Sasha Newell
Biographic Data
| ID | 89044 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sasha Newell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sasha |
| FAMILY NAME | Newell |
| SIGNATURE | NEWELL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | North Carolina State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3517-8629 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 248 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
I am the noise: Spectacular capital, influencers, and the economy of attention in coupé-décalé music
The early years of the 2000s saw the rise of coupé-décalé, a musical genre created by undocumented Ivoirian migrants in Paris. This took place in parallel with the internet's explosion in Côte d'Ivoire, giving rise to a new figure in Ivoirian popular culture: the boucantier (noisemaker). The boucantiers became famous by entering nightclubs and focusing the crowd's attention on themselves. Their principal technique for doing so was to conspicuousl…
Joël Akafou. After the Crossing (Traverser). 2020. 77 minutes. French. VraiVraiFilms
Of Hoarding and Housekeeping: Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective
Of Hoarding and Housekeeping: Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective
Hoarding has largely been approached from a psychological and universal perspective, and decluttering from an aesthetic and ecological one, while little work has been done to think about the cultural and global economic aspects of these phenomena. Of Hoarding and Housekeeping provides an anthropological, global, and comparative angle to the understanding of hoarding and decluttering using cases from a variety of countries including US, Japan, Ind…
The Time of Clutter: Anti-Kairos and Storage Space in North American Domestic Life
Clutter fragments the temporality of the home and storage space offers a technology of containment with which to keep these portals to the past and future open, but not openly visible. Storage space is not a spatial but a temporal solution, secreting objects that do not belong to this time until such time as they might be more appropriate. Possessors of such objects speak of being transported to specific moments of their past, or in Benjaminian f…
Introduction: Timely Matters
In this introduction to our special collection, we discuss the theoretical forebears that inform our guiding concept of "material temporalities" with an eye to the collection's impact on contemporary debates in anthropology and beyond. To begin, we situate "material temporalities" in relation to the temporal and material turns that have reoriented anthropology in recent years. In particular, we emphasize the dual property of material temporalitie…
Héritages coloniaux en Belgique: Universités, mobilisations et contre-mobilisations
Cet article présente le programme de recherche HERICOL qui renouvelle l’analyse pluridisciplinaire des héritages coloniaux en Belgique
Hackers of the heart: Digital sorcery and virtual intimacy in Côte d'Ivoire
This is an ethnography of internet scams in Abidjan through which I attempt to develop a theory of digital sorcery. Thebrouteursof Côte d'Ivoire impersonate Europeans in social media profiles and seduce others into falling in love with them. After months of flirtatious messaging and photo exchanges, disaster strikes their avatar and they ask for an emergency wire transfer from their digital lover. While millions of euros of income are sent to Abi…
Decolonizing the Virtual: Future Knowledges and the Extrahuman in Africa
The peer reviewing was organized by the journal editor; i can provide reports of the peer reviewing of my own article, and of our introduction
Decolonizing Science, Digitizing the Occult: Theory from the Virtual South
In this article Newell uses two case studies to explore one of the central threads of Mbembe's Abiola lecture, the idea that there is a relationship between the plasticity of digital technology and African cosmologies of thedeuxième monde. One case concerns the viral YouTube video #sciencemustfall, in which students at the University of Cape Town criticize "Western" science and demand that African forms of knowledge such as witchcraft be incorpor…
Ethnography in a Shell Game: Turtles All the Way Down in Abidjan
This essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the pretense of ongoing sociality must continue even when betrayers have been unmasked and deceptions unraveled. The article follows my unintentional entanglement in a series of confidence schemes in Abidjan to explore the ways in which such scams develop their own agentive force beyond the control of their participants. Driven by the performative efficacy of …
The Affectiveness of Symbols: Materiality, Magicality, and the Limits of the Antisemiotic Turn
In response to an oft-encountered stance against semiotic or symbolic analysis in current anthropological theory, I argue for a broader understanding of semiosis as inherently both affective and material. Affect theory and new materialism move away from conceptualizations of human subjectivity and cultural construction and toward an ontological framework focused on material entities and vital flows. By meshing their language with that of classic …
