Matthew C Watson
Biographic Data
| ID | 75505 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew C Watson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew C |
| FAMILY NAME | Watson |
| SIGNATURE | WATSON M C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mount Holyoke College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8461-5816 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A Solicitous Science
Three visions of anthropology collided in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas in the 1950s. Infrastructural improvements, indigenista politics, and increased US social science funding intensified research on Indigenous Chiapas. The scene drew together imperial travelers, modernist ethnographers, and Mexican development administrators. Among them was Danish explorer-archaeologist Frans Blom, who struggled to establish his estate as a reputationall…
Rearview mirrors: Harvard Land Rover interviews and the ethnographic drive in midcentury Chiapas
In 1951, Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) established a coordinating center for a pilot development project in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. INI administrators sought to draw Tzotzil- and Tzeltal-speaking indigenous communities that radiated around San Cristóbal into identification with the Mexican state and its political mythology of racial-cultural mixture, or mestizaje. To do so, the INI built roads. State investment in the…
Raging Hallelujah
Imitation and society: How Boasian anthropology reassembled the social
A growing body of research defends the contemporary relevance of 19th-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde's theory of the social. Bruno Latour, in particular, reads Tarde's emphasis on imitation, innovation, and opposition as a relationist alternative to Émile Durkheim's ostensible determinism. Scholars aligned with Latour's reconstruction have maintained that sociology and anthropology decisively abandoned Tarde's social epistemology in favor of a…
On Multispecies Mythology: A Critique of Animal Anthropology
This article argues that the turn to the animal is a return to mythology. By reading multispecies scholarship as narrativization of contemporary mythology, I claim that the field voices anxieties about human futures through figures of animal others. Multispecies ethnography implicitly grapples with an apocalyptic mythos prevailing in the wake of modernity's seemingly abandoned dreams (e.g. geopolitical peace, postcolonial development, environment…
Listening in the Pakal controversy: A matter of care in Ancient Maya studies
This article explores the fraught historical politics of a 20th-century controversy over a Classic Maya king. The controversy ostensibly concerned the age at death of a ruler discovered in 1952 in an elaborate sarcophagus at the Mexican site of Palenque. Combining osteological and epigraphic techniques, Mexican scholars estimated that the ruler died at about 40 or 50years of age. Two decades later, an emerging collective of US hieroglyph experts …
Derrida, Stengers, Latour, and Subalternist Cosmopolitics
Postcolonial science studies entails ostensibly contradictory critical and empirical commitments. Science studies scholars influenced by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers embrace forms of realist, radical empiricism, while postcolonial studies scholars influenced by Jacques Derrida trace the limits of the knowable. This essay takes their common use of the term cosmopolitics as an unexpected point of departure for reconciling Derrida's program wi…
The poverty of postcolonial theory
Vivek Chibber Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital London and New York: Verso, 2013 306 pp ISBN 978 1 84467 976 8 (pb) US$29.95 Classical Marxist theory teaches that the proletarian revol
Mediating the Maya: Hieroglyphic imaging and objectivity
Drawing from the science studies literature on scientific visualization, this essay examines how techniques of imaging Maya hieroglyphs have established conditions that constrain contemporary scholars' systems of historical imagination and interpretation. I discuss imaging techniques innovated by three significant Mayanists: J. Eric S. Thompson, Merle Greene Robertson, and Linda Schele. Building on the work of historians of science Lorraine Dasto…
Staged Discovery and the Politics of Maya Hieroglyphic Things
Anthropologists of science conventionally examine the cultural politics of natural sciences. However, historical and social sciences also have cultural contexts and consequences. This article extends science studies to public engagement with Maya hieroglyphic decipherment. In the 1970s several scholars claimed to discover Maya hieroglyphs’ grammatical structure. Linda Schele popularized decipherment through sites including the Maya Meetings, publ…
Dissecting Postcolonial Biomedicine
