Timothy De Waal Malefyt
Biographic Data
| ID | 640818 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Timothy De Waal Malefyt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Timothy De Waal |
| FAMILY NAME | Malefyt |
| SIGNATURE | MALEFYT T W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Fordham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1427-4646 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 80 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Magical Power of Words in Large Language Models
This essay reframes the discourse around large language models (LLMs) by drawing on anthropological and linguistic theories of magic as a positive transformative force. While current discussions often cast AI as mysteriously dangerous – a form of “dark magic” that beguiles users and obscures ethical concerns – we argue that LLMs represent a fundamental shift in human-technology interaction, one requiring ritualistic linguistic precision rather th…
"Hacking the senses" to mitigate hotel food waste
What is Our Sense of Place in the Time of the Pandemic
Place is the most fundamental form of embodied experience -the site of a powerful fusion of self, space and time (Feld and Basso 1996: 9)
Magical Practice
The word “magic” refers to a broad range of beliefs and practices that include animism, charm(s), divination, enchantment, fantasy, fetish, glamour, illusion, miracles, the occult, shamanism, sorcery, spells, the supernatural, superstition, taboos, trickery, and witchcraft. Magic―once thought a core feature of “primitive societies,” abandoned by more rational, bureaucratic and progressive beliefs―is, in fact, thriving in contemporary life, and ce…
Women, Consumption and Paradox
Advertising Cultures
Introduction: Advertising Cultures – Advertising, Ethnography and Anthropology
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the anthropologists, working in areas as diverse as Sri Lanka and the United States, Norway, Trinidad and Japan, have pondered, studied, reflected on and written about the advertising industries that they encountered. Anthropology has always put great emphasis on fieldwork as the most important way to go about finding o…
Women's Softball and the Collaborative Spirit of Magic
All major US sports are high in superstitions because motivation to win is high and the game outcome is uncertain; athletes purportedly engage in superstitious behavior to reduce anxiety, build individual confidence and cope with uncertainty. Sports is also a male domain, where men traditionally display individual, masculine achievement. We observe magic rituals practiced in a women's college softball team not as a means to overcome anxiety or di…
Proceedings of the 2019 Global Business Anthropology Summit
The second Global Business Anthropology Summit was held May 28-29, 2019 at Fordham University in New York City. The 2019 Summit brought together 160 industry practitioners and academic scholars to build upon the work of the 2018 Summit. The 2019 Summit was explicitly and emphatically forward thinking and action oriented to advance anthropological ideas in business. Its broad aims were to (1) advance thinking on the value of anthropological perspe…
Marketing
Marketing is the communication, management, and distribution of value (of a product, brand, or service) for the purpose of persuading consumers to act in some way. Views of marketing and its effect on consumer culture and consumption range from dystopic to utopian. Anthropologists examine marketing from both economic and cultural views. They explore the various ways in which marketing is perceived as a social force: as a widespread form of coerci…
Brands
A brand is a complex entity that generates surplus value for a commodity in exchanges between consumers and producers. In its simplest form, a brand is a mode of commodity interaction between producers and consumers; yet, elaborated as a sign–object, a brand possesses semiotic, material, and sensual qualities that continually shift and adapt to contingencies, which makes the process by which it assumes meaning theoretically debatable. The anthrop…
Advertising
Anthropologists and cultural critics have investigated advertising from a range of perspectives, including as a form of manipulation for creating false desires in consumers; as an agent for prompting consumers to make their own relevant interpretations; as a “magical” system for enchanting products and brands that offer desirable lifestyles; for its global reach and ability to affect local culture; and for its internal dynamics among advertising …
The Magic of Paradox: How Advertising Ideas Transform Art into Business and the Ordinary into the Extraordinary
Magical Capitalism: An Introduction
Magical Capitalism: Enchantment, Spells, and Occult Practices in Contemporary Economies
Women, makeup, and authenticity: Negotiating embodiment and discourses of beauty