Uncontained accumulation: Hidden heterotopias of storage and spillage
Domestic storage spaces are containers for the concealment of things whose value is inarticulable. Unlike the curation of collections, material accumulations grow of their own accord, accruing mass and animacy and inserting their affective hooks into the tissue of our sociality. Those who fail to contain accumulations are labelled hoarders
The matter of the unfetish: Hoarding and the spirit of possessions
In this article, I employ West African ideas of spirited materiality to rethink the semiosis of possession in North Atlantic societies. I investigate this ethnographically through the lens of storage-those things kept out of sight and unused in US attics, basements, closets, and storage units. Things contained in storage form a residual category of animated detritus that US society often pathologizes as "hoarding" when it makes public appearances…
Remote and edgy: New takes on old anthropological themes
Eight anthropologists working in various parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America reflect on an essay by Edwin Ardener on the concept of remote areas recently reprinted in Hau(Volume 2, Issue 1). These reflections all show that the idea of the remote can be detached from its geographical moorings and understood not simply as a spatial concept but as a relativistic social construct. Considered in conjunction with the notion of edginess, they under…
Brands as masks: Public secrecy and the counterfeit in Côte d'Ivoire
Rethinking Simmel's comparison of secrecy and adornment, I consider the ways in which brands function much like masking practices, concealing even as they reveal, using the visible to hide/signify the invisible. The classic masking scenario is one in which men wear masks and claim to be powerful ancestral spirits, keeping the fact of their performance a secret from women and uninitiated boys. However, the secrecy is ambiguous, for women give sign…
The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire
Enregistering Modernity, Bluffing Criminality: How Nouchi Speech Reinvented (and Fractured) the Nation
This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban patois) in Côte d'Ivoire, arguing that the struggles to define the indexical values of Nouchi and the performative bluff of urban street life associated with it have played a central role in the production of Ivoirian national identity. Speakers of Nouchi integrate references to American pop culture with local Ivoirian lexical content, which allows Nouch…
Godrap Girls, Draou Boys, and the Sexual Economy of the Bluff in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
In Abidjan, both economic and sexual exchanges are structured around the bluff, a mimetic performance of modern urban identity that is both a form of deception and a means of social transformation. Men and women attempt to seduce each other through the bluff and exploit the relationship for material gain. While marriage is held up as an ideal, it is increasingly elusive as kinship has come to mimic the peer networks of the informal economy. Like …
Pentecostal Witchcraft: Neoliberal Possession and Demonic Discourse in Ivoirian Pentecostal Churches
While Pentecostal churches derive their growing popularity in large part from their ability to combat witchcraft in society, I argue here that Pentecostalism is itself an alternative form of witchcraft discourse. As such, it falls prey to the same ambivalent relationship between power, success and social obligation that witchdoctors and politicians must face. I discuss Pentecostalism and witchcraft in terms of their relationship to neoliberal und…
Estranged belongings: A moral economy of theft in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
Arguing that ethnographies of cities must do more than highlight their fluid, boundless nature, this article seeks forms of social order produced in tension with forces of dissolution. I argue that even in the society of thieves I worked with in Abidjan, theft was ruled by relationships of exchange and obligation and social relationships were prioritized over financial gain. I discovered a tenuous moral community regulating the arbitration of jus…
Pentecostal Witchcraft: Neoliberal Possession and Demonic Discourse in Ivoirian Pentecostal Churches
While Pentecostal churches derive their growing popularity in large part from their ability to combat witchcraft in society, I argue here that Pentecostalism is itself an alternative form of witchcraft discourse. As such, it falls prey to the same ambivalent relationship between power, success and social obligation that witchdoctors and politicians must face. I discuss Pentecostalism and witchcraft in terms of their relationship to neoliberal und…
The Affectiveness of Symbols: Materiality, Magicality, and the Limits of the Antisemiotic Turn
