Ilana Gershon
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 75495 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Ilana Gershon |
| NOMBRES | Ilana |
| APELLIDO | Gershon |
| FIRMA | GERSHON I |
| AFILIACIONES | Indiana University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0447-0694 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 88 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 798 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 89 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1999 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Linguistic anthropology of AI
This reflection on the themed cluster of articles on linguistic anthropology and AI addresses what social anthropologists might wish to know about the linguistic anthropological analytical toolkit when turning to large language models (LLMs) as objects of analysis. In particular, this afterword discusses what agency might be understood to be when the scholarly attention is focused largely on how people use communicative repertoires to accomplish …
Semiotic Determinacy
Some people have become disenchanted with modern bureaucratic forms and modern governments, and in their attempts to imagine an alternative, have joined the sovereign citizen counterpublic, a right-leaning movement comprised of loosely affiliated groups rejecting the validity of national laws that are present in the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other countries. These groups focus their energies on legal syste…
The Political Uses of Semiotic Indeterminacy
The authors in this collection start with the insight that not all instances of semiotic indeterminacy are produced in the same way, that they can be located differently in the process of semiosis, and this fact shapes how and when semiotic indeterminacy is deployed by formulators and interpreters. The authors explore patterned uses of semiotic indeterminacy in Brazil, Bulgaria, Iran, and the United States to examine the role indeterminacy plays …
Seeking romance in a marketplace of profiles
How does the state ignore? Ideologies and practices of substantive and procedural listening in U.S. school board meetings
Prefigurative Neoliberalism
Much contemporary research on prefigurative legality turns to left-leaning activists for ethnographic insights into practices that call forward an alternative legal world. We turn instead to a right-leaning movement commonly known by scholars as the Pseudolaw movement-or self-named (by some involved) as the sovereign citizen movement-filled with loosely affiliated groups that share a common ideological approach to law. We discuss the underlying l…
Machines built out of other people's words
Glissant and the Politics of Coordination
This is an ironic moment for Edouard Glissant’s growing community of readers. So many are discovering Glissant’s work for the first time, myself included, in part because a fervent commitment to a politics of recognition now dominates in many corners of the humanities. This is ironic largely because while the choice to engage with Glissant might be motivated by an all too generalized logic of recognition, to read Glissant is to learn about how th…
Uncommon Sense
Breakups -with
Bullshit Genres
Another communication technology has been introduced, ChatGPT, drawing the attention of many pundits, occupying valuable space on every op-ed page, and inspiring a Hollywood writers' strike and endless small talk, all steaming a bit with the intoxicating fumes of moral panic or outsized utopian enthusiasm. Research on artificial intelligence (AI) has existed for decades, entering many people's daily lives in dribs and drabs. ChatGPT and its sibli…
Expectations of the Gift
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange-giving, taking, and returning-with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconside…
Reflecting on/for better worlds
New Media and Labor
In the early decades of the internet, many saw new channels of communication as potentially beneficial disruptions, analyzing largely through a utopic lens, albeit often with a technolibertarian bent. This did not last, and by the 2020s, scholars were increasingly pessimistic about how neoliberal logics structured the ways these technologies produced and extracted economic value. The heady promise of newness associated with recently invented comm…
The Worst of Anthro Job Ads for 2021
Every fall, some lucky anthropology departments get to hire. The search for a new colleague happens behind the scenes for a while before it goes public-five-year plans have been written, external reviews have been navigated, lots of conversations have occurred, and some pleading with a dean has taken place. But the first public hint that the department has been successful in its campaign is the job ad. And what a text it is! Written by a committe…
Introduction
The special issue brings together anthropologists working at the intersection of language and economy to draw attention to the dynamics of how people’s experiences of social change are articulated through genre work in different institutional contexts. In recent years, many scholars working in cultural economy have turned to language as an analytic, and this has often focused on the performative dimensions of economic practice as the most signifi…
Genres are the drive belts of the job market