This essay examines women’s makeup practices and cultural tension between inner and outer constructs of beauty in the United States. Ethnographic research reveals competing discourses of beauty in the embodied experience of women, compared to images of beauty as promoted in advertising by the cosmetic industry. While the discourse of women’s embodied experience emphasizes inner worth and connecting internal and external self, cosmetic advertising…
Business Anthropology Comes of Age
Anthropologist in Advertising Agencies: Mediating Structures of Power and Knowledge Capital by Managing Relationships
This essay discusses how working from within an advertising agency as an anthropologist yields particular advantages in terms of presenting anthropological insights and gaining access to information that one would not have been privy to, compared to a study of advertising from the outside. Working from within an agency affords access not only to forms of objective data and consumer research documents that are less accessible from the outside, but…
Advertising magic: The paradox of keeping-while-giving
Magic is alive in advertising industries through the organized assemblages of magicians, formulas and rites that perform magically. Creatives (the magicians) employ mystic formulas in creative processes and in rites of awards ceremonies and business pitches, where they transform ephemeral ideas into broad marketing campaigns. Transformative ideas are esteemed as agency assets and celebrated of creatives in their names, but are also disseminated a…
Enchanting Technology
Technology enchants our lives by appropriating subjective gaps in human uncertainty and desire with objective results, thus incorporating a sense of wonder and closeness in much of what we do. It does this because technology is no longer cold and rational, but warm and aesthetically pleasing in the many devices we use; it performs magically by engaging us sensorially, creating new realities, and bridges objective facts with subjective assumptions…
An Anthropology of the Senses: Tracing the Future of Sensory Marketing in Brand Rituals
Musings on an Archaeology of Business Anthropology
Business anthropology is an emergent hybrid discipline Even if this process is generally at work, temporal gaps are observed in its development, following national traditions. We thus observe differences between USA and Europe, probably in relation to the dichotomy between fundamental anthropology and applied anthropology, due to different colonial heritage. However, this hybrid discipline ostensibly bridges an anthropological focus with business…
"Women's bodies, menstruation and marketing "protection: Interpreting a Paradox of Gendered Discourses in Consumer Practices and Advertising Campaigns
This essay explores the various associations, conflicts, and resolutions that converge in consumer research to produce an advertising campaign for a feminine hygiene product. Ethnographic research identified a correspondence in beliefs and values among women who discuss menstruation as a natural process of rhythms and flow in their changing bodies. Building off the work of gender discourses in advertising, this paper claims women's “natural” disc…
The Senses in Anthropological and Marketing Research: Investigating a Consumer-Brand Ritual Holistically
The study of the senses encompasses a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities. Anthropology, in particular, turns our attention away from previous considerations of the senses as biologically determined and universally fixed, to more interactive, adaptable and fluid concepts of the senses that are continuously shaped by culture, geography and history. Alternately, business marketers increasingly explore the senses and consumer…
Ethics in Business Anthropology: Crossing Boundaries
The door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world (van Gennep 1960: 20) The theme of the 2012 American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting in San Francisco was 'Borders and Crossings.' A session on 'Ethics in Business Anthropology' seemed appropriate given th…
Understanding the Rise of Consumer Ethnography: Branding Technomethodologies in the New Economy
In this article, I aim to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the changing public role of anthropology by exploring the rise of branded ethnographic practices in consumer research. I argue that a juncture in the "New Economy"-the conjoining of corporate interest in branding, technology, and consumers, with vast social changes-may explain the rapid growth of ethnography for consumer research and predict its future direction. An analysis of bra…
Magical Capitalism: Enchantment, Spells, and Occult Practices in Contemporary Economies
Creativity and cooking: Motherhood, agency and social change in everyday life
Creativity in the kitchen is a normal part of everyday life in US homes. This article explores improvisation by mothers in home cooking as exemplary of the creative process. Western analyses of creativity have typically examined innovation after-the-fact, and showed how something innovative constitutes something novel that is discontinuous with the past. This is reading creativity “backward” in terms of outcomes. We provide a “forward” reading of…