In response to an oft-encountered stance against semiotic or symbolic analysis in current anthropological theory, I argue for a broader understanding of semiosis as inherently both affective and material. Affect theory and new materialism move away from conceptualizations of human subjectivity and cultural construction and toward an ontological framework focused on material entities and vital flows. By meshing their language with that of classic …
Remote and edgy: New takes on old anthropological themes
Eight anthropologists working in various parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America reflect on an essay by Edwin Ardener on the concept of remote areas recently reprinted in Hau(Volume 2, Issue 1). These reflections all show that the idea of the remote can be detached from its geographical moorings and understood not simply as a spatial concept but as a relativistic social construct. Considered in conjunction with the notion of edginess, they under…
Enregistering Modernity, Bluffing Criminality: How Nouchi Speech Reinvented (and Fractured) the Nation
This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban patois) in Côte d'Ivoire, arguing that the struggles to define the indexical values of Nouchi and the performative bluff of urban street life associated with it have played a central role in the production of Ivoirian national identity. Speakers of Nouchi integrate references to American pop culture with local Ivoirian lexical content, which allows Nouch…
Estranged belongings: A moral economy of theft in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
Arguing that ethnographies of cities must do more than highlight their fluid, boundless nature, this article seeks forms of social order produced in tension with forces of dissolution. I argue that even in the society of thieves I worked with in Abidjan, theft was ruled by relationships of exchange and obligation and social relationships were prioritized over financial gain. I discovered a tenuous moral community regulating the arbitration of jus…
Brands as masks: Public secrecy and the counterfeit in Côte d'Ivoire
Rethinking Simmel's comparison of secrecy and adornment, I consider the ways in which brands function much like masking practices, concealing even as they reveal, using the visible to hide/signify the invisible. The classic masking scenario is one in which men wear masks and claim to be powerful ancestral spirits, keeping the fact of their performance a secret from women and uninitiated boys. However, the secrecy is ambiguous, for women give sign…
Godrap Girls, Draou Boys, and the Sexual Economy of the Bluff in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
In Abidjan, both economic and sexual exchanges are structured around the bluff, a mimetic performance of modern urban identity that is both a form of deception and a means of social transformation. Men and women attempt to seduce each other through the bluff and exploit the relationship for material gain. While marriage is held up as an ideal, it is increasingly elusive as kinship has come to mimic the peer networks of the informal economy. Like …
The matter of the unfetish: Hoarding and the spirit of possessions
In this article, I employ West African ideas of spirited materiality to rethink the semiosis of possession in North Atlantic societies. I investigate this ethnographically through the lens of storage-those things kept out of sight and unused in US attics, basements, closets, and storage units. Things contained in storage form a residual category of animated detritus that US society often pathologizes as "hoarding" when it makes public appearances…
Uncontained accumulation: Hidden heterotopias of storage and spillage
Domestic storage spaces are containers for the concealment of things whose value is inarticulable. Unlike the curation of collections, material accumulations grow of their own accord, accruing mass and animacy and inserting their affective hooks into the tissue of our sociality. Those who fail to contain accumulations are labelled hoarders
Decolonizing the Virtual: Future Knowledges and the Extrahuman in Africa
The peer reviewing was organized by the journal editor; i can provide reports of the peer reviewing of my own article, and of our introduction
Ethnography in a Shell Game: Turtles All the Way Down in Abidjan
This essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the pretense of ongoing sociality must continue even when betrayers have been unmasked and deceptions unraveled. The article follows my unintentional entanglement in a series of confidence schemes in Abidjan to explore the ways in which such scams develop their own agentive force beyond the control of their participants. Driven by the performative efficacy of …
Hackers of the heart: Digital sorcery and virtual intimacy in Côte d'Ivoire
This is an ethnography of internet scams in Abidjan through which I attempt to develop a theory of digital sorcery. Thebrouteursof Côte d'Ivoire impersonate Europeans in social media profiles and seduce others into falling in love with them. After months of flirtatious messaging and photo exchanges, disaster strikes their avatar and they ask for an emergency wire transfer from their digital lover. While millions of euros of income are sent to Abi…
