J F Sherry
Biographic Data
| ID | 71299 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J F Sherry |
| GIVEN NAMES | J F |
| FAMILY NAME | Sherry |
| SIGNATURE | SHERRY J F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Notre Dame |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5153-5465 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 70 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 771 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 70 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Mesh and Merge
This autoethnographic poem explores the complementarity of two approaches to comprehending and rendering experience. Each approach seeks to illuminate the worlds in which the researcher is immersed as well as the changes wrought in the researcher by prolonged engagements with others. Anthropology provides the opportunity for and analysis of intimate encounters with self and other. Poetry provides a language for deepening those encounters and depi…
Description Has Thick Roots
This playful etymological poem explores the complexity of anthropology's principal way of apprehending the world. Description is a multifaceted practice that contours, translates and contextualizes our observations in a way that brings them to life. The poem is, in effect, an origin story of this practice. We theorize with stories and theory‐laden facts. Poetry is a way of dramatizing our (re)presentations. Good description is incisive, almost su…
Sheer Volume
Homeland Precarity
This lamentation skewers a primary post-truth neoliberal practice of the Anthropocene in America: scourging the scapegoat. Barding the alleged immigration issue with layers of attribution intended to imbrute vast segments of the population has both enflamed ethnocentric prejudice and helped mobilize a resisting local-level relativism. Tension in social relations has heightened. Other provocative practices such as political prevarication, gaslight…
Ulster Flashback
This poem emerges from fieldwork in Northern Ireland and rambles in the north woods of my home state. A dreamlike transcultural diffusion of embodied symbolism has the persona inhabiting home and field at once. In this instance, nature’s affordances and the martial atmosphere of Michigan hunting season evoke murals, bonfires and the marching season in Belfast. The opportunity for casual violence resonates across settings, and the possibility of t…
Fandeul® Fantasy
In this poem, the persona lolls, luxuriant in his recliner, moving through hypnogogic episodes before his TV screen. Gradually and intermittently, he becomes aware of the persistent and repeated commercial for an online gaming service massaging him. Its execution reminds him of older iconic advertising; the power of the imagery and sacramental aura of the jingle draw him into the story. He becomes a participant as much as a spectator but ultimate…
The Ethnographer’s Craft: A Love Song
Hiding in plain sight
Resolving Not to Hang a Print of Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pads Box on My Office Wall
This jeremiad is a critique of commodity aesthetics advocating resistance to the hegemony of the brandscape. The persona laments a consciousness cluttered by, and grieves an imagination colonized by, brands. The poem hints at consumers’ patriotic inability to conceive of alternatives to capitalism, and the seductive deception that invites buyers to regard brands merely as products, rather than occasions of cultural occultation or occlusion. The p…
Ikons Seen Stenciled in Seattle Street Here Censored
This ekphrastic poem emerges from a decades-long fascination with public art, especially street art, and the stakeholder ecology in which it is imbricated. In this case, I viewed the images out of context, curated on a printed page instead of emblazoned on an actual wall, which likely set me off on a more layered hermeneutic quest than traditional field exposure alone might have triggered. Their juxtaposition and the editor’s cropping energized m…
Five poems
so called/poems stink of sociology ... (Hazo, 2024, 295
Time and Tide Triptych: Lyric of Lifelong Learning
In this set of three poems, the author, a retired anthropologist, reflects upon his career of lifelong learning, a reminiscence of a kind enkindled by review of old fieldnotes and journal entries, a re‐reading of old publications, or perusal of old photographs. He muses about influences shaping his vocation and evolution as a scholartist. He invokes three tutelary spirits—of archaeology, of intrepid voyaging, of artful renewal—to symbolize a like…
Direct to consumer
"Thirteen ways of looking at " apprentices: A Memoir of Rejection, Recrimination and Reconciliation
Public art tourism: Atmospheric stories in city margins
Cities play a pivotal role in progressing cultural tourism, embracing everyday life, where particular cityscapes afford a diversity of cultural practices. The ethnographic storying of two city public artworks presents a backcloth of historical, cultural and religio-political outlooks. Public art and idiosyncratic atmospherics provide conflicting narratives of how pubic art attends wider religion-tourism concerns. Both public artworks observe ‘tog…
Exploring Kid Space in the wild: A preliminary study of multimodal and immersive collaborative play-based learning experiences