Women, makeup, and authenticity: Negotiating embodiment and discourses of beauty
This essay examines women’s makeup practices and cultural tension between inner and outer constructs of beauty in the United States. Ethnographic research reveals competing discourses of beauty in the embodied experience of women, compared to images of beauty as promoted in advertising by the cosmetic industry. While the discourse of women’s embodied experience emphasizes inner worth and connecting internal and external self, cosmetic advertising…
"Women's bodies, menstruation and marketing "protection: Interpreting a Paradox of Gendered Discourses in Consumer Practices and Advertising Campaigns
This essay explores the various associations, conflicts, and resolutions that converge in consumer research to produce an advertising campaign for a feminine hygiene product. Ethnographic research identified a correspondence in beliefs and values among women who discuss menstruation as a natural process of rhythms and flow in their changing bodies. Building off the work of gender discourses in advertising, this paper claims women's “natural” disc…
Anthropologist in Advertising Agencies: Mediating Structures of Power and Knowledge Capital by Managing Relationships
This essay discusses how working from within an advertising agency as an anthropologist yields particular advantages in terms of presenting anthropological insights and gaining access to information that one would not have been privy to, compared to a study of advertising from the outside. Working from within an agency affords access not only to forms of objective data and consumer research documents that are less accessible from the outside, but…
Enchanting Technology
Technology enchants our lives by appropriating subjective gaps in human uncertainty and desire with objective results, thus incorporating a sense of wonder and closeness in much of what we do. It does this because technology is no longer cold and rational, but warm and aesthetically pleasing in the many devices we use; it performs magically by engaging us sensorially, creating new realities, and bridges objective facts with subjective assumptions…
Creativity, brands, and the ritual process: Confrontation and resolution in advertising agencies
The intensity of modern business has increased pressure for innovation, which places greater emphasis on creativity. This article explores one of the central sites of creativity in the American corporate world, the advertising agency. We examine how creativity in agencies is managed, controlled, and channeled to produce advertisements. We contend that the brand advertised and the agency’s creative collaborations have properties of ritual symbols …
The Senses in Anthropological and Marketing Research: Investigating a Consumer-Brand Ritual Holistically
The study of the senses encompasses a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities. Anthropology, in particular, turns our attention away from previous considerations of the senses as biologically determined and universally fixed, to more interactive, adaptable and fluid concepts of the senses that are continuously shaped by culture, geography and history. Alternately, business marketers increasingly explore the senses and consumer…
Panelists
The invitation to participate in this panel has been an occasion for a personal reflection on where we've been, where we are, and where we're heading.The "we" here is not all encompassing, but instead references the people with whom I have shared all or part of a journey that began more than two decades ago.I want to begin by recounting a recent conversation I had with my friend and colleague, Lucy Suchman.Having been at IBM Research for about a …
Surface or Depth: Reviewing Two Approaches to Consumer Experience in Marketing
2006). Surface or Depth?: Reviewing Two Approaches to Consumer Experience in Marketing. The Senses and Society: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 129-132
Panelists
The invitation to participate in this panel has been an occasion for a personal reflection on where we've been, where we are, and where we're heading.The "we" here is not all encompassing, but instead references the people with whom I have shared all or part of a journey that began more than two decades ago.I want to begin by recounting a recent conversation I had with my friend and colleague, Lucy Suchman.Having been at IBM Research for about a …
Session 4 - Markets, Media and Meanings Simon Roberts (Intel, Ireland), Curator: How Consumers Create Value in a Recession Economy
This essay examines a conscious shift in the cultural flows of consumption practices. It explores the ways consumers are generating and sharing shopping competence as a new form of value. I argue that a shift in consumer consciousness and resulting open social discourse around shopping practices are creating a new consumption narrative in the recession. This narrative celebrates the resourceful and collective acts of people who transform modes of…