Many job applicants spend an inordinate amount of time struggling with the task of fashioning the most appealing biography of the increasingly skillful self out of interwoven genres that can also circulate individually. These struggles are most frequently articulated as questions of how best to manage different genres’ chronotopic expectations. Under neoliberalism, how workers are expected to represent their previous work lives has shifted signif…
Digital economy and labor
This chapter reviews some of that literature, which for many scholars has tended to come from and be about regions in North America and Europe. It focuses on popular beliefs that shape industry and academic perspectives of digital work, and reviews three types of field sites that often guide critical inquiry into modern practices of working with and through digital technologies: corporate culture in Silicon Valley, online work distribution platfo…
You got a hole in your belly and a phone in your hand
Many of the tasks involved in looking for a job these days involve sharing and storing digital data. Digital technology is now required for job seekers to research employers, store resumes, complete applications, and schedule interviews. What is the employment process for people who are living on the poverty line, without reliable access to the Internet or mobile phones? We focus on technology maintenance, the continuous work required to stay dig…
Genres in new economies of language
This article suggests that one of the understudied and substantive ways in which actors produce and transform social hierarchies and classifications is by aligning and mis-aligning genres. Alignments within and across genres have furnished methods for construing and evaluating qualities of people - as examples, the genre repertoires of job applications or promotion dossiers. A fine attunement to new and emergent semiotic alignments via genres can…
Trump's Appeal
Media as Channel
To understand how people navigate shifting media ecologies, linguistic anthropologists have turned to an array of analytical concepts that address how people communicate when using multiple channels: media ideologies, remediation, participant structures, heteroglossia, and entextualization. After demonstrating how these concepts are pertinent to the anthropological study of media, we also discuss two co‐constitutive ways of engaging with a varied…
Law and Empire in the Pacific
The Warm Winds of Change
The Power of Perspective
Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange
Neoliberal Agency
This article addresses the challenges a neoliberal conception of agency poses to anthropologists. I first discuss the kind of self that a neoliberal agency presupposes, in particular a self that is a flexible bundle of skills that reflexively manages oneself as though the self was a business. I then explore the dilemmas this neoliberal agency poses to different scholarly imaginations. I conclude by proposing that a neoliberal agency creates relat…
Media Ideologies
This volume began with the question: what analytical possibilities can scholarly work on language ideologies offer the study of media? Studying media ideologies is not new, but calling the metalanguage that emphasizes the technology or bodies through which we communicate a "media ideology" is. By examining media ideologies, the authors in this volume are building on previous ethnographies of how people on the ground understand the ways the medium…
The Breakup 2.0
A few generations ago, college students showed their romantic commitments by exchanging special objects: rings, pins, varsity letter jackets. Pins and rings were handy, telling everyone in local communities that you were spoken for, and when you broke up, the absence of a ring let everyone know you were available again. Is being Facebook official really more complicated, or are status updates just a new version of these old tokens? Many people ar…
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
When U.S. college students tell breakup stories, they often indicate what medium was used for each exchange. In this article, I explore what this practice reveals about people's media ideologies. By extending previous scholarship on language ideologies to media, I trace how switching media or refusing to switch media contributes to the labor of disconnecting the relationship, determining whether phrases such as "it's over" are effective or not.[b…
I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man
This article discusses personal branding, a performance genre that many job seekers in the United States are told to master in order to get a job. I discuss the specific techniques you are supposed to use to brand yourself, some of the origins of these techniques, and the reasons why people find it challenging to put these techniques into practice. I analyze the self that personal branding assumes everyone should be able to present to others by d…
Un-Friend My Heart
In interviews with Indiana University college students, undergraduates insisted that Facebook could be a threat to their romantic relationships. Some students choose to deactivate their Facebook accounts to preserve their relationships. No other new media was described as harmful. This article explores why Facebook was singled out. I argue that Facebook encourages (but does not require) users to introduce a neoliberal logic to all their intimate …
Animating interaction
This article engages with Ten Silvio's 2010 challenge to treat animation as a central trope for understanding the relationship between selves and media. We discuss how animation can illuminate aspects of interactions that performance, the current dominant trope, can not-such as addressing what it means to be human when what distinguishes the human from the nonhuman is how one is being controlled. We discuss how focusing on animation can shed ligh…
