Gregory Duff Morton
Biographic Data
| ID | 469763 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gregory Duff Morton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gregory Duff |
| FAMILY NAME | Morton |
| SIGNATURE | MORTON G D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bard College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6945-6650 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The ABCs of Motives
Why should we consider an anthropology of motives? Because anthropologists see motion everywhere. The field has focused for decades on describing processes, practices, and action. This “motion zeitgeist” calls our attention to questions about why people act as they do—that is, in Burke's sense, to questions about motive. Motive claims are abundant in anthropological analysis, but they are often implicit, baked into our accounts of motion. Seeking…
Property and the Matter of Belonging
Belonging and matter serve as entry points into the conceptual and political stakes of this inquiry into property. The articles in this collection explore relations of belonging as they occur through forms of property, as objects and subjects gather and are gathered together amid and by differentials of power. We suggest that the matters of belonging that unfold through property also constitute terrains of struggle, in which belonging is held in …
Do schools build social movements? Education among Brazil's MST landless activists
What Happened to the Wage
Peer-reviewed
How Work Counts
How do self-employed people count the time that they spend working? I consider this question, in the context of contemporary Northeastern Brazil, by returning to the classic anthropological problem of peasant time accounting. In the drylands of Bahia, smallholding farmers today tend to support themselves through cyclical labor migration between countryside and city. I focus on two sites of self-employment along this circuit: marketplace hawking i…
Neoliberal eclipse
The power of lump sums
Trump, Uber, and the Changing Shape of Work
Managing transience
Bolsa Família, the world's largest conditional cash transfer, provides welfare payments to 13 million Brazilian households - and creates dilemmas for Brazil's rural landless movement, the MST. Through ethnographic analysis in two villages, this paper explores the daily practices and political conceptions of the program's beneficiaries. Bolsa Família does not, as is often believed, create a de-radicalizing sense of contentment. Instead, the progra…
Modern meetings
In the democratic cosmology of Brazil's MST landless movement, a meeting must occur before a decision can be reached—even if the decision was set before the meeting. I examine MST speech habits in an effort to understand the meeting as a symptomatically modern method for producing authoritative discourse. I identify four properties of MST meeting speech: (1) a lexicon that highlights verbs of speech, (2) the enforcement of tight semantic linkages…
Protest Before the Protests
Protest Before the Protests:The Unheard Politics of a Welfare Panic in Brazil Gregory Duff Morton In June 2013, the world woke up to the surprising voices of an unprophesied movement. Thousands of people had swarmed the main avenues of urban Brazil, in city after city, to protest a 20-cent bus fare increase and all that it came to represent: the World Cup, the Olympics, the bursting hospitals, the clogged streets, the facelessness of a developmen…
Modern meetings
In the democratic cosmology of Brazil's MST landless movement, a meeting must occur before a decision can be reached—even if the decision was set before the meeting. I examine MST speech habits in an effort to understand the meeting as a symptomatically modern method for producing authoritative discourse. I identify four properties of MST meeting speech: (1) a lexicon that highlights verbs of speech, (2) the enforcement of tight semantic linkages…
Managing transience
Bolsa Família, the world's largest conditional cash transfer, provides welfare payments to 13 million Brazilian households - and creates dilemmas for Brazil's rural landless movement, the MST. Through ethnographic analysis in two villages, this paper explores the daily practices and political conceptions of the program's beneficiaries. Bolsa Família does not, as is often believed, create a de-radicalizing sense of contentment. Instead, the progra…
Property and the Matter of Belonging
Belonging and matter serve as entry points into the conceptual and political stakes of this inquiry into property. The articles in this collection explore relations of belonging as they occur through forms of property, as objects and subjects gather and are gathered together amid and by differentials of power. We suggest that the matters of belonging that unfold through property also constitute terrains of struggle, in which belonging is held in …
Protest Before the Protests
Protest Before the Protests:The Unheard Politics of a Welfare Panic in Brazil Gregory Duff Morton In June 2013, the world woke up to the surprising voices of an unprophesied movement. Thousands of people had swarmed the main avenues of urban Brazil, in city after city, to protest a 20-cent bus fare increase and all that it came to represent: the World Cup, the Olympics, the bursting hospitals, the clogged streets, the facelessness of a developmen…
What Happened to the Wage
Peer-reviewed
Modern meetings
In the democratic cosmology of Brazil's MST landless movement, a meeting must occur before a decision can be reached—even if the decision was set before the meeting. I examine MST speech habits in an effort to understand the meeting as a symptomatically modern method for producing authoritative discourse. I identify four properties of MST meeting speech: (1) a lexicon that highlights verbs of speech, (2) the enforcement of tight semantic linkages…
Protest Before the Protests
Protest Before the Protests:The Unheard Politics of a Welfare Panic in Brazil Gregory Duff Morton In June 2013, the world woke up to the surprising voices of an unprophesied movement. Thousands of people had swarmed the main avenues of urban Brazil, in city after city, to protest a 20-cent bus fare increase and all that it came to represent: the World Cup, the Olympics, the bursting hospitals, the clogged streets, the facelessness of a developmen…
Managing transience
Bolsa Família, the world's largest conditional cash transfer, provides welfare payments to 13 million Brazilian households - and creates dilemmas for Brazil's rural landless movement, the MST. Through ethnographic analysis in two villages, this paper explores the daily practices and political conceptions of the program's beneficiaries. Bolsa Família does not, as is often believed, create a de-radicalizing sense of contentment. Instead, the progra…
Trump, Uber, and the Changing Shape of Work
Neoliberal eclipse
The power of lump sums
What Happened to the Wage
Peer-reviewed
How Work Counts
How do self-employed people count the time that they spend working? I consider this question, in the context of contemporary Northeastern Brazil, by returning to the classic anthropological problem of peasant time accounting. In the drylands of Bahia, smallholding farmers today tend to support themselves through cyclical labor migration between countryside and city. I focus on two sites of self-employment along this circuit: marketplace hawking i…
Do schools build social movements? Education among Brazil's MST landless activists
Property and the Matter of Belonging
Belonging and matter serve as entry points into the conceptual and political stakes of this inquiry into property. The articles in this collection explore relations of belonging as they occur through forms of property, as objects and subjects gather and are gathered together amid and by differentials of power. We suggest that the matters of belonging that unfold through property also constitute terrains of struggle, in which belonging is held in …
The ABCs of Motives
Why should we consider an anthropology of motives? Because anthropologists see motion everywhere. The field has focused for decades on describing processes, practices, and action. This “motion zeitgeist” calls our attention to questions about why people act as they do—that is, in Burke's sense, to questions about motive. Motive claims are abundant in anthropological analysis, but they are often implicit, baked into our accounts of motion. Seeking…
Political science (9 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Economics (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (3 works) · History (3 works) · Political economy (3 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (2 works)