N Langlitz
Biographic Data
| ID | 48356 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Langlitz |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Langlitz |
| SIGNATURE | LANGLITZ N |
| AFFILIATIONS | New School |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5631-8494 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 67 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 67 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Experiments in medicalization
What Ever Happened to the Anthropology of Science? From the Science Wars to the Post-Truth Era
The anthropology of science emerged in the 1980s as a critique of science and technocracy, exposing the social construction of scientific facts and their role in reinforcing ideologies such as capitalism, racism, and gender inequality. This project positioned anthropologists as challengers of scientific authority, culminating in the science wars of the 1990s. By the 2000s, the political landscape shifted as climate skeptics appropriated social co…
Psychedelic innovations and the crisis of psychopharmacology
The moral economy of diversity
We may well be witnessing a decisive event in the history of knowledge as diversity is becoming one of the premier values of late modern societies. We seek to preserve and foster biodiversity, neurodiversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and perspectival diversity. Perspectival diversity has become the passage point through which other forms of diversity must pass to become episte…
Anthropology Bright and Dark
In "Dark Anthropology," Sherry Ortner questions the critical potential of anthropological studies of ethics, and particularly of research focused on studying cultural articulations of the good. She promotes instead the study of people's critiques of the neoliberal darkness that besets their lives. Suggesting that critical, dark anthropology is handicapped by opposing itself to the study of the good, I reconsider the critical potential of the anth…
The making of a mushroom people
As regulatory agencies have put psychedelics on an expedited path to market approval, North Americans and Europeans might turn away from their repression and join the subset of cultures that have institutionalized the use of hallucinogenic drugs. What is the place of anthropology in this psychedelic renaissance? More specifically, how should anthropology relate to the cycles of hype and anti-hype, which have been identified as a recurrent pattern…
Paul Rabinow (1944-2021)
If only there was a Department of Fieldwork in Philosophy
Fieldwork in philosophy amounts to a second-order philosophical anthropology. It examines contemporary forms of the human by attending to lower-level concepts and practices. It departs from Michel Foucault’s gray and meticulous approach to the history of the present, which understands the transformation of high-level organizing concepts such as “Man” or “the subject” through an inquiry into scientific discourses, clinical practices, disciplinary …
Moral Psychopharmacology Needs Moral Inquiry
The revival of psychedelic research coincided and more recently conjoined with psychopharmacological research on how drugs affect moral judgments and behaviors. This article makes the case for a moral psychopharmacology of psychedelics that examines whether psychedelics serve as non-specific amplifiers that enable subjects to (re-)connect with their values, or whether they promote specific moral-political orientations such as liberal and anti-aut…
Natural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism
Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumNatural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism On the making of a philosophical anthropologist Daston, Lorraine. 2019. Against nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Nicolas LanglitzNicolas LanglitzNew School for Social Research Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code Sections…
Chimpanzee Culture Wars
"Do apes share with humans the capacity to acquire qualities not inherent in their nature? Debates within the field of primatology over the last century keep coming back to this fundamental question, which compels us to reexamine our understanding of culture and of the nature-culture divide. This book is an ethnography that examines both the modern history of this controversy and its contemporary manifestations in both Japanese and Euro-American …
Salvage Primatology
This chapter assesses how cultural primatologists fought for the conservation and documentation of quickly dwindling chimpanzee communities. As Homo sapiens outcompeted Pan troglodytes in sub-Saharan Africa, Christophe Boesch, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, and the first generation of African primatologists forged alliances and made enemies in their attempts to prolong the coexistence of humans and apes for a few more years. In West Africa, the chimpanzee cu…
Prologue
SITTING ON A NARROW STRIP of savanna, which the Gabonese maintained between the coastal forest swamps to our left and the deep somber rainforest to our right, I thought of Andrew Battell. During the two and a half years he had lived in Loango, the seventeenth-century British merchant had maintained a healthy respect, even wariness, of these woods so “covered with baboons, monkeys, apes and parrots, that it will fear any man to travel in them alon…
Chimpanzee Culture Wars
Lockdown texts
Chimpanzee ethnography in the face of humankind's savage success