Evaluating Sensory Experience: Self-Reporting Consumers and Commercial Fieldwork
Understanding the Rise of Consumer Ethnography: Branding Technomethodologies in the New Economy
In this article, I aim to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the changing public role of anthropology by exploring the rise of branded ethnographic practices in consumer research. I argue that a juncture in the "New Economy"-the conjoining of corporate interest in branding, technology, and consumers, with vast social changes-may explain the rapid growth of ethnography for consumer research and predict its future direction. An analysis of bra…
How Anthropologists Can Succeed in Business: Mediating Multiple Worlds of Inquiry
Marketing research and advertising strategic planning offer viable and financially attractive career options for anthropologists because many businesses seek deep understandings of consumer lifestyles and brand use. As professionally trained anthropologists operating in the corporate world, we see a bright future for anthropologists, but we believe that there are merits in broadening the typical anthropological approach to incorporate additional …
Brands, Interactivity, and Contested Fields: Exploring Production and Consumption in Cadillac and Infiniti Automobile Advertising Campaigns
Brands mediate relations between production and consumption in capitalism. This essay aims to expand current discussions about brands by looking at the nature of interactivity between producers and consumers as a symbolic field of negotiation that can be contested. We argue that interactivity involves layers of representation and interpretation in the process of qualifying and requalifying products in the marketplace. The authors analyze two past…
Creativity, brands, and the ritual process: Confrontation and resolution in advertising agencies
The intensity of modern business has increased pressure for innovation, which places greater emphasis on creativity. This article explores one of the central sites of creativity in the American corporate world, the advertising agency. We examine how creativity in agencies is managed, controlled, and channeled to produce advertisements. We contend that the brand advertised and the agency’s creative collaborations have properties of ritual symbols …
Writing Advertising: The Production of Relationships in Historical Review
This article examines a range of writings on advertising. It shows that advertising has been written about as instrumental to an emerging capitalistic market, touted as a flamboyant lifestyle in autobiographical tales of charismatic advertising leaders, depicted as a coercive tool of manipulation for creating false desires in consumers, and analyzed for its complex social and political relations among its internal divisions and suppliers. I argue…
Touching Consumers, engaging the Senses in Consumption
For years, the Campbell's Soup Company advertised their brand of soup through a message of “Mmm, Mmm, Good.” This slogan reached mass audiences primarily through visual and auditory media messages of television and print. Campbell's recently switched to a new form of advertising to consumers through an IAd application. The format works through Apple iPhones by first showing an interactive ad teaser, “You're getting warmer,” then when clicked thro…
Anthropologists at Work in Advertising and Marketing
this chapter explains how and why anthropological training is an advantage in the advertising environment. The chapter discusses the vast changes underway in marketing and advertising that increasingly call for a more consumer-centric understanding of consumption, which is well suited to an anthropological approach. Also included are discussions on how anthropologists might likely break into this field, what everyday work in advertising is like, …
Creativity and cooking: Motherhood, agency and social change in everyday life
Creativity in the kitchen is a normal part of everyday life in US homes. This article explores improvisation by mothers in home cooking as exemplary of the creative process. Western analyses of creativity have typically examined innovation after-the-fact, and showed how something innovative constitutes something novel that is discontinuous with the past. This is reading creativity “backward” in terms of outcomes. We provide a “forward” reading of…
Ethics in Business Anthropology: Crossing Boundaries
The door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world (van Gennep 1960: 20) The theme of the 2012 American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting in San Francisco was 'Borders and Crossings.' A session on 'Ethics in Business Anthropology' seemed appropriate given th…
The Senses in Anthropological and Marketing Research: Investigating a Consumer-Brand Ritual Holistically
The study of the senses encompasses a range of approaches from the social sciences and humanities. Anthropology, in particular, turns our attention away from previous considerations of the senses as biologically determined and universally fixed, to more interactive, adaptable and fluid concepts of the senses that are continuously shaped by culture, geography and history. Alternately, business marketers increasingly explore the senses and consumer…