Decolonizing Science, Digitizing the Occult: Theory from the Virtual South
In this article Newell uses two case studies to explore one of the central threads of Mbembe's Abiola lecture, the idea that there is a relationship between the plasticity of digital technology and African cosmologies of thedeuxième monde. One case concerns the viral YouTube video #sciencemustfall, in which students at the University of Cape Town criticize "Western" science and demand that African forms of knowledge such as witchcraft be incorpor…
Introduction: Timely Matters
In this introduction to our special collection, we discuss the theoretical forebears that inform our guiding concept of "material temporalities" with an eye to the collection's impact on contemporary debates in anthropology and beyond. To begin, we situate "material temporalities" in relation to the temporal and material turns that have reoriented anthropology in recent years. In particular, we emphasize the dual property of material temporalitie…
Estranged belongings: A moral economy of theft in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
Arguing that ethnographies of cities must do more than highlight their fluid, boundless nature, this article seeks forms of social order produced in tension with forces of dissolution. I argue that even in the society of thieves I worked with in Abidjan, theft was ruled by relationships of exchange and obligation and social relationships were prioritized over financial gain. I discovered a tenuous moral community regulating the arbitration of jus…
Pentecostal Witchcraft: Neoliberal Possession and Demonic Discourse in Ivoirian Pentecostal Churches
While Pentecostal churches derive their growing popularity in large part from their ability to combat witchcraft in society, I argue here that Pentecostalism is itself an alternative form of witchcraft discourse. As such, it falls prey to the same ambivalent relationship between power, success and social obligation that witchdoctors and politicians must face. I discuss Pentecostalism and witchcraft in terms of their relationship to neoliberal und…
Enregistering Modernity, Bluffing Criminality: How Nouchi Speech Reinvented (and Fractured) the Nation
This paper traces processes of the enregisterment of modernity in French and Nouchi (an urban patois) in Côte d'Ivoire, arguing that the struggles to define the indexical values of Nouchi and the performative bluff of urban street life associated with it have played a central role in the production of Ivoirian national identity. Speakers of Nouchi integrate references to American pop culture with local Ivoirian lexical content, which allows Nouch…
Godrap Girls, Draou Boys, and the Sexual Economy of the Bluff in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
In Abidjan, both economic and sexual exchanges are structured around the bluff, a mimetic performance of modern urban identity that is both a form of deception and a means of social transformation. Men and women attempt to seduce each other through the bluff and exploit the relationship for material gain. While marriage is held up as an ideal, it is increasingly elusive as kinship has come to mimic the peer networks of the informal economy. Like …
The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Côte d’Ivoire
Brands as masks: Public secrecy and the counterfeit in Côte d'Ivoire
Rethinking Simmel's comparison of secrecy and adornment, I consider the ways in which brands function much like masking practices, concealing even as they reveal, using the visible to hide/signify the invisible. The classic masking scenario is one in which men wear masks and claim to be powerful ancestral spirits, keeping the fact of their performance a secret from women and uninitiated boys. However, the secrecy is ambiguous, for women give sign…
The matter of the unfetish: Hoarding and the spirit of possessions
In this article, I employ West African ideas of spirited materiality to rethink the semiosis of possession in North Atlantic societies. I investigate this ethnographically through the lens of storage-those things kept out of sight and unused in US attics, basements, closets, and storage units. Things contained in storage form a residual category of animated detritus that US society often pathologizes as "hoarding" when it makes public appearances…
Remote and edgy: New takes on old anthropological themes
Eight anthropologists working in various parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America reflect on an essay by Edwin Ardener on the concept of remote areas recently reprinted in Hau(Volume 2, Issue 1). These reflections all show that the idea of the remote can be detached from its geographical moorings and understood not simply as a spatial concept but as a relativistic social construct. Considered in conjunction with the notion of edginess, they under…
The Affectiveness of Symbols: Materiality, Magicality, and the Limits of the Antisemiotic Turn
