Debbora Battaglia
Biographic Data
| ID | 84497 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debbora Battaglia |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debbora |
| FAMILY NAME | Battaglia |
| SIGNATURE | BATTAGLIA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mount Holyoke College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8681-064X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 349 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination
Anthropocene Unseen
Aeroponic gardens and their magic: Plants/persons/ethics in suspension
Out of the fire bombed ruins and food deprivation of the Second World War came one innovator's prototype for growing edible plants, suspended above earth and requiring a minimum of water. His aeroponic apparatus would later be referred to as The Genesis Machine, from the movie Star Trek II. This paper travels with roots in air into different spheres where the relations of persons, plants, and technology conspire to place future - growing into eth…
Relational Space: An Earthly Installation
Anthropology off the Earth opens to new questions and futures for our disciplinary project and reach, while at the same time compelling revisits to classic sites of anthropological inquiry and critique. Taking as a given that human labor and imagination are neither limitable to, nor severable from, terrestrial-scapes of knowledge and practice, we argue that conceptually and materially working with outer space offers a unique opportunity to engage…
Coming in at an Unusual Angle: Exo-Surprise and the Fieldworking Cosmonaut
Valentin Lebedev is a pioneer of space and earth science in Russia. He is also the first ethnographic diarist of outer space. In 1982, while "on orbit" for 211 days as a fieldworking cosmonaut, Lebedev produced a thickly descriptive account of the intimate sociality and technoculture of the Soviet space complex Salyut 7. Crafted to defamiliarize (ostranenie) a spaceworld that publics saw as flawlessly engineered and managed, the diary is an argum…
Extreme: Limits and Horizons in the Once and Future Cosmos
This paper introduces a special collection of Anthropological Quarterly for examining "the extreme" in contemporary modernity. Drawing upon sites of political, scientific, and economic engagement that source specifically to the extraterrestrial, we argue that the figure of the extreme shapes an analytic of limits and ever-opening horizons-epistemological and physical-provoking new understandings of humanness, environment, temporality, and of inte…
Arresting hospitality: The Case of the 'Handshake in Space
The diplomatic event which symbolically terminated the Space Race was a high-risk mission on low Earth orbit which came to be known as the Apollo-Soyuz 'handshake in space'. Designed as an act of détente to literally and figuratively transcend national borders and technocultural differences, the mission in the end transcended itself in denying any but space nature -'space-as-itself'- the sovereignty of hosting. Humorous exchanges between astronau…
Introduction: Contexts for a Comparative Relativism
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
Of Archipelagos and Arrows
These comments on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's article, "Zeno and the Art of Anthropology," emphasize, first, his engagement with ideas of Gilles Deleuze that open to the political dimension of Amerindian perspectivism and to a "multinatural" understanding of human-to-environment relations; these form the foundation of postdevelopment action in this part of the world and orient actors' "postures of attention" to power relations. Second, this comm…
Casino and Museum by John Bodinger de Uriarte
Encountering the Future: Anthropology and Outer Space
Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human by Tom Boellstorff
Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere: Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere
Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere
Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 325 pp
E. T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces
E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces
Anthropologists have long sought to engage and describe foreign or “alien” societies, yet few have considered the fluid communities centered around a shared belief in alien beings and UFO sightings and their effect on popular and expressive culture. Opening up a new frontier for anthropological study, the contributors to E.T. Culture take these communities seriously. They demonstrate that an E.T. orientation toward various forms of visitation—inc…
“For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future”: Raëlian Clonehood in the Public Sphere
The Art of Kula
The Art of Kula Shirley F. Campbell Oxford: Berg 2002
Religion and Media Across the Great Divide of Essentialist and Situated Knowledge
Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds. Religion and Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. As the distinguished editors of this multi-disciplinary anthology and the majority of its contributors are writers of critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy and comparative religion, the decision to give substantial space (ten of the twenty-five chapters) to anthropologists and ethnographic writers should be noted at the outset as commendabl…
Multiplicities: An Anthropologist's Thoughts on Replicants and Clones in Popular Film
Anthro-Signifying at the Millennium
Introduction: Interpretive Language and Cultures Have interpretive anthropologists completely given up on shared, formal ways of apprehending expressive forms? Interpretive orthodoxies of past, despite their drawbacks, ensured reproduction of discipline by providing a reasonably effective tool kit any member could dip into and use. What among today's vanishing signs, mimetic doublings, and frequent dialogues approaches scope, power, and richness …
Ambiguating Agency: The Case of Malinowski's Ghost
Agency is useful to people not so much for controlling a site of authorship or authority as for ambiguating social relationships and authority. Both indigenous and anthropological practices of ambiguation are critical sites of discourse that allow the gaps and ruptures between epistemologies the possibility of positive value
Rhetorics of Self-Making
Rhetorics of Self-Making
Rhetorics of Self-Making
Departing from an essentialist concept of the self, this book advances the cross-cultural study of selfhood with three contributions to the literature: First, it approaches the self as an ideological process, arguing that selfhood is culturally situated and emergent in social practices of persuasion. Second, it demonstrates how postmodernity problematizes the experience and concept of the self. Finally, the book challenges the pervasive practice …
The Body in the Gift: Memory and forgetting in Sabarl mortuary exchange
In casting gift exchange as an inscriptive performance of embodied gender relations, the Sabarl of Papua New Guinea reveal an indigenous valuation of forgetting as a willed transformation of memory and resist the opposition between inscribed and enacted cultural traditions that is so pervasive in the anthropological literature on social memory. Sabarl mortuary exchanges that feature "corpses" of gendered wealth serve here as a case in point. [exc…
Projecting Personhood in Melanesia: The Dialectics of Artefact Symbolism on Sabarl Island
Introduction: Contexts for a Comparative Relativism
This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled "Comparative Relativism" outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usu…
Extreme: Limits and Horizons in the Once and Future Cosmos
This paper introduces a special collection of Anthropological Quarterly for examining "the extreme" in contemporary modernity. Drawing upon sites of political, scientific, and economic engagement that source specifically to the extraterrestrial, we argue that the figure of the extreme shapes an analytic of limits and ever-opening horizons-epistemological and physical-provoking new understandings of humanness, environment, temporality, and of inte…
Ambiguating Agency: The Case of Malinowski's Ghost
Agency is useful to people not so much for controlling a site of authorship or authority as for ambiguating social relationships and authority. Both indigenous and anthropological practices of ambiguation are critical sites of discourse that allow the gaps and ruptures between epistemologies the possibility of positive value
Aeroponic gardens and their magic: Plants/persons/ethics in suspension
Out of the fire bombed ruins and food deprivation of the Second World War came one innovator's prototype for growing edible plants, suspended above earth and requiring a minimum of water. His aeroponic apparatus would later be referred to as The Genesis Machine, from the movie Star Trek II. This paper travels with roots in air into different spheres where the relations of persons, plants, and technology conspire to place future - growing into eth…
At Play in the Fields (and Borders) of the Imaginary: Melanesian Transformations of Forgetting
We Feed Our Father: Paternal nurture among the Sabarl of Papua New Guinea
Among matrilineal peoples in Papua New Guinea, power symmetries and asymmetries, with their bases in indigenous models of gender and generation-based relations, are often revealed in the way paternal nurture is conceptualized and the way people act in relation to it. In the case of the Sabarl, these relations are marked in "paths" of symbolic action and embodied concretely in the movement of ritual foods and objects featured in affinal exchanges.…
Relational Space: An Earthly Installation
