Vita Peacock
Biographic Data
| ID | 648916 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vita Peacock |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vita |
| FAMILY NAME | Peacock |
| SIGNATURE | PEACOCK V |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5645-3242 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Radical hospitality in a Berlin hackerspace
Widening the Frame: The Right to Fire: A Review of Bonfire Night
Scatological Humour and the Absent Anthropology of Privacy
This article addresses the puzzle of scatological humour among privacy advocates. Drawing on ethnographic work in Britain in 2014 and in Germany between 2019–2023, it advances a consideration of the phenomenon as a form of “boundary play” (Nippert-Eng 2005). Deploying the transgressive exposure of behaviours of a human body, as expressive of transgressions across a social body, scatological references use satire to make statements around contempo…
Writing opacity: Going beyond pseudonyms with spirit portraiture
What does it mean to go beyond pseudonyms? Building on fieldwork with privacy and data protection advocates in Germany, this article incorporates ethical imperatives coming from within and beyond the field, to develop a different mode of writing it calls spirit portraiture. This entails characterizing natural persons, without including any personal data through which they could be re-identified, with or without the use of computing. Drawing on th…
Surveillance
Surveillance—watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose—can connote a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Anthropology has explored and complexified this picture. While surveillance can enable intensive control over space, social categorisation, and the affective states of large societies, among other things, such asymmetries can also be evaded, refashioned, or re…
Rethinking Euro-anthropology: Part three. Early career scholars forum
Social Media in Rural China
for inviting me to present and receive feedback on
Anthropology inside out
Response to comments on "Academic precarity as hierarchical dependence in the Max Planck Society" by Vita Peacock, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Volume 6, Issue 1, Summer 2016
Academic precarity as hierarchical dependence in the Max Planck Society
This essay examines the idiosyncratic internal hierarchy of Germany's foremost research organization, the Max Planck Society. It employs Louis Dumont's analytics of paramount value, encompassment, and complementarity to convey the symbolic logic of relations therein. One consequence of this is to show that the organization's paramount values of autonomy and excellence (embodied by its governing community of directors who encompass their departmen…
The negation of hierarchy and its consequences
This paper traces the large-scale abandonment of hierarchical models of society by human scientists in the aftermath of 1968. The late 20th century saw these scholars emphasizing the contractual and 'egalitarian' relations between actors, at the expense of relations predicated on status differences and the differentiation of function relative to a totality. It simultaneously argues that these scholarly developments hinged on a set of socio-econom…
Agency and the Anstoß: Max Planck Directors as Fichtean Subjects
One of the core assumptions in agency theory has been that agency is a primordial attribute of persons: an agent is 'the origin of causal events'. However, rather than situating agency at the origin, this article argues that we should a end to where agency, within a given context, itself originates. In Germany's Max Planck Society the departmental heads – so-called 'directors' – possess a significant degree of 'agency' in realizing their personal…
Transcending Structure-Agency in the Study of Organizations
What is the relation between our own daily activity and the organizations that almost all of us are members of? This seemingly simple question has dominated the social study of organizations for over a century, and the responses to it can be very broadly parcelled out into three alternative perspectives
Academic precarity as hierarchical dependence in the Max Planck Society
This essay examines the idiosyncratic internal hierarchy of Germany's foremost research organization, the Max Planck Society. It employs Louis Dumont's analytics of paramount value, encompassment, and complementarity to convey the symbolic logic of relations therein. One consequence of this is to show that the organization's paramount values of autonomy and excellence (embodied by its governing community of directors who encompass their departmen…
The negation of hierarchy and its consequences
This paper traces the large-scale abandonment of hierarchical models of society by human scientists in the aftermath of 1968. The late 20th century saw these scholars emphasizing the contractual and 'egalitarian' relations between actors, at the expense of relations predicated on status differences and the differentiation of function relative to a totality. It simultaneously argues that these scholarly developments hinged on a set of socio-econom…
Rethinking Euro-anthropology: Part three. Early career scholars forum
Social Media in Rural China
for inviting me to present and receive feedback on
Anthropology inside out
Response to comments on "Academic precarity as hierarchical dependence in the Max Planck Society" by Vita Peacock, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Volume 6, Issue 1, Summer 2016
Agency and the Anstoß: Max Planck Directors as Fichtean Subjects
One of the core assumptions in agency theory has been that agency is a primordial attribute of persons: an agent is 'the origin of causal events'. However, rather than situating agency at the origin, this article argues that we should a end to where agency, within a given context, itself originates. In Germany's Max Planck Society the departmental heads – so-called 'directors' – possess a significant degree of 'agency' in realizing their personal…
Transcending Structure-Agency in the Study of Organizations
What is the relation between our own daily activity and the organizations that almost all of us are members of? This seemingly simple question has dominated the social study of organizations for over a century, and the responses to it can be very broadly parcelled out into three alternative perspectives
The negation of hierarchy and its consequences
This paper traces the large-scale abandonment of hierarchical models of society by human scientists in the aftermath of 1968. The late 20th century saw these scholars emphasizing the contractual and 'egalitarian' relations between actors, at the expense of relations predicated on status differences and the differentiation of function relative to a totality. It simultaneously argues that these scholarly developments hinged on a set of socio-econom…
Rethinking Euro-anthropology: Part three. Early career scholars forum
Social Media in Rural China
for inviting me to present and receive feedback on
Anthropology inside out
Response to comments on "Academic precarity as hierarchical dependence in the Max Planck Society" by Vita Peacock, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Volume 6, Issue 1, Summer 2016
Academic precarity as hierarchical dependence in the Max Planck Society
This essay examines the idiosyncratic internal hierarchy of Germany's foremost research organization, the Max Planck Society. It employs Louis Dumont's analytics of paramount value, encompassment, and complementarity to convey the symbolic logic of relations therein. One consequence of this is to show that the organization's paramount values of autonomy and excellence (embodied by its governing community of directors who encompass their departmen…
Surveillance
Surveillance—watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose—can connote a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Anthropology has explored and complexified this picture. While surveillance can enable intensive control over space, social categorisation, and the affective states of large societies, among other things, such asymmetries can also be evaded, refashioned, or re…
Writing opacity: Going beyond pseudonyms with spirit portraiture
What does it mean to go beyond pseudonyms? Building on fieldwork with privacy and data protection advocates in Germany, this article incorporates ethical imperatives coming from within and beyond the field, to develop a different mode of writing it calls spirit portraiture. This entails characterizing natural persons, without including any personal data through which they could be re-identified, with or without the use of computing. Drawing on th…
Scatological Humour and the Absent Anthropology of Privacy
This article addresses the puzzle of scatological humour among privacy advocates. Drawing on ethnographic work in Britain in 2014 and in Germany between 2019–2023, it advances a consideration of the phenomenon as a form of “boundary play” (Nippert-Eng 2005). Deploying the transgressive exposure of behaviours of a human body, as expressive of transgressions across a social body, scatological references use satire to make statements around contempo…
Radical hospitality in a Berlin hackerspace
Widening the Frame: The Right to Fire: A Review of Bonfire Night
Sociology (8 works) · Political science (5 works) · Anthropology (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Social science (3 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (2 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (2 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (2 works) · Hierarchy (2 works)