Porous social orders
Many cultural anthropologists today share a common theoretical commitment: to view the people they encounter during fieldwork as living among multiple social orders that are interconnected and contingent. When social orders are multiple, ethnographers are quickly faced with the question of how people construct the boundaries between these social orders to be both durable (enough) to keep social orders distinct and porous (enough) to allow people,…
Selling Your Self in the United States
In the contemporary U.S. workplace, corporate personhood is increasingly becoming the metaphor structuring how job seekers are supposed to present themselves as employable. If one takes oneself to be a business, one should also take oneself to be an entity that requires a brand. Some ethnographic questions arise when job seekers try to embody corporate personhood. How does one transform oneself into a brand? What are the obstacles that a person e…
Seeing like a system
In this essay, I discuss how Niklas Luhmann's systems theory might be useful for anthropologists. After providing a summary of Luhmann's theory, I address the quandaries anthropologists might face when deploying a theory that presumes systems without selves. I also recount how other anthropologists have made use of Luhmann's systems theory to analyze auditing, legal pluralism, and biosecurity hazards
Language and the Newness of Media
How is the newness of new media constructed? Rejecting technological determinism, linguistic anthropologists understand that newness emerges when previous strategies for coordinating social interactions are challenged by a communicative channel. People experience a communicative channel as new when it enables people to circulate knowledge in new ways, to call forth new publics, to occupy new communicative roles, to engage in new forms of politics…
Cross-Cultural Marriage
Cross-Cultural Marriage: Identity and Choice. ROSEMARY BREGER and ROSANNA HILL. eds. Oxford: Berg, 1998. xvi. 241 pp., contributors, notes, index
Employing the CEO of Me, Inc
Social practices and contingencies always exceed the neoliberal models by which people currently try to contain the inherent unpredictability of accomplishing social tasks with others, such as getting a job. Contradictions in neoliberal logics emerge when people try to live according to neoliberal precepts, engaging with other social entities as though all are corporate persons and all alliances are, metaphorically speaking, business‐to‐business …
"Introduction to "In Focus
In this "In Focus," authors address how culture is figured in institutional contexts that are putatively arenas of no culture. Participants in these institutions pay ever more attention to questions of "culture" but often deploy the term in ways that presume that only select outsiders are culture bearers. Contributors to this volume seek to highlight the intricate ways in which the "cultural" and "acultural" are mutually constituted in such insti…
When Culture Is Not A System
In independent and American Samoa, Samoan representatives have historically been successful at furthering their communities' interests when dealing with various colonial regimes. Yet during my fieldwork in California, I kept witnessing failed encounters between Samoan migrants and government officials. I argue that government officials helped create these problems through the ways they expected Samoan migrants to act as culture-bearers. I conclud…
Being Explicit about Culture
In this article, I explore how people use the culture concept in legislatures to understand the minorities they legislate for and about. I focus on recent debates in the New Zealand parliament over whether the indigenous Māori are a cultural group or a racial group. A Westminster parliament system encourages these debates, in which political parties argue that Māori are either cultural or racial but not both. For the ruling Labour Party and its a…
Bullshit Genres
Another communication technology has been introduced, ChatGPT, drawing the attention of many pundits, occupying valuable space on every op-ed page, and inspiring a Hollywood writers' strike and endless small talk, all steaming a bit with the intoxicating fumes of moral panic or outsized utopian enthusiasm. Research on artificial intelligence (AI) has existed for decades, entering many people's daily lives in dribs and drabs. ChatGPT and its sibli…
Publish and be damned
The public sphere is increasingly being depicted as a site of inadequately assessed risk when American undergraduates post blogs, videos, and Facebook updates that become viral, prompting others to mutter 'don't they know better than to press send?' In this article, I offer an analytical frame for such posting that does not re-inscribe US tendencies to attribute ignorance or misguided selfishness to unwelcome behavior. In the United States, there…
Reflexivity in Others' Contexts
The Worst of Anthro Job Ads for 2021
Every fall, some lucky anthropology departments get to hire. The search for a new colleague happens behind the scenes for a while before it goes public-five-year plans have been written, external reviews have been navigated, lots of conversations have occurred, and some pleading with a dean has taken place. But the first public hint that the department has been successful in its campaign is the job ad. And what a text it is! Written by a committe…