Beyond Zoom Fatigue: Ritual and Resilience in Remote Meetings
COVID‐19 has precipitated a massive social experiment – the sudden shift of millions of knowledge workers from their traditional offices to homes or other remote work locations. This has inspired heated debates and new ways of imagining the future of work. This paper hopes to contribute to a better understanding of these changes by reporting on the results of several dozen in‐depth interviews with remote workers from a variety of geographies, ind…
Attachment to and Detachment from Favorite Stores: An Affordance Theory Perspective
Like homes, neighborhoods, and cities, retail locations offer significant opportunities for attachment far from domestic spheres. In commercial settings, consumers construct personal geographies, and find stable references for their lives. Our work advances previous consumer research by showing how these relationalities are situated, implicitly unstable and often impermanent. Individuals attach to commercial spaces in multiple ways, through both …
Scale and the Gaze of a Machine
Scale suffuses the work we do and, recently, has us considering an aspect of scale best suited to those with ethnographic training. We've been asked to help with scaling up one of the latest blockbusters in high tech - deep learning. Advances in deep learning have enabled technology to be programmed to not only see who we are by using facial ID systems and hear what we say by using natural language systems; machines are now even programmed to rec…
Emotion and consumption: Toward a new understanding of cultural collisions between Hong Kong and PRC luxury consumers
Incorporating Illouz’s theory of emotions, this study examines how specific emotions drive consumption, as embodied by escalating conflicts between Hong Kong and the PRC luxury consumers. When affluent Mainlanders pursue status signifiers via consumption of relatively affordable luxury goods in Hong Kong, local residents’ disdain triggers a nexus of emotions: envy, resentment, and status anxiety, linked to fears of being occupied by and assimilat…
Brand Fortitude in Moments of Consumption
Grooving in the ludic foodscape: Bridled revelry in collegiate tailgating
Throughout North America, the open air public feasting and drinking that surrounds an athletic event, most commonly football, is labeled “tailgating.” In this article, we explore how consumers infuse their place-creating activity with a well-modulated aura of revelry that energizes tailgating without jeopardizing either its immediate or long-term viability. To an appreciable degree, tailgating is about celebrating and preserving the communal bond…
The market (documents of contemporary art)
Domesticating Public Space through Ritual: Tailgating as Vestaval
Using a semiotic square to study placeway rituals, we theorize one particular sanctuary, a secular ritual we term vestaval—and specifically, its manifestation in the form of tailgating—as a site of popular communion. Vestaval demonstrates the power of consumption to stimulate social and civic engagement. We employ an ethnographic team methodology to describe and analyze the phenomenon. We theorize the eversion mechanism that animates vestaval and…
Creating and sustaining a culture of hope: Feng Shui discourses and practices in Hong Kong
This ethnographic study of Feng Shui discourses and practices in Hong Kong examines consumer hope embedded within a specific sociocultural context, supplanting the current understanding of hope as purely an individual psychic phenomenon. The study investigates hope as a collective emotion, informed by key Chinese cultural resources drawn from Taoist and Confucian principles in both its pursuit and desired outcomes. As consumers incorporate hope w…
Gift Giving in Anthropological Perspective
Journal Article Gift Giving in Anthropological Perspective Get access John F. Sherry, Jr. John F. Sherry, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 10, Issue 2, September 1983, Pages 157-168, https://doi.org/10.1086/208956 Published: 01 September 1983 Article history Received: 01 January 1983 Revision received: 01 June 1983 Published: 01 September 1983
The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey
Two processes at work in contemporary society are the secularization of religion and the sacralization of the secular. Consumer behavior shapes and reflects these processes. For many, consumption has become a vehicle for experiencing the sacred. This article explores the ritual substratum of consumption and describes properties and manifestations of the sacred inherent in consumer behavior. Similarly, the processes by which consumers sacralize an…
Speaking of Art as Embodied Imagination: A Multisensory Approach to Understanding Aesthetic Experience
This article focuses on somatic experience—not just the process of thinking bodily but how the body informs the logic of thinking about art. We examine the links between embodiment, movement, and multisensory experience insofar as they help to elucidate the contours of art appreciation in a museum. We argue that embodiment can be identified at two levels: the phenomenological and the cognitive unconscious. At the first level, individuals are cons…
The effects of violent video games on aggression. A meta-analysis