Anthropology off the Earth opens to new questions and futures for our disciplinary project and reach, while at the same time compelling revisits to classic sites of anthropological inquiry and critique. Taking as a given that human labor and imagination are neither limitable to, nor severable from, terrestrial-scapes of knowledge and practice, we argue that conceptually and materially working with outer space offers a unique opportunity to engage…
Retaining Reality: Some Practical Problems with Objects as Property
L'A. remet en question les representations classiques des operations par lesquelles les habitants des iles Trobriand evaluent les objets, et conteste les modeles qui, definissant l'echange a partir de la nature materielle des objets, n'attribuent qu'un role secondaire aux relations sociales. A partir d'un exemple ethnographique - l'interet que porte la lame d'une hache en pierre pour une certaine elite urbaine des iles, membre d'un lignage matril…
Coming in at an Unusual Angle: Exo-Surprise and the Fieldworking Cosmonaut
Valentin Lebedev is a pioneer of space and earth science in Russia. He is also the first ethnographic diarist of outer space. In 1982, while "on orbit" for 211 days as a fieldworking cosmonaut, Lebedev produced a thickly descriptive account of the intimate sociality and technoculture of the Soviet space complex Salyut 7. Crafted to defamiliarize (ostranenie) a spaceworld that publics saw as flawlessly engineered and managed, the diary is an argum…
Arresting hospitality: The Case of the 'Handshake in Space
The diplomatic event which symbolically terminated the Space Race was a high-risk mission on low Earth orbit which came to be known as the Apollo-Soyuz 'handshake in space'. Designed as an act of détente to literally and figuratively transcend national borders and technocultural differences, the mission in the end transcended itself in denying any but space nature -'space-as-itself'- the sovereignty of hosting. Humorous exchanges between astronau…
Encountering the Future: Anthropology and Outer Space
Multiplicities: An Anthropologist's Thoughts on Replicants and Clones in Popular Film
"Fear of Setting in the American Cultural Imaginary or "You Are Never Alone with a Clone
sRecently the New York Times reported that scientists had "cloned" a human embryo. The alarmed response of journalists, bioethicists, and the general public focused a spotlight on the ethics of human embryo research. The popular debate reiterated the critiques of cultural theorists that humans not be figured as (marketable) products. But the debate's attribution of an unproblematic value for individual personhood illustrates the importance of a m…
Kitawa: A Linguistic and Aesthetic Analysis of Visual Art in Melanesia
Displacing Culture: A Joke of Significance in Urban Papua New Guinea
Debbora Battaglia, Displacing Culture: A Joke of Significance in Urban Papua New Guinea, New Literary History, Vol. 23, No. 4, Papers from the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (Autumn, 1992), pp. 1003-1017
Of Archipelagos and Arrows
These comments on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's article, "Zeno and the Art of Anthropology," emphasize, first, his engagement with ideas of Gilles Deleuze that open to the political dimension of Amerindian perspectivism and to a "multinatural" understanding of human-to-environment relations; these form the foundation of postdevelopment action in this part of the world and orient actors' "postures of attention" to power relations. Second, this comm…
Rhetorics of Self-Making
The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response . David FREEDBERG
Projecting Personhood in Melanesia: The Dialectics of Artefact Symbolism on Sabarl Island
Magicians of Manumanua: Living Myth in Kalauna
We Feed Our Father: Paternal nurture among the Sabarl of Papua New Guinea
Among matrilineal peoples in Papua New Guinea, power symmetries and asymmetries, with their bases in indigenous models of gender and generation-based relations, are often revealed in the way paternal nurture is conceptualized and the way people act in relation to it. In the case of the Sabarl, these relations are marked in "paths" of symbolic action and embodied concretely in the movement of ritual foods and objects featured in affinal exchanges.…
The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response . David FREEDBERG
Linguistic Anthropology: The Heart of the Pearl Shell: The Mythological Dimension of Foi Sociality. James F. Weiner
Cultural Alternatives and a Feminist Anthropology: An Analysis of Culturally Constructed Gender Interests in Papua New Guinea. Frederick Errington , Deborah Gewertz
On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory, and Mortality in Sabaryl Island Society
Displacing Culture: A Joke of Significance in Urban Papua New Guinea
Debbora Battaglia, Displacing Culture: A Joke of Significance in Urban Papua New Guinea, New Literary History, Vol. 23, No. 4, Papers from the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (Autumn, 1992), pp. 1003-1017