Genres in new economies of language
This article suggests that one of the understudied and substantive ways in which actors produce and transform social hierarchies and classifications is by aligning and mis-aligning genres. Alignments within and across genres have furnished methods for construing and evaluating qualities of people - as examples, the genre repertoires of job applications or promotion dossiers. A fine attunement to new and emergent semiotic alignments via genres can…
Undercover Boss' s Travels
Comparing different versions of Undercover Boss reveals how an assemblage of TV producers, camera crews, businesses, and broadcasters choose to portray corporate hierarchies during the financial crisis of 2008 when corporations seemed like especially vulnerable forms of social organization for workers to rely upon. This article approaches the same show done in two different countries as a natural experiment that can reveal national differences th…
Machines built out of other people's words
Charles Goodwin's Reflection upon Retirement
Critical Review Essay
What insights can the literature on legal pluralism and cultural pluralism written by ethnographers of courts provide to ethnographers of legislatures? Focusing on Anglo‐American legal systems, I explore how analyses of cultural pluralism can change when one moves from courts to legislatures. Three analytical shifts can occur when switching institutional perspectives. First, in Anglo‐American courts, contexts are often made cultural as one techni…
Cross-Cultural Marriage
Cross-Cultural Marriage: Identity and Choice. ROSEMARY BREGER and ROSANNA HILL. eds. Oxford: Berg, 1998. xvi. 241 pp., contributors, notes, index
Knowing adoption and adopting knowledge
Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment, and Secret Adoption in Morocco. Jamila Bargach. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. xvii. 304 pp., bibliography, index.Sealed and Secret Kinship: The Culture of Policies and Practices in American Adoption. Judith Modell New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. vi. 220 pp., bibliography,index.Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Ann Laura Stoler. Berkeley: University of Ca…
Seeing like a system
In this essay, I discuss how Niklas Luhmann's systems theory might be useful for anthropologists. After providing a summary of Luhmann's theory, I address the quandaries anthropologists might face when deploying a theory that presumes systems without selves. I also recount how other anthropologists have made use of Luhmann's systems theory to analyze auditing, legal pluralism, and biosecurity hazards
When Culture Is Not A System
In independent and American Samoa, Samoan representatives have historically been successful at furthering their communities' interests when dealing with various colonial regimes. Yet during my fieldwork in California, I kept witnessing failed encounters between Samoan migrants and government officials. I argue that government officials helped create these problems through the ways they expected Samoan migrants to act as culture-bearers. I conclud…
Reflexivity in Others' Contexts
Compelling culture
Studies of assimilation tend to focus on whether or not members of a migrant group are adjusting to their new surroundings. This article inverts this focus, asking not how migrant groups adjust, but rather how migrant groups use the language of assimilation to explain generation gaps and other exigencies of migration. This inversion sheds light on the ways a migrant group's epistemological assumptions underlie their understandings of cultural ide…
Being Explicit about Culture
In this article, I explore how people use the culture concept in legislatures to understand the minorities they legislate for and about. I focus on recent debates in the New Zealand parliament over whether the indigenous Māori are a cultural group or a racial group. A Westminster parliament system encourages these debates, in which political parties argue that Māori are either cultural or racial but not both. For the ruling Labour Party and its a…
"Introduction to "In Focus
In this "In Focus," authors address how culture is figured in institutional contexts that are putatively arenas of no culture. Participants in these institutions pay ever more attention to questions of "culture" but often deploy the term in ways that presume that only select outsiders are culture bearers. Contributors to this volume seek to highlight the intricate ways in which the "cultural" and "acultural" are mutually constituted in such insti…
Email my heart
For the past year, I have been collecting people's stories about how they break-up using new social technologies - text-messaging, instant messaging, Facebook, email, voicemail, and so on. These are narratives about how changes in media create new possibilities for disconnecting with others. In telling these stories, people are also being explicit about their media ideologies surrounding what constitutes proper and improper use of new technologie…
Living Theory
When writing, ethnographers are faced with the hermeneutic task of interweaving their dialogues with scholars and their dialogues with their interlocutors in the field. This article is a critique of a long-standing tendency in anthropology to conflate social analysis in texts with social analysis on the ground. I am taking issue with a tendency to compare social theorists such as Heidegger or Bakhtin with the social analysts met during fieldwork.…