La primatologie culturelle récapitule l'anthropologie culturelle. Dans les années 1980, au moment même où nombre d'anthropologues culturels abandonnaient le concept de culture, en particulier aux États-Unis, les ethnographes des chimpanzés l'adoptèrent pour décrire les variations comportementales des communautés de grands singes vivant dans des espaces géographiquement distincts. Tout comme leurs collègues en sciences humaines qui en avaient fait…
Warning against and experimenting with morality
Devil's advocate
This essay polemicizes against contemporary anthropology's ubiquitous moralism and its demand for engagement. It does so by trying on the glasses of evolutionary theories of moral behavior. If we take Homo sapiens to be a moralistic ape and consider that anthropologists are members of the species they study, their moralizing appears only natural. In the past decade, however, the moral and political landscapes of North America and Europe have chan…
Organized polemics
Psychedelic science as cosmic play, psychedelic humanities as perennial polemics? Or why we are still fighting over Max Weber's Science as a Vocation
If it was indeed the fate of scientific work to become obsolete within 10-15 years, as Max Weber contended in Science as a Vocation, why does the Journal of Classical Sociology publish this article a century after publication of his famous lecture? Departing from anthropological fieldwork on the revival of psychedelic science since the 1990s, the author gives two answers. First, Weber provided a historically and culturally situated ideal type of …
Primatology of Science
This article situates actor-network theory in the history of evolutionary anthropology. In the 1980s, this attempt at explaining the social through the mediation of nonhumans received important impulses from Bruno Latour's conversations with primatologist Shirley Strum. In a re-articulation of social evolutionism, they proposed that the utilization of objects distinguished humans from baboons and that the use of a growing number of objects set in…
Making babies in a new old world
Poieses
Salvage and self-loathing
We understand our time as one in which human culture remakes nature. But Japanese and Euro-American primatologists have come to question whether humans are the only primates capable of culture. Chimpanzee ethnographers observe different chimpanzee communities which share much of their lives with different human communities. The resulting diversity of cultures has become the eye through which all scientific claims about chimpanzee nature must pass…
Life’s afterlives
Anthropology Bright and Dark
In "Dark Anthropology," Sherry Ortner questions the critical potential of anthropological studies of ethics, and particularly of research focused on studying cultural articulations of the good. She promotes instead the study of people's critiques of the neoliberal darkness that besets their lives. Suggesting that critical, dark anthropology is handicapped by opposing itself to the study of the good, I reconsider the critical potential of the anth…
Pharmacovigilance and Post-Black Market Surveillance
Pharmacovigilance can be defined as a set of practices aiming at the detection, understanding and assessment of risks related to the use of drugs in a population, and the prevention of consequential adverse effects. In a narrower sense, the term refers exclusively to postmarket surveillance. This paper briefly outlines how pharmacovigilance has come to play a central role in the regulation of novel pharmaceuticals. However, the focus of the text …
The persistence of the subjective in neuropsychopharmacology
The elimination of subjectivity through brain research and the replacement of so-called "folk psychology" by a neuroscientifically enlightened worldview and self-conception has been both hoped for and feared. But this cultural revolution is still pending. Based on nine months of fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research since the "Decade of the Brain," this paper examines how subjective experience appears as epistemic object and practical…
Psychedelic science as cosmic play, psychedelic humanities as perennial polemics? Or why we are still fighting over Max Weber's Science as a Vocation
If it was indeed the fate of scientific work to become obsolete within 10-15 years, as Max Weber contended in Science as a Vocation, why does the Journal of Classical Sociology publish this article a century after publication of his famous lecture? Departing from anthropological fieldwork on the revival of psychedelic science since the 1990s, the author gives two answers. First, Weber provided a historically and culturally situated ideal type of …
The making of a mushroom people
As regulatory agencies have put psychedelics on an expedited path to market approval, North Americans and Europeans might turn away from their repression and join the subset of cultures that have institutionalized the use of hallucinogenic drugs. What is the place of anthropology in this psychedelic renaissance? More specifically, how should anthropology relate to the cycles of hype and anti-hype, which have been identified as a recurrent pattern…
Devil's advocate
This essay polemicizes against contemporary anthropology's ubiquitous moralism and its demand for engagement. It does so by trying on the glasses of evolutionary theories of moral behavior. If we take Homo sapiens to be a moralistic ape and consider that anthropologists are members of the species they study, their moralizing appears only natural. In the past decade, however, the moral and political landscapes of North America and Europe have chan…
Warning against and experimenting with morality
Primatology of Science
