Richard D G Irvine
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 587864 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Richard D G Irvine |
| NOMBRES | Richard D G |
| APELLIDO | Irvine |
| FIRMA | IRVINE R D G |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0468-4510 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 106 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2010 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
“Mongolians can find their feet anywhere, except in Mongolia”
This article draws on the narratives of Mongolians who have worked in Korea to explore the experience of migrant labour and the role work abroad plays in Mongolian identities and life projects. Four different categories of worker are discussed: those working on 3 month visas; those working illegally having overstayed their visa; contract workers; and workers on student visas. Noting that so many narratives valorise the migrant work ethic and high…
Boredom, despondency, and the scourge that lays waste at noon
Attentive to the ways that inertia can take hold of life, Catholic monks recognize despondency as a potential not only within the monastery, but in contemporary society more widely. Such experiences are regularly mapped onto an understanding of what early Christian monks termed ‘acedia’ (a Greek term that can be translated as ‘lack of care’). Taking as my ethnographic starting point the ways in which monks of an English Benedictine monastery unde…
Plastic Time
The study of plastics reveals a disjuncture in time. Plastic production draws on resources from our deep geological past while driving an accumulation of waste that will survive into the deep future as a marker of our geological agency. Yet the apparently infinite replaceability of plastics narrows our horizons to the present of the eternally new. The ubiquity and disposability of plastic instills in consumers a time sense that is focused on pres…
Concrete Buys Time
Recent engagements with deep time within anthropology have urged an expansion of our time horizons in order to confront the contemporary ecological crisis. Here, we explore this theme by considering concrete’s material properties as a substance that reveals the troubled relationship between the present and deep time. We combine discussion of the life cycle of concrete in Orkney, Scotland, with reflection on sculptural interventions that seek to c…
Absent presence
What does it mean to declare loyalty to the Crown? This article explores the politics of loyalty and the potency of monarchy's set-apart quality. It does so from the vantage point of Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory the Queen had not visited since 1954 as the British government sought to avoid reigniting tensions with Spain. However, under the conditions of this absent presence, a particularly intense form of loyalty has emerged in Gibralt…
Isolation, Solitude and Social Distancing for People Who Use Drugs
COVID-19 has resulted in deepened states of crisis and vulnerability for people who use drugs throughout Europe and across the world, with social distancing measures having far-reaching implications for everyday life. Prolonged periods of isolation and solitude are acknowledged within much addiction literature as negatively impacting the experiences of those in recovery, while also causing harm to active users - many of whom depend on social cont…
Time Horizon
What is the significance of a human life in relation to the timespan of the geological processes that shape and reshape the terrain under our feet? Here, we ask how we might think on a planetary scale while being grounded in the everyday, tracing the relationship between biographical time and geological formation. Examining social relationships through the materiality of sandstone, uranium, and concrete, this paper presents a collaborative deep t…
Experts in Self-Isolation? Monastic Outreach during Lockdown
This paper draws on digital ethnography to examine the experience of a Catholic English Benedictine monastery in the context of restrictions on religious gatherings during the global COVID-19 pandemic. As the monks expand their digital presence and social media involvement, it is their experience of social withdrawal and apparent expertise in self-isolation that provides the grounding for their public engagement. While Max Weber depicts the monk …
Not-Knowing Magic
Our research explores the modern status of magic in two different European island settings: Cyprus and Orkney. By historically and ethnographically addressing the gradual dissolution of magical traditions in our respective fieldsites, our aim is to explore the means and instances by which magic continues to manifest in narratives and everyday practices. By exploring the current epistemological and social standing attributed to magic in Cyprus and…
An Anthropology of Deep Time
In the face of debates about the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - and contemporary concerns about ecological crisis and the Sixth Mass Extinction, it is more important than ever to locate the timeframe of human activity within the deep time of planetary history. This path-breaking book is a timely critical review of the anthropology of time, exploring our human relationship with the timescale of geological formation. Richard …
Just Out of Reach
Perceived in their ideal forms, rationalisation and magic might seem to oppose one another. In this paper, however, rather than placing these forces in sterile opposition, we instead explore the social and relational dynamics through which rationalisation-the dominant epistemological force of modernity-in certain cases provides the conditions of doubt, opacity, and unknowability that makes magical thinking manifest in the everyday mundane. We exp…