Violent content video games such as Mortal Kombat and Doom have become very popular among children and adolescents, causing great concern for parents, teachers, and policy makers. This study cumulates findings across existing empirical research on the effects of violent video games to estimate overall effect size and discern important trends and moderating variables, Results suggest there is a smaller effect of violent video games on aggression t…
A Naturalistic Inquiry into Buyer and Seller Behavior at a Swap Meet
Naturalistic inquiry as an ethnographic approach is explained and utilized for exploring emergent themes in buyer and seller behavior at a swap meet. Components of the method used include purposive sampling, triangulation across researchers, emergent theme analysis, autodriving, memoing, member checks, and auditing. Four emergent dialectical substantive themes are discussed: freedom versus rules, boundaries versus transitions, competition versus …
Fast Fashion, Sustainability, and the Ethical Appeal of Luxury Brands
The phrase "fast fashion" refers to low-cost clothing collections that mimic current luxury fashion trends. Fast fashion helps sate deeply held desires among young consumers in the industrialized world for luxury fashion, even as it embodies unsustainability. Trends run their course with lightning speed, with today's latest styles swiftly trumping yesterday's, which have already been consigned to the trash bin. This article addresses the inherent…
Ludic Agency and Retail Spectacle
Spectacular, themed environments have been theorized as places where play is limited and consumer agency is overpowered. In a multiperspectival ethnographic engagement with ESPN Zone Chicago, we find consumers resisting the rules, but only to a limited degree. Spectacular consumption possesses a do-it-yourself quality unrecognized in prior theory. Technology and screens are important to this form of play, which exhibits a transcendent character b…
Street Art, Sweet Art? Reclaiming the "Public" in Public Place
Consumer research has paid scant attention to public goods, especially at a time when the contestation between categorizing public and private goods and controlling public goods is pronounced. In this multisited ethnography, we explore the ways in which active consumers negotiate meanings about the consumption of a particular public good, public space. Using the context of street art, we document four main ideologies of public space consumption t…
A Role for Poetry in Consumer Research
Consumer researchers are wrestling with the crisis of representation that has challenged contiguous disciplines over the past decade. Traditional or conventional prose articles seem increasingly insufficient as vessels for representing our understandings and experiences. In this article, we demonstrate how poetry contributes to the research enterprise. We use our own experiences as researcher-poets to illustrate how the writing and close reading …
A Sociocultural Analysis of a Midwestern American Flea Market
The ethnographic case study presented in this article illustrates the institutional complexity and sociocultural significance of a midwestern American flea market. A conception of market place structure and function that incorporates informal and festive dimensions of consumer behavior is advanced. The article explores the relationship of primary and secondary economic activity. Buyer and seller behavior, marketplace ambience, the social embedded…
Domesticating Public Space through Ritual: Tailgating as Vestaval
Using a semiotic square to study placeway rituals, we theorize one particular sanctuary, a secular ritual we term vestaval—and specifically, its manifestation in the form of tailgating—as a site of popular communion. Vestaval demonstrates the power of consumption to stimulate social and civic engagement. We employ an ethnographic team methodology to describe and analyze the phenomenon. We theorize the eversion mechanism that animates vestaval and…
Being in the Zone: Staging Retail Theater at ESPN Zone Chicago
Experiential consumption is a topic of growing interest in the social scientific and managerial literatures. While consumer experience is profoundly shaped by the built environment, a critical eye has been cast on the oppressive nature of themed environments. While offering multisensory sensual opportunities, themed retail environments cater primarily to the visual impulse and have been theorized to both direct and misdirect attention in ways ben…
Joutia: Street vendor entrepreneurship and the informal economy of information and communication technologies in Morocco1
This paper provides an ethnographic and cultural analysis of the 'informal sector' in Morocco. In this age of globalisation, no firm can afford to ignore the vibrant informal sector that makes up the bulk of GDP in many developing economies. And yet, the informal sector is routinely misunderstood and mythologised as 'pimps, drug dealers, counterfeiters and pirates', and is particularly despised by the high tech industry. Based on fieldwork, the a…
Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior: An Anthropological Sourcebook
Place, Technology, and Representation