Kitawa: A Linguistic and Aesthetic Analysis of Visual Art in Melanesia
The Body in the Gift: Memory and forgetting in Sabarl mortuary exchange
In casting gift exchange as an inscriptive performance of embodied gender relations, the Sabarl of Papua New Guinea reveal an indigenous valuation of forgetting as a willed transformation of memory and resist the opposition between inscribed and enacted cultural traditions that is so pervasive in the anthropological literature on social memory. Sabarl mortuary exchanges that feature "corpses" of gendered wealth serve here as a case in point. [exc…
At Play in the Fields (and Borders) of the Imaginary: Melanesian Transformations of Forgetting
General/Theoretical Anthropology: Partial Connections. Marilyn Strathern
Retaining Reality: Some Practical Problems with Objects as Property
L'A. remet en question les representations classiques des operations par lesquelles les habitants des iles Trobriand evaluent les objets, et conteste les modeles qui, definissant l'echange a partir de la nature materielle des objets, n'attribuent qu'un role secondaire aux relations sociales. A partir d'un exemple ethnographique - l'interet que porte la lame d'une hache en pierre pour une certaine elite urbaine des iles, membre d'un lignage matril…
Rhetorics of Self-Making
Departing from an essentialist concept of the self, this book advances the cross-cultural study of selfhood with three contributions to the literature: First, it approaches the self as an ideological process, arguing that selfhood is culturally situated and emergent in social practices of persuasion. Second, it demonstrates how postmodernity problematizes the experience and concept of the self. Finally, the book challenges the pervasive practice …
Rhetorics of Self-Making
"Fear of Setting in the American Cultural Imaginary or "You Are Never Alone with a Clone
sRecently the New York Times reported that scientists had "cloned" a human embryo. The alarmed response of journalists, bioethicists, and the general public focused a spotlight on the ethics of human embryo research. The popular debate reiterated the critiques of cultural theorists that humans not be figured as (marketable) products. But the debate's attribution of an unproblematic value for individual personhood illustrates the importance of a m…
Rhetorics of Self-Making
Rhetorics of Self-Making
Ambiguating Agency: The Case of Malinowski's Ghost
Agency is useful to people not so much for controlling a site of authorship or authority as for ambiguating social relationships and authority. Both indigenous and anthropological practices of ambiguation are critical sites of discourse that allow the gaps and ruptures between epistemologies the possibility of positive value
Anthro-Signifying at the Millennium
Introduction: Interpretive Language and Cultures Have interpretive anthropologists completely given up on shared, formal ways of apprehending expressive forms? Interpretive orthodoxies of past, despite their drawbacks, ensured reproduction of discipline by providing a reasonably effective tool kit any member could dip into and use. What among today's vanishing signs, mimetic doublings, and frequent dialogues approaches scope, power, and richness …
Multiplicities: An Anthropologist's Thoughts on Replicants and Clones in Popular Film
The Art of Kula
The Art of Kula Shirley F. Campbell Oxford: Berg 2002
Religion and Media Across the Great Divide of Essentialist and Situated Knowledge
Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds. Religion and Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. As the distinguished editors of this multi-disciplinary anthology and the majority of its contributors are writers of critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy and comparative religion, the decision to give substantial space (ten of the twenty-five chapters) to anthropologists and ethnographic writers should be noted at the outset as commendabl…
E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces
Anthropologists have long sought to engage and describe foreign or “alien” societies, yet few have considered the fluid communities centered around a shared belief in alien beings and UFO sightings and their effect on popular and expressive culture. Opening up a new frontier for anthropological study, the contributors to E.T. Culture take these communities seriously. They demonstrate that an E.T. orientation toward various forms of visitation—inc…
“For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future”: Raëlian Clonehood in the Public Sphere
Sociology (23 works) · History (18 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · History (16 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (12 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Political science (9 works)