This article situates actor-network theory in the history of evolutionary anthropology. In the 1980s, this attempt at explaining the social through the mediation of nonhumans received important impulses from Bruno Latour's conversations with primatologist Shirley Strum. In a re-articulation of social evolutionism, they proposed that the utilization of objects distinguished humans from baboons and that the use of a growing number of objects set in…
On a not so chance encounter of neurophilosophy and science studies in a sleep laboratory
This article was inspired by participant observation of a contemporary collaboration between empirically oriented philosophers of mind and neuroscientists. An encounter between this anthropologist of science and neurophilosophers in a Finnish sleep laboratory led to the following philosophical exploration of the intellectual space shared by neurophilosophy and science studies. Since these fields emerged in the 1970s, scholars from both sides have…
Vatted dreams
Despite much social-scientific work on the neurosciences, little ethnographic and historical attention has been paid to the field of neurophilosophy. Yet anthropologists studying brain research occasionally critique neurophilosophers for reducing the mind to the brain while affirmatively citing philosophers of mind who present the mind as emerging from interactions between brain, body, and environment. This article examines the ostracized camp of…
The End of the Soul
The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France. Jennifer Michael Hecht. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 402 pp
What Ever Happened to the Anthropology of Science? From the Science Wars to the Post-Truth Era
The anthropology of science emerged in the 1980s as a critique of science and technocracy, exposing the social construction of scientific facts and their role in reinforcing ideologies such as capitalism, racism, and gender inequality. This project positioned anthropologists as challengers of scientific authority, culminating in the science wars of the 1990s. By the 2000s, the political landscape shifted as climate skeptics appropriated social co…
Is There a Place for Psychedelics in Philosophy
Based on anthropological fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research as well as on the epistemic culture of neurophilosophy, this Common Knowledge guest column examines two very different philosophical engagements with psychedelic drugs. In Thomas Metzinger's evidence-based philosophy of mind, hallucinogens help to operationalize questions about the nature of consciousness. While this project contributes to the great divide between empirica…
Biosecurity
The moral economy of diversity
We may well be witnessing a decisive event in the history of knowledge as diversity is becoming one of the premier values of late modern societies. We seek to preserve and foster biodiversity, neurodiversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and perspectival diversity. Perspectival diversity has become the passage point through which other forms of diversity must pass to become episte…
Salvage and self-loathing
We understand our time as one in which human culture remakes nature. But Japanese and Euro-American primatologists have come to question whether humans are the only primates capable of culture. Chimpanzee ethnographers observe different chimpanzee communities which share much of their lives with different human communities. The resulting diversity of cultures has become the eye through which all scientific claims about chimpanzee nature must pass…
Biosecurity
Ceci n’est pas une psychose. Toward a Historical Epistemology of Model Psychoses
The End of the Soul
The End of the Soul
The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France. Jennifer Michael Hecht. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 402 pp
The New Old Books Forum
Pharmacovigilance and Post-Black Market Surveillance
Pharmacovigilance can be defined as a set of practices aiming at the detection, understanding and assessment of risks related to the use of drugs in a population, and the prevention of consequential adverse effects. In a narrower sense, the term refers exclusively to postmarket surveillance. This paper briefly outlines how pharmacovigilance has come to play a central role in the regulation of novel pharmaceuticals. However, the focus of the text …
Psychopharmacological enhancement discussed across disciplines
Cognitive enhancement
Public knowledge and the life sciences
Biosciences, ethics and collaborations
The Books Forum authors in conversation
The persistence of the subjective in neuropsychopharmacology
The elimination of subjectivity through brain research and the replacement of so-called "folk psychology" by a neuroscientifically enlightened worldview and self-conception has been both hoped for and feared. But this cultural revolution is still pending. Based on nine months of fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research since the "Decade of the Brain," this paper examines how subjective experience appears as epistemic object and practical…
Cultural brains and neural histories
Alien forms of life
Is there an Asian biopolitics
Contemporary physiology of art
Prosocial primates for benevolent biosocieties
Autism
Aristotelian neurophilosophy for big children
Securing life against life
After the Science Wars
Psychedelics
Neuro, Neuro, Neuro
Cosmopolitics revisited
Animal sciences at sea and in the zoo
Psychology (46 works) · Diathesis–stress model (37 works) · Medical tourism (37 works) · Neuroscience (36 works) · Dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia (35 works) · Political science (34 works) · Psychiatry (33 works) · Law (30 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Philosophy (24 works)