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
When U.S. college students tell breakup stories, they often indicate what medium was used for each exchange. In this article, I explore what this practice reveals about people's media ideologies. By extending previous scholarship on language ideologies to media, I trace how switching media or refusing to switch media contributes to the labor of disconnecting the relationship, determining whether phrases such as "it's over" are effective or not.[b…
Media Ideologies
This volume began with the question: what analytical possibilities can scholarly work on language ideologies offer the study of media? Studying media ideologies is not new, but calling the metalanguage that emphasizes the technology or bodies through which we communicate a "media ideology" is. By examining media ideologies, the authors in this volume are building on previous ethnographies of how people on the ground understand the ways the medium…
On the Internet, Everyone Knows You're a Dog. A Review Essay
Ethnographers of new media face a challenge nowadays because they write about technologies people love to discuss and about which journalists love to write. They often find themselves writing against myths about digital media users that other digital media scholars, journalists, and even people interviewed hold in common. In the first decade of Internet research, skeptical scholars often wrote against assumptions about how social practices in vir…
Critical Review Essay
What insights can the literature on legal pluralism and cultural pluralism written by ethnographers of courts provide to ethnographers of legislatures? Focusing on Anglo‐American legal systems, I explore how analyses of cultural pluralism can change when one moves from courts to legislatures. Three analytical shifts can occur when switching institutional perspectives. First, in Anglo‐American courts, contexts are often made cultural as one techni…
Dot Com Mantra
Un-Friend My Heart
In interviews with Indiana University college students, undergraduates insisted that Facebook could be a threat to their romantic relationships. Some students choose to deactivate their Facebook accounts to preserve their relationships. No other new media was described as harmful. This article explores why Facebook was singled out. I argue that Facebook encourages (but does not require) users to introduce a neoliberal logic to all their intimate …
Islands of Privacy by Christena Nippert-Eng
Neoliberal Agency
This article addresses the challenges a neoliberal conception of agency poses to anthropologists. I first discuss the kind of self that a neoliberal agency presupposes, in particular a self that is a flexible bundle of skills that reflexively manages oneself as though the self was a business. I then explore the dilemmas this neoliberal agency poses to different scholarly imaginations. I conclude by proposing that a neoliberal agency creates relat…
No Family Is an Island
Online a Lot of the Time
Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign. Ken Hillis . Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2009 . 316 pp . Ken Hillis has written an engaging philosophical exploration of the dilemmas confronting Euro-Americans when they begin to use online communication. He is intellectually generous to anthropologists and their conceptual impulses, exploring a series of questions that can aid ethnographers interrogating Euro-American media ideologies sur…
Animating interaction
This article engages with Ten Silvio's 2010 challenge to treat animation as a central trope for understanding the relationship between selves and media. We discuss how animation can illuminate aspects of interactions that performance, the current dominant trope, can not-such as addressing what it means to be human when what distinguishes the human from the nonhuman is how one is being controlled. We discuss how focusing on animation can shed ligh…
Every Time We Type Goodbye
Language and media
Any account of social action presupposes an ontology of action whether this is made explicit or not. This chapter reviews the problem of defining and analyzing action in interaction, and to propose a solution. It describes three dimensions of contrast in the analysis of action. A first point is that both purposive action and non-intentional effects can be seen as ways to do things with words but, as we shall see, they differ in many respects. Sec…
Publish and be damned
The public sphere is increasingly being depicted as a site of inadequately assessed risk when American undergraduates post blogs, videos, and Facebook updates that become viral, prompting others to mutter 'don't they know better than to press send?' In this article, I offer an analytical frame for such posting that does not re-inscribe US tendencies to attribute ignorance or misguided selfishness to unwelcome behavior. In the United States, there…
Selling Your Self in the United States
In the contemporary U.S. workplace, corporate personhood is increasingly becoming the metaphor structuring how job seekers are supposed to present themselves as employable. If one takes oneself to be a business, one should also take oneself to be an entity that requires a brand. Some ethnographic questions arise when job seekers try to embody corporate personhood. How does one transform oneself into a brand? What are the obstacles that a person e…
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