Learning to See Climate Change
What are the factors that render environmental concerns salient in people's lives, and under what conditions do people make connections between an abstract concept such as climate change and concrete experiences in their own daily circumstances? Taking as our focus ethnographic work with children in several different ethnographic settings (Barrow, Alaska; Oaxaca, Mexico; Tuv aimag and Uvurkhangai aimag, Mongolia; and East Anglia, United Kingdom),…
The Seekers at the Cloister Gate
Seeing Environmental Violence in Deep Time
What does it mean to do violence in deep time? How is deep time evoked in our understanding of environmental harm? Environmental transformations have figured prominently in the recent history of Mongolia. Shifts in land use have been associated with severe pasture degradation, and the precarity of herding livelihoods has been a factor accelerating urbanization. Most recently, the intensification of mining activity has been a particular source of …
Following the Bear
In Whittlesey and Ramsey, two market towns in the East Anglian fenlands, farm labourers led a ‘Straw Bear’ through the streets; one of an array of Plough Monday customs marking the start of the agricultural year. The practice seems to have come to an end in the early 20th century, when it was forbidden by a police inspector as a form of begging. Yet what was had come to be seen as an unruly and unsavoury practice was renovated as a valued form of…
Our Lady of Ipswich
This article traces the social life of Our Lady of Ipswich, a statue taken to be destroyed during the English Reformation, and the possibility of pilgrimage in the context of dramatic urban change and loss of place memory. Arguing that iconoclasm is not an end-point, we see that the life of the image is not extinguished on the pyre, but is set into motion by conflict surrounding its significance, efficacy, and survival. Indeed, it is not simply t…
Over and under
Drawing on fieldwork in three primary schools in East Cambridgeshire, UK, this paper explores children’s relationships with the places where they live, and the ways in which those relationships are mediated by play, exploration, and narrative imagination. Challenging assumptions of a ‘bubble-wrap generation’ which seem to discount the possibility that children today are able to experience the outdoor environment as a safe space with which they ca…
Anthropocene East Anglia
As we find ourselves in a geological epoch of our own making, it becomes necessary to reconsider the temporal scale of ethnographic enquiry; the effect of human behaviour is shown as a mark in deep time. Focusing on the East Anglian fenland, UK, this article considers the importance of thinking about long-term environmental change for the understanding of human life. First, the article explores the way in which human geological agency has transfo…
Exclusion and reappropriation
Transformations of the landscapes which children inhabit have significant impacts on their lives; yet, due to the limited economic visibility of children's relationships with place, they have little stake in those transformations. Their experience, therefore, illustrates in an acute way the experience of contemporary enclosure as a mode of subordination. Following fieldwork in three primary schools in South Cambridgeshire, UK, we offer an ethnogr…
Anthropology and the study of contradictions
Contradictions constitute one fundamental aspect of human life. Humans are steeped in contradictory thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In this debate, five anthropologists adopt an individual-centered and phenomenological perspective on contradictions. How can one live with them? How to describe them from an anthropological point of view? Should we rethink our dear notion of the "social agent" through that of contradiction
Waterworlds
Deep time
As anthropologists attempt to engage with the emergent idea that we are now living in the ‘Anthropocene’ – a geological epoch of our own making – it becomes important to locate the timeframe of human activity within the deep time of planetary history. This paper asks whether anthropology is properly equipped for this challenge. By discussing the encounter with deep time in the earth sciences, I argue that deep time is not an abstract concept, but…
The Happisburgh footprints in time
This is a reflection on time as it is perceived in coastal environments. As the soft sediments of the East Anglian coast are eroded away, the underlying evidence of past human occupation is revealed. Most recently, after a storm, a set of footprints were revealed in the silt of an extinct estuary at Happisburgh, Norfolk, UK. The footprints are thought to belong to a small group of adults and children, and have been dated to between 780,000 and 1 …
John Clare in the Anthropocene
This article explores what it might mean to interweave social and natural history, taking as its inspiration the work of the English poet John Clare (1793-1864). If Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) is right in suggesting that the recognition that we are now in the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - will force us to re-read human history in the light of planetary history and deep time, John Clare's work provides us with a way of thinki…
Communicating Climate Knowledge
This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five i…
Anthropology and the study of contradictions