An Anthropology of the Senses: Tracing the Future of Sensory Marketing in Brand Rituals
Musings on an Archaeology of Business Anthropology
Business anthropology is an emergent hybrid discipline Even if this process is generally at work, temporal gaps are observed in its development, following national traditions. We thus observe differences between USA and Europe, probably in relation to the dichotomy between fundamental anthropology and applied anthropology, due to different colonial heritage. However, this hybrid discipline ostensibly bridges an anthropological focus with business…
"Women's bodies, menstruation and marketing "protection: Interpreting a Paradox of Gendered Discourses in Consumer Practices and Advertising Campaigns
This essay explores the various associations, conflicts, and resolutions that converge in consumer research to produce an advertising campaign for a feminine hygiene product. Ethnographic research identified a correspondence in beliefs and values among women who discuss menstruation as a natural process of rhythms and flow in their changing bodies. Building off the work of gender discourses in advertising, this paper claims women's “natural” disc…
Women, makeup, and authenticity: Negotiating embodiment and discourses of beauty
This essay examines women’s makeup practices and cultural tension between inner and outer constructs of beauty in the United States. Ethnographic research reveals competing discourses of beauty in the embodied experience of women, compared to images of beauty as promoted in advertising by the cosmetic industry. While the discourse of women’s embodied experience emphasizes inner worth and connecting internal and external self, cosmetic advertising…
Business Anthropology Comes of Age
Anthropologist in Advertising Agencies: Mediating Structures of Power and Knowledge Capital by Managing Relationships
This essay discusses how working from within an advertising agency as an anthropologist yields particular advantages in terms of presenting anthropological insights and gaining access to information that one would not have been privy to, compared to a study of advertising from the outside. Working from within an agency affords access not only to forms of objective data and consumer research documents that are less accessible from the outside, but…
Advertising magic: The paradox of keeping-while-giving
Magic is alive in advertising industries through the organized assemblages of magicians, formulas and rites that perform magically. Creatives (the magicians) employ mystic formulas in creative processes and in rites of awards ceremonies and business pitches, where they transform ephemeral ideas into broad marketing campaigns. Transformative ideas are esteemed as agency assets and celebrated of creatives in their names, but are also disseminated a…
Enchanting Technology
Technology enchants our lives by appropriating subjective gaps in human uncertainty and desire with objective results, thus incorporating a sense of wonder and closeness in much of what we do. It does this because technology is no longer cold and rational, but warm and aesthetically pleasing in the many devices we use; it performs magically by engaging us sensorially, creating new realities, and bridges objective facts with subjective assumptions…
Marketing
Marketing is the communication, management, and distribution of value (of a product, brand, or service) for the purpose of persuading consumers to act in some way. Views of marketing and its effect on consumer culture and consumption range from dystopic to utopian. Anthropologists examine marketing from both economic and cultural views. They explore the various ways in which marketing is perceived as a social force: as a widespread form of coerci…
Brands
A brand is a complex entity that generates surplus value for a commodity in exchanges between consumers and producers. In its simplest form, a brand is a mode of commodity interaction between producers and consumers; yet, elaborated as a sign–object, a brand possesses semiotic, material, and sensual qualities that continually shift and adapt to contingencies, which makes the process by which it assumes meaning theoretically debatable. The anthrop…
Advertising
Anthropologists and cultural critics have investigated advertising from a range of perspectives, including as a form of manipulation for creating false desires in consumers; as an agent for prompting consumers to make their own relevant interpretations; as a “magical” system for enchanting products and brands that offer desirable lifestyles; for its global reach and ability to affect local culture; and for its internal dynamics among advertising …
Sociology (31 works) · Business (22 works) · Advertising (20 works) · Art (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · Aesthetics (15 works) · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Social science (13 works)