This essay reviews Warwick Anderson's book The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. I present the book as a model of postcolonial science studies research that exemplifies the complementarity of postcolonial studies and science studies
Cosmopolitics and the Subaltern: Problematizing Latour’s Idea of the Commons
This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour's conceptualization of the 'common world'. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a 'cosmopolitics' in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterog…
Classrooms and Online Engagement
Cosmopolitics and the Subaltern: Problematizing Latour’s Idea of the Commons
This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour's conceptualization of the 'common world'. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a 'cosmopolitics' in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterog…
Derrida, Stengers, Latour, and Subalternist Cosmopolitics
Postcolonial science studies entails ostensibly contradictory critical and empirical commitments. Science studies scholars influenced by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers embrace forms of realist, radical empiricism, while postcolonial studies scholars influenced by Jacques Derrida trace the limits of the knowable. This essay takes their common use of the term cosmopolitics as an unexpected point of departure for reconciling Derrida's program wi…
On Multispecies Mythology: A Critique of Animal Anthropology
This article argues that the turn to the animal is a return to mythology. By reading multispecies scholarship as narrativization of contemporary mythology, I claim that the field voices anxieties about human futures through figures of animal others. Multispecies ethnography implicitly grapples with an apocalyptic mythos prevailing in the wake of modernity's seemingly abandoned dreams (e.g. geopolitical peace, postcolonial development, environment…
Listening in the Pakal controversy: A matter of care in Ancient Maya studies
This article explores the fraught historical politics of a 20th-century controversy over a Classic Maya king. The controversy ostensibly concerned the age at death of a ruler discovered in 1952 in an elaborate sarcophagus at the Mexican site of Palenque. Combining osteological and epigraphic techniques, Mexican scholars estimated that the ruler died at about 40 or 50years of age. Two decades later, an emerging collective of US hieroglyph experts …
Staged Discovery and the Politics of Maya Hieroglyphic Things
Anthropologists of science conventionally examine the cultural politics of natural sciences. However, historical and social sciences also have cultural contexts and consequences. This article extends science studies to public engagement with Maya hieroglyphic decipherment. In the 1970s several scholars claimed to discover Maya hieroglyphs’ grammatical structure. Linda Schele popularized decipherment through sites including the Maya Meetings, publ…
Rearview mirrors: Harvard Land Rover interviews and the ethnographic drive in midcentury Chiapas
In 1951, Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) established a coordinating center for a pilot development project in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. INI administrators sought to draw Tzotzil- and Tzeltal-speaking indigenous communities that radiated around San Cristóbal into identification with the Mexican state and its political mythology of racial-cultural mixture, or mestizaje. To do so, the INI built roads. State investment in the…
Imitation and society: How Boasian anthropology reassembled the social
A growing body of research defends the contemporary relevance of 19th-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde's theory of the social. Bruno Latour, in particular, reads Tarde's emphasis on imitation, innovation, and opposition as a relationist alternative to Émile Durkheim's ostensible determinism. Scholars aligned with Latour's reconstruction have maintained that sociology and anthropology decisively abandoned Tarde's social epistemology in favor of a…
A Solicitous Science
Three visions of anthropology collided in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas in the 1950s. Infrastructural improvements, indigenista politics, and increased US social science funding intensified research on Indigenous Chiapas. The scene drew together imperial travelers, modernist ethnographers, and Mexican development administrators. Among them was Danish explorer-archaeologist Frans Blom, who struggled to establish his estate as a reputationall…
The poverty of postcolonial theory
Vivek Chibber Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital London and New York: Verso, 2013 306 pp ISBN 978 1 84467 976 8 (pb) US$29.95 Classical Marxist theory teaches that the proletarian revol
Classrooms and Online Engagement
Dissecting Postcolonial Biomedicine
This essay reviews Warwick Anderson's book The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. I present the book as a model of postcolonial science studies research that exemplifies the complementarity of postcolonial studies and science studies