Contradictions constitute one fundamental aspect of human life. Humans are steeped in contradictory thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In this debate, five anthropologists adopt an individual-centered and phenomenological perspective on contradictions. How can one live with them? How to describe them from an anthropological point of view? Should we rethink our dear notion of the "social agent" through that of contradiction
Communicating Climate Knowledge
This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five i…
Anthropocene East Anglia
As we find ourselves in a geological epoch of our own making, it becomes necessary to reconsider the temporal scale of ethnographic enquiry; the effect of human behaviour is shown as a mark in deep time. Focusing on the East Anglian fenland, UK, this article considers the importance of thinking about long-term environmental change for the understanding of human life. First, the article explores the way in which human geological agency has transfo…
Exclusion and reappropriation
Transformations of the landscapes which children inhabit have significant impacts on their lives; yet, due to the limited economic visibility of children's relationships with place, they have little stake in those transformations. Their experience, therefore, illustrates in an acute way the experience of contemporary enclosure as a mode of subordination. Following fieldwork in three primary schools in South Cambridgeshire, UK, we offer an ethnogr…
How to read
This paper provides an ethnographic account of reading in a contemporary English Benedictine monastery. It focuses on lectio divina, a particular tradition which has been described as a ‘slow, contemplative praying of scripture’. The use of this method is contextualised historically and compared with other approaches to scripture reading. This paper argues that lectio divina aims to transform the relationship between the reader and text by changi…
Our Lady of Ipswich
This article traces the social life of Our Lady of Ipswich, a statue taken to be destroyed during the English Reformation, and the possibility of pilgrimage in the context of dramatic urban change and loss of place memory. Arguing that iconoclasm is not an end-point, we see that the life of the image is not extinguished on the pyre, but is set into motion by conflict surrounding its significance, efficacy, and survival. Indeed, it is not simply t…
John Clare in the Anthropocene
This article explores what it might mean to interweave social and natural history, taking as its inspiration the work of the English poet John Clare (1793-1864). If Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) is right in suggesting that the recognition that we are now in the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - will force us to re-read human history in the light of planetary history and deep time, John Clare's work provides us with a way of thinki…
Just Out of Reach
Perceived in their ideal forms, rationalisation and magic might seem to oppose one another. In this paper, however, rather than placing these forces in sterile opposition, we instead explore the social and relational dynamics through which rationalisation-the dominant epistemological force of modernity-in certain cases provides the conditions of doubt, opacity, and unknowability that makes magical thinking manifest in the everyday mundane. We exp…
The Happisburgh footprints in time
This is a reflection on time as it is perceived in coastal environments. As the soft sediments of the East Anglian coast are eroded away, the underlying evidence of past human occupation is revealed. Most recently, after a storm, a set of footprints were revealed in the silt of an extinct estuary at Happisburgh, Norfolk, UK. The footprints are thought to belong to a small group of adults and children, and have been dated to between 780,000 and 1 …
Learning to See Climate Change
What are the factors that render environmental concerns salient in people's lives, and under what conditions do people make connections between an abstract concept such as climate change and concrete experiences in their own daily circumstances? Taking as our focus ethnographic work with children in several different ethnographic settings (Barrow, Alaska; Oaxaca, Mexico; Tuv aimag and Uvurkhangai aimag, Mongolia; and East Anglia, United Kingdom),…
Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery
What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnograph…
Concrete Buys Time
Recent engagements with deep time within anthropology have urged an expansion of our time horizons in order to confront the contemporary ecological crisis. Here, we explore this theme by considering concrete’s material properties as a substance that reveals the troubled relationship between the present and deep time. We combine discussion of the life cycle of concrete in Orkney, Scotland, with reflection on sculptural interventions that seek to c…
Not-Knowing Magic
Our research explores the modern status of magic in two different European island settings: Cyprus and Orkney. By historically and ethnographically addressing the gradual dissolution of magical traditions in our respective fieldsites, our aim is to explore the means and instances by which magic continues to manifest in narratives and everyday practices. By exploring the current epistemological and social standing attributed to magic in Cyprus and…
Over and under