Three challenges of intellectual, political, and moral significance confront our discipline in the new millennium. First, a thorough understanding of sense of place must be harnessed in the service of ecolate dwelling. Second, our inquiry into materiality must expand to encompass the numinous dimension of technology. Finally, we must resolve the crisis of representation that limits our ability to express the insights we achieve in our research in…
Attachment to and Detachment from Favorite Stores: An Affordance Theory Perspective
Like homes, neighborhoods, and cities, retail locations offer significant opportunities for attachment far from domestic spheres. In commercial settings, consumers construct personal geographies, and find stable references for their lives. Our work advances previous consumer research by showing how these relationalities are situated, implicitly unstable and often impermanent. Individuals attach to commercial spaces in multiple ways, through both …
May Your Life Be Marvelous: English Language Labelling and the Semiotics of Japanese Promotion
A recent trend in consumer research is the broadening of the notion of consumer behavior to include activities not merely epiphenomenal to marketing. Another trend with earlier historical origins is the semiotic interpretation of consumption activities. These trends are merged in the present article, which contrasts the vehemence with which Japanese cultural uniqueness is linked with the spirit of the language (kotodama) with the Japanese readine…
Emotion and consumption: Toward a new understanding of cultural collisions between Hong Kong and PRC luxury consumers
Incorporating Illouz’s theory of emotions, this study examines how specific emotions drive consumption, as embodied by escalating conflicts between Hong Kong and the PRC luxury consumers. When affluent Mainlanders pursue status signifiers via consumption of relatively affordable luxury goods in Hong Kong, local residents’ disdain triggers a nexus of emotions: envy, resentment, and status anxiety, linked to fears of being occupied by and assimilat…
Framing considerations in the prc: Creating Value in the Contemporary Chinese Art Market
This study of art galleries in the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) uses a political economy approach to examine the contours of the art world and the art market. A Chinese art market based on the Western and Japanese models was created in the early twentieth century, but was abolished in 1949 when the PRC, under Chairman Mao, adopted a socialist framing model on a national scale. Breaking out of this totalizing frame was difficult despite the ad…
Bottomless cup, plug-in drug: A telethnography of coffee
In this paper, I use an anthropological perspective to explore the dimensions of “coffeeworld” as it is depicted on prime time network television programming. I do not examine coffee commercials, but rather the programming context that conditions in part viewers’ perceptions of coffee, which ostensibly delivers a receptive audience to prospective marketers. I explore the cultural significance of coffee in the form of themes emerging from a close …
Three poems on markets and consumption
This account reflects an effort to address the crisis of representation emerging from some of my recent fieldwork on pilgrimage in the postmodern era. Bracketed by the relatively dispassionate field note and the reasonably narcissistic journal entry, each of these particular poems is a liminal playground for the contest between introspection and exteroception. In these poems, I exploit the coincidence of the ethnographic and lyric moment to exami…
The Ethnographer’s Apprentice: Trying Consumer Culture from the Outside In
Beyond Zoom Fatigue: Ritual and Resilience in Remote Meetings
COVID‐19 has precipitated a massive social experiment – the sudden shift of millions of knowledge workers from their traditional offices to homes or other remote work locations. This has inspired heated debates and new ways of imagining the future of work. This paper hopes to contribute to a better understanding of these changes by reporting on the results of several dozen in‐depth interviews with remote workers from a variety of geographies, ind…
The Work of Play at American Girl Place
For a number of years, my colleagues and I have inhabited American Girl Place in Chicago, a host of other public venues to which the ceaseless procession of trade marked red shopping bags drew us, and the intimate play spaces of children's rooms, pars ing our findings across genres of publication in an effort to understand the brand.1 The cover photo documents one of many revela tory incidents we captured ethnographically. Comfortably seated in a…
Sporting Sensation
Gift Giving in Anthropological Perspective
Journal Article Gift Giving in Anthropological Perspective Get access John F. Sherry, Jr. John F. Sherry, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 10, Issue 2, September 1983, Pages 157-168, https://doi.org/10.1086/208956 Published: 01 September 1983 Article history Received: 01 January 1983 Revision received: 01 June 1983 Published: 01 September 1983
Through a Glass Darkly: Beer and Modernization in Papua New Guinea.Mac Marshall
Consumerism in Medicine: Challenging Physician Authority . Marie Haug, Bebe Lavin
A Year in the Life of a Factory
Maynard Seider. Year in the Life of. Factory. 1984 San Pedro, CA.: Singlejack Books
