lamas of the Ivolginsk monastery in the post-Soviet Republic of Buryatia in southern Siberia accompanied by independent forensic experts performed an exhumation of the body of Dashi-Dorzho Itigelov, the last head lama from the time of the Russian empire, who died in 1927. The body of the lama, found in the lotus position, allegedly had not deteriorated, and soon rumors spread that the lama was alive and had returned to…
Semiotic technologies, temporal reckoning, and the portability of meaning. Or: Modern modes of temporality – just how abstract are they
This essay is about meaning and measurement, with particular emphasis on the relation between semiotic technologies and temporal reckoning. It begins by theorizing four ways of framing time. Temporality as metricality focuses on the repetition of tokens of common types. Temporality as performativity focuses on the roots and fruits of a given event. Temporality as reckoning focuses on how one determines when an event occurred or how long an event …
More Alive Than All the Living: Sovereign Bodies and Cosmic Politics in Buddhist Siberia
This article explores religious practice among Buryats, a Siberian people, through scholarship on sovereignty and the body. Under conditions of rapid social transformation such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, certain religious bodies became key sites through which Buryats have negotiated their relationship with the Russian state and the larger Tibeto-Mongol and Eurasian Budd…
Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism
An Inadvertent Sacrifice: Body Politics and Sovereign Power in the Pussy Riot Affair
The impossible object: Relics, property, and the secular in post‐Soviet Russia (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
The article analyzes a recent court case concerning the relics of two 14th‐century Russian Orthodox saints, during which the Russian state ruled to confiscate the relics from the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church. I examine the church's attempts to fight back, paying particular attention to how the conflicting parties have differently framed the disputed objects' materiality. In doing so, I link the ongoing debates over whether dead bodies can b…
Caution, Religion! Iconoclasm, Secularism, and Ways of Seeing in Post-Soviet Art Wars
This article looks at recent Russian lawsuits accusing artists and curators of “inciting religious hatred.” It seeks to explain the reasons behind these controversies by considering the respective scopic regimes informing several exhibits and subsequent trials from 1998 to 2010. One might expect members of the post-Soviet Russian intelligentsia to unanimously back the accused artists and thus to adhere to semiotic ideologies similar to those of t…
Freeze, die, come to life: The many paths to immortality in post-Soviet Russia
Through practices such as cryonics and plans to build robotic bodies for future "consciousness transfer," the Russian transhumanist movement has engendered competing practices of immortality as well as ontological debates over the immortal body and person. Drawing on an ethnography of these practices and plans, I explore controversies around religion and secularism within the movement as well as the conflict between transhumanists and the Russian…
Love and Resurrection: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia
In this article, I discuss two "crimes of compassion"-one a mercy killing and the other what I refer to as a "mercy resurrection"-as key illustrations of the changing landscape of necropolitical governmentality in Russia some 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such practices present unanticipated challenges to the state control of death, producing irregular yet ultimately normative narratives of what counts as pathological, as life …
Sacred necropolitics: A dialogue on Alexei Yurchak’s essay, “The canon and the mushroom: Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse
In this meditation, Anya Bernstein and Alexei Yurchak discuss Yurchak's essay, "The canon and the mushroom: Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse," which is published in the current issue. They elaborate on some points in the essay that are central for the understanding of the figure of "Lenin" and its role in Soviet history, take them in new directions, and link them to other topics that are relevant to anthropology. The themes discussed includ…
The Songs of Other Birds
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia
Porous Bureaucracy: Legitimating the Administrative State in Taiwan
Scholars and politicians have sometimes presented bureaucracy as inherently conflicting with democracy. But bureaucrats themselves are rarely consulted about that relationship. In contrast, I draw on interviews and participant observation to illuminate how government administrators understand their own place in the government of Taiwan, one of the few successful third wave democracies. The administrators I work with root their own legitimacy not …
Life, unlimited: Russian archives of the digital and the human
Since the end of the Soviet Union, questions of memory and history have been at the centre of public debates, often focused on the institutions of archives and libraries. This article considers a particular incarnation ofarkhivnaia bolezn'(archival disease, roughly archival fever) with genealogies going back to the pre-revolutionary writings of the visionary nineteenth-century philosopher-librarian Nikolai Fedorov. Specifically, I examine practic…
Saying What the Law Is
Exploring what it means to take formal law as an ethnographic object—a social phenomenon that both reflects and affects the society that produced it—this article analyzes the legal doctrine governing the judicial review of agency action. This doctrine is split into two streams: one evaluates agency interpretations of law, the other, agency policy decisions. In choosing to use one or the other, courts thus implicitly categorize the agency action u…
Resurrection Is Possible Not Only for People
, , - . , - , -
Pleistocene Park: Engineering Wilderness in a More-than-Human World
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Politics (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · History (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (7 works)