Drawing on fieldwork in three primary schools in East Cambridgeshire, UK, this paper explores children’s relationships with the places where they live, and the ways in which those relationships are mediated by play, exploration, and narrative imagination. Challenging assumptions of a ‘bubble-wrap generation’ which seem to discount the possibility that children today are able to experience the outdoor environment as a safe space with which they ca…
How to read
This paper provides an ethnographic account of reading in a contemporary English Benedictine monastery. It focuses on lectio divina, a particular tradition which has been described as a ‘slow, contemplative praying of scripture’. The use of this method is contextualised historically and compared with other approaches to scripture reading. This paper argues that lectio divina aims to transform the relationship between the reader and text by changi…
Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery
What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnograph…
Communicating Climate Knowledge
This forum article is the product of interdisciplinary discussion at a conference on climate histories held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, in early 2011, with the specific aim of building a network around the issue of communicating cultural knowledge of environmental change. The lead articles, by Kirsten Hastrup as an anthropologist and Simon Schaffer as a historian of science, highlight the role of agents and proxies. These are followed by five i…
John Clare in the Anthropocene
This article explores what it might mean to interweave social and natural history, taking as its inspiration the work of the English poet John Clare (1793-1864). If Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) is right in suggesting that the recognition that we are now in the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - will force us to re-read human history in the light of planetary history and deep time, John Clare's work provides us with a way of thinki…
Deep time
As anthropologists attempt to engage with the emergent idea that we are now living in the ‘Anthropocene’ – a geological epoch of our own making – it becomes important to locate the timeframe of human activity within the deep time of planetary history. This paper asks whether anthropology is properly equipped for this challenge. By discussing the encounter with deep time in the earth sciences, I argue that deep time is not an abstract concept, but…
The Happisburgh footprints in time
This is a reflection on time as it is perceived in coastal environments. As the soft sediments of the East Anglian coast are eroded away, the underlying evidence of past human occupation is revealed. Most recently, after a storm, a set of footprints were revealed in the silt of an extinct estuary at Happisburgh, Norfolk, UK. The footprints are thought to belong to a small group of adults and children, and have been dated to between 780,000 and 1 …
Waterworlds
Exclusion and reappropriation
Transformations of the landscapes which children inhabit have significant impacts on their lives; yet, due to the limited economic visibility of children's relationships with place, they have little stake in those transformations. Their experience, therefore, illustrates in an acute way the experience of contemporary enclosure as a mode of subordination. Following fieldwork in three primary schools in South Cambridgeshire, UK, we offer an ethnogr…
Anthropology and the study of contradictions
Contradictions constitute one fundamental aspect of human life. Humans are steeped in contradictory thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. In this debate, five anthropologists adopt an individual-centered and phenomenological perspective on contradictions. How can one live with them? How to describe them from an anthropological point of view? Should we rethink our dear notion of the "social agent" through that of contradiction
Over and under
Drawing on fieldwork in three primary schools in East Cambridgeshire, UK, this paper explores children’s relationships with the places where they live, and the ways in which those relationships are mediated by play, exploration, and narrative imagination. Challenging assumptions of a ‘bubble-wrap generation’ which seem to discount the possibility that children today are able to experience the outdoor environment as a safe space with which they ca…
Anthropocene East Anglia
As we find ourselves in a geological epoch of our own making, it becomes necessary to reconsider the temporal scale of ethnographic enquiry; the effect of human behaviour is shown as a mark in deep time. Focusing on the East Anglian fenland, UK, this article considers the importance of thinking about long-term environmental change for the understanding of human life. First, the article explores the way in which human geological agency has transfo…
Seeing Environmental Violence in Deep Time
What does it mean to do violence in deep time? How is deep time evoked in our understanding of environmental harm? Environmental transformations have figured prominently in the recent history of Mongolia. Shifts in land use have been associated with severe pasture degradation, and the precarity of herding livelihoods has been a factor accelerating urbanization. Most recently, the intensification of mining activity has been a particular source of …
Following the Bear
In Whittlesey and Ramsey, two market towns in the East Anglian fenlands, farm labourers led a ‘Straw Bear’ through the streets; one of an array of Plough Monday customs marking the start of the agricultural year. The practice seems to have come to an end in the early 20th century, when it was forbidden by a police inspector as a form of begging. Yet what was had come to be seen as an unruly and unsavoury practice was renovated as a valued form of…