Cultural and Sociological Aspects of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse . Barry Stimmel. ; The Substance Abuse Problems . Sidney Cohen
Wheeling and Dealing: An Ethnography of an Upper‐Level, Drug Dealing and Smugling Community
Wheeling And Dealing: An Ethnography Of An Upper‐Level, Drug Dealing And Smugling Community By: Fatricia A. Adler. New York: Columbia university Press. 1985. Pp. xi. 175 (index, bibliography). $25.00 (hardcover
A Guide to Alcoholism Treatment Research, Vol. III: Alcoholics Anonymous and Counseling . David Levinson
Informant Brokerage And Social System Therapy: Improving Service Delivery In The Treatment Of Chemical Dependency
May Your Life Be Marvelous: English Language Labelling and the Semiotics of Japanese Promotion
A recent trend in consumer research is the broadening of the notion of consumer behavior to include activities not merely epiphenomenal to marketing. Another trend with earlier historical origins is the semiotic interpretation of consumption activities. These trends are merged in the present article, which contrasts the vehemence with which Japanese cultural uniqueness is linked with the spirit of the language (kotodama) with the Japanese readine…
A Naturalistic Inquiry into Buyer and Seller Behavior at a Swap Meet
Naturalistic inquiry as an ethnographic approach is explained and utilized for exploring emergent themes in buyer and seller behavior at a swap meet. Components of the method used include purposive sampling, triangulation across researchers, emergent theme analysis, autodriving, memoing, member checks, and auditing. Four emergent dialectical substantive themes are discussed: freedom versus rules, boundaries versus transitions, competition versus …
Teaching International Business: A View from Anthropology
As an independent enterprise, international business has begun to achieve parity with such basic business disciplines as marketing, finance, and organization behavior. As the field matures, it will become increasingly judicious in its borrowing from other intellectual traditions, and both educational and research objectives will be profoundly affected. The current interest of anthropologists in business activity is one source of synergy that can …
The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey
Two processes at work in contemporary society are the secularization of religion and the sacralization of the secular. Consumer behavior shapes and reflects these processes. For many, consumption has become a vehicle for experiencing the sacred. This article explores the ritual substratum of consumption and describes properties and manifestations of the sacred inherent in consumer behavior. Similarly, the processes by which consumers sacralize an…
A Sociocultural Analysis of a Midwestern American Flea Market
The ethnographic case study presented in this article illustrates the institutional complexity and sociocultural significance of a midwestern American flea market. A conception of market place structure and function that incorporates informal and festive dimensions of consumer behavior is advanced. The article explores the relationship of primary and secondary economic activity. Buyer and seller behavior, marketplace ambience, the social embedded…
Gaea Descending
To Everything There is a Season: A Photoessay of a Farmers' Market
Local Custom [Field Journal/Amsterdam Station]
Too Far Afield
Restoration Triptych
Unter Den Linden, Madison and Mine; Meditation on a Fragment of the Berlin Wall
Research Article| May 01 1992 Unter Den Linden, Madison and Mine; Meditation on a Fragment of the Berlin Wall John F. Sherry John F. Sherry Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1992) 4 (2): 139–140. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-4-2-139 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation John F. Sherry; Unter Den Linden, Madison and Mine; Meditation on a Fragment of the Berlin Wall. Pu…
Bottomless cup, plug-in drug: A telethnography of coffee
In this paper, I use an anthropological perspective to explore the dimensions of “coffeeworld” as it is depicted on prime time network television programming. I do not examine coffee commercials, but rather the programming context that conditions in part viewers’ perceptions of coffee, which ostensibly delivers a receptive audience to prospective marketers. I explore the cultural significance of coffee in the form of themes emerging from a close …
Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior: An Anthropological Sourcebook
Trivium siam
Real Work
Ethnography and Internet Time: Ethics, Politics and Poetics
Place, Technology, and Representation
Three challenges of intellectual, political, and moral significance confront our discipline in the new millennium. First, a thorough understanding of sense of place must be harnessed in the service of ecolate dwelling. Second, our inquiry into materiality must expand to encompass the numinous dimension of technology. Finally, we must resolve the crisis of representation that limits our ability to express the insights we achieve in our research in…
Sociology (35 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Art (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (15 works) · History (14 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Ethnography (12 works)