In response to an oft-encountered stance against semiotic or symbolic analysis in current anthropological theory, I argue for a broader understanding of semiosis as inherently both affective and material. Affect theory and new materialism move away from conceptualizations of human subjectivity and cultural construction and toward an ontological framework focused on material entities and vital flows. By meshing their language with that of classic …
Uncontained accumulation: Hidden heterotopias of storage and spillage
Domestic storage spaces are containers for the concealment of things whose value is inarticulable. Unlike the curation of collections, material accumulations grow of their own accord, accruing mass and animacy and inserting their affective hooks into the tissue of our sociality. Those who fail to contain accumulations are labelled hoarders
Ethnography in a Shell Game: Turtles All the Way Down in Abidjan
This essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the pretense of ongoing sociality must continue even when betrayers have been unmasked and deceptions unraveled. The article follows my unintentional entanglement in a series of confidence schemes in Abidjan to explore the ways in which such scams develop their own agentive force beyond the control of their participants. Driven by the performative efficacy of …
Hackers of the heart: Digital sorcery and virtual intimacy in Côte d'Ivoire
This is an ethnography of internet scams in Abidjan through which I attempt to develop a theory of digital sorcery. Thebrouteursof Côte d'Ivoire impersonate Europeans in social media profiles and seduce others into falling in love with them. After months of flirtatious messaging and photo exchanges, disaster strikes their avatar and they ask for an emergency wire transfer from their digital lover. While millions of euros of income are sent to Abi…
Decolonizing the Virtual: Future Knowledges and the Extrahuman in Africa
The peer reviewing was organized by the journal editor; i can provide reports of the peer reviewing of my own article, and of our introduction
Decolonizing Science, Digitizing the Occult: Theory from the Virtual South
In this article Newell uses two case studies to explore one of the central threads of Mbembe's Abiola lecture, the idea that there is a relationship between the plasticity of digital technology and African cosmologies of thedeuxième monde. One case concerns the viral YouTube video #sciencemustfall, in which students at the University of Cape Town criticize "Western" science and demand that African forms of knowledge such as witchcraft be incorpor…
Héritages coloniaux en Belgique: Universités, mobilisations et contre-mobilisations
Cet article présente le programme de recherche HERICOL qui renouvelle l’analyse pluridisciplinaire des héritages coloniaux en Belgique
Of Hoarding and Housekeeping: Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective
Of Hoarding and Housekeeping: Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective
Hoarding has largely been approached from a psychological and universal perspective, and decluttering from an aesthetic and ecological one, while little work has been done to think about the cultural and global economic aspects of these phenomena. Of Hoarding and Housekeeping provides an anthropological, global, and comparative angle to the understanding of hoarding and decluttering using cases from a variety of countries including US, Japan, Ind…
The Time of Clutter: Anti-Kairos and Storage Space in North American Domestic Life
Clutter fragments the temporality of the home and storage space offers a technology of containment with which to keep these portals to the past and future open, but not openly visible. Storage space is not a spatial but a temporal solution, secreting objects that do not belong to this time until such time as they might be more appropriate. Possessors of such objects speak of being transported to specific moments of their past, or in Benjaminian f…
Introduction: Timely Matters
In this introduction to our special collection, we discuss the theoretical forebears that inform our guiding concept of "material temporalities" with an eye to the collection's impact on contemporary debates in anthropology and beyond. To begin, we situate "material temporalities" in relation to the temporal and material turns that have reoriented anthropology in recent years. In particular, we emphasize the dual property of material temporalitie…
Joël Akafou. After the Crossing (Traverser). 2020. 77 minutes. French. VraiVraiFilms
I am the noise: Spectacular capital, influencers, and the economy of attention in coupé-décalé music
The early years of the 2000s saw the rise of coupé-décalé, a musical genre created by undocumented Ivoirian migrants in Paris. This took place in parallel with the internet's explosion in Côte d'Ivoire, giving rise to a new figure in Ivoirian popular culture: the boucantier (noisemaker). The boucantiers became famous by entering nightclubs and focusing the crowd's attention on themselves. Their principal technique for doing so was to conspicuousl…
Sociology (14 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works)