Our Lady of Ipswich
This article traces the social life of Our Lady of Ipswich, a statue taken to be destroyed during the English Reformation, and the possibility of pilgrimage in the context of dramatic urban change and loss of place memory. Arguing that iconoclasm is not an end-point, we see that the life of the image is not extinguished on the pyre, but is set into motion by conflict surrounding its significance, efficacy, and survival. Indeed, it is not simply t…
Just Out of Reach
Perceived in their ideal forms, rationalisation and magic might seem to oppose one another. In this paper, however, rather than placing these forces in sterile opposition, we instead explore the social and relational dynamics through which rationalisation-the dominant epistemological force of modernity-in certain cases provides the conditions of doubt, opacity, and unknowability that makes magical thinking manifest in the everyday mundane. We exp…
Learning to See Climate Change
What are the factors that render environmental concerns salient in people's lives, and under what conditions do people make connections between an abstract concept such as climate change and concrete experiences in their own daily circumstances? Taking as our focus ethnographic work with children in several different ethnographic settings (Barrow, Alaska; Oaxaca, Mexico; Tuv aimag and Uvurkhangai aimag, Mongolia; and East Anglia, United Kingdom),…
The Seekers at the Cloister Gate
An Anthropology of Deep Time
In the face of debates about the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - and contemporary concerns about ecological crisis and the Sixth Mass Extinction, it is more important than ever to locate the timeframe of human activity within the deep time of planetary history. This path-breaking book is a timely critical review of the anthropology of time, exploring our human relationship with the timescale of geological formation. Richard …
Isolation, Solitude and Social Distancing for People Who Use Drugs
COVID-19 has resulted in deepened states of crisis and vulnerability for people who use drugs throughout Europe and across the world, with social distancing measures having far-reaching implications for everyday life. Prolonged periods of isolation and solitude are acknowledged within much addiction literature as negatively impacting the experiences of those in recovery, while also causing harm to active users - many of whom depend on social cont…
Time Horizon
What is the significance of a human life in relation to the timespan of the geological processes that shape and reshape the terrain under our feet? Here, we ask how we might think on a planetary scale while being grounded in the everyday, tracing the relationship between biographical time and geological formation. Examining social relationships through the materiality of sandstone, uranium, and concrete, this paper presents a collaborative deep t…
Experts in Self-Isolation? Monastic Outreach during Lockdown
This paper draws on digital ethnography to examine the experience of a Catholic English Benedictine monastery in the context of restrictions on religious gatherings during the global COVID-19 pandemic. As the monks expand their digital presence and social media involvement, it is their experience of social withdrawal and apparent expertise in self-isolation that provides the grounding for their public engagement. While Max Weber depicts the monk …
Not-Knowing Magic
Our research explores the modern status of magic in two different European island settings: Cyprus and Orkney. By historically and ethnographically addressing the gradual dissolution of magical traditions in our respective fieldsites, our aim is to explore the means and instances by which magic continues to manifest in narratives and everyday practices. By exploring the current epistemological and social standing attributed to magic in Cyprus and…
Concrete Buys Time
Recent engagements with deep time within anthropology have urged an expansion of our time horizons in order to confront the contemporary ecological crisis. Here, we explore this theme by considering concrete’s material properties as a substance that reveals the troubled relationship between the present and deep time. We combine discussion of the life cycle of concrete in Orkney, Scotland, with reflection on sculptural interventions that seek to c…
Absent presence
What does it mean to declare loyalty to the Crown? This article explores the politics of loyalty and the potency of monarchy's set-apart quality. It does so from the vantage point of Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory the Queen had not visited since 1954 as the British government sought to avoid reigniting tensions with Spain. However, under the conditions of this absent presence, a particularly intense form of loyalty has emerged in Gibralt…
Plastic Time
The study of plastics reveals a disjuncture in time. Plastic production draws on resources from our deep geological past while driving an accumulation of waste that will survive into the deep future as a marker of our geological agency. Yet the apparently infinite replaceability of plastics narrows our horizons to the present of the eternally new. The ubiquity and disposability of plastic instills in consumers a time sense that is focused on pres…
Sociology (20 obras) · History (14 obras) · Aesthetics (12 obras) · Anthropology (12 obras) · Art (12 obras) · Archaeology (11 obras) · Ethnography (11 obras) · History (11 obras) · Philosophy (10 obras) · Philosophy (9 obras)