Cosmopolitics and the Subaltern: Problematizing Latour’s Idea of the Commons
This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour's conceptualization of the 'common world'. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a 'cosmopolitics' in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterog…
Staged Discovery and the Politics of Maya Hieroglyphic Things
Anthropologists of science conventionally examine the cultural politics of natural sciences. However, historical and social sciences also have cultural contexts and consequences. This article extends science studies to public engagement with Maya hieroglyphic decipherment. In the 1970s several scholars claimed to discover Maya hieroglyphs’ grammatical structure. Linda Schele popularized decipherment through sites including the Maya Meetings, publ…
The poverty of postcolonial theory
Vivek Chibber Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital London and New York: Verso, 2013 306 pp ISBN 978 1 84467 976 8 (pb) US$29.95 Classical Marxist theory teaches that the proletarian revol
Mediating the Maya: Hieroglyphic imaging and objectivity
Drawing from the science studies literature on scientific visualization, this essay examines how techniques of imaging Maya hieroglyphs have established conditions that constrain contemporary scholars' systems of historical imagination and interpretation. I discuss imaging techniques innovated by three significant Mayanists: J. Eric S. Thompson, Merle Greene Robertson, and Linda Schele. Building on the work of historians of science Lorraine Dasto…
Listening in the Pakal controversy: A matter of care in Ancient Maya studies
This article explores the fraught historical politics of a 20th-century controversy over a Classic Maya king. The controversy ostensibly concerned the age at death of a ruler discovered in 1952 in an elaborate sarcophagus at the Mexican site of Palenque. Combining osteological and epigraphic techniques, Mexican scholars estimated that the ruler died at about 40 or 50years of age. Two decades later, an emerging collective of US hieroglyph experts …
Derrida, Stengers, Latour, and Subalternist Cosmopolitics
Postcolonial science studies entails ostensibly contradictory critical and empirical commitments. Science studies scholars influenced by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers embrace forms of realist, radical empiricism, while postcolonial studies scholars influenced by Jacques Derrida trace the limits of the knowable. This essay takes their common use of the term cosmopolitics as an unexpected point of departure for reconciling Derrida's program wi…
On Multispecies Mythology: A Critique of Animal Anthropology
This article argues that the turn to the animal is a return to mythology. By reading multispecies scholarship as narrativization of contemporary mythology, I claim that the field voices anxieties about human futures through figures of animal others. Multispecies ethnography implicitly grapples with an apocalyptic mythos prevailing in the wake of modernity's seemingly abandoned dreams (e.g. geopolitical peace, postcolonial development, environment…
Raging Hallelujah
Imitation and society: How Boasian anthropology reassembled the social
A growing body of research defends the contemporary relevance of 19th-century sociologist Gabriel Tarde's theory of the social. Bruno Latour, in particular, reads Tarde's emphasis on imitation, innovation, and opposition as a relationist alternative to Émile Durkheim's ostensible determinism. Scholars aligned with Latour's reconstruction have maintained that sociology and anthropology decisively abandoned Tarde's social epistemology in favor of a…
Rearview mirrors: Harvard Land Rover interviews and the ethnographic drive in midcentury Chiapas
In 1951, Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) established a coordinating center for a pilot development project in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. INI administrators sought to draw Tzotzil- and Tzeltal-speaking indigenous communities that radiated around San Cristóbal into identification with the Mexican state and its political mythology of racial-cultural mixture, or mestizaje. To do so, the INI built roads. State investment in the…
A Solicitous Science
Three visions of anthropology collided in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas in the 1950s. Infrastructural improvements, indigenista politics, and increased US social science funding intensified research on Indigenous Chiapas. The scene drew together imperial travelers, modernist ethnographers, and Mexican development administrators. Among them was Danish explorer-archaeologist Frans Blom, who struggled to establish his estate as a reputationall…
Sociology (11 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works) · Anthropology (5 works)