M Shapiro
Biographic Data
| ID | 9899 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Shapiro |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Shapiro |
| SIGNATURE | SHAPIRO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bergen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2655-7467 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 54 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1965 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Digital friction surfaces and new alterity formations
The Extractive Power of Automated Surveillance
Experts in Open-Source Intelligence (osint) and "Development Security Operations" (Dev-Sec-Ops) increasingly use automated tools to monitor databases, survey "targets" and identify cybersecurity threats. While the information they seek is usually freely available online, finding and extracting it requires special expertise. The extractive power of automated machines accelerates in this way the ubiquity of synoptic surveillance, while raising new …
Surveillance
Surveillance—watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose—can connote a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Anthropology has explored and complexified this picture. While surveillance can enable intensive control over space, social categorisation, and the affective states of large societies, among other things, such asymmetries can also be evaded, refashioned, or re…
Reassessing social trust: Gossip, self-policing, and Covid-19 risk communication in Norway
This article analyses patterns of compliance with COVID-19 regulations in Southwest Norway. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and a series of interviews, we contrast grassroots discourses with the Norwegian government’s own emphasis on ‘trust’ in its risk communication strategies. As opposed to the official claim that Norwegians complied with COVID-19 emergency regulations because they trusted the authorities, the evidence suggests that citizens co…
Crypto-Egalitarian Life: Ideational and Materialist Approaches to Bitcoin
In this article I explore the fundamental tension in the world of Bitcoin between ‘maximalists’, who see Bitcoin as a tool for the promotion of a moral revolution, and ‘traders’, who approach Bitcoin pragmatically as a financial tool. Based on ethnography of a crypto gold rush that took place in the Bitcoin Embassy in Tel Aviv, I argue that, despite heuristic distinctions, both of these attitudes advance egalitarian tendencies. While maximalists …
The Risks of the Mask
In this article we go beyond epidemiological models to make a case for a more holistic approach to the use of face masks as a risk mitigation factor in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. We argue that while masking offers a measure of protection from infection, its moral, political, and affective implications produce two main collateral risks. These are: (1) the heightening of social boundaries, which thus increase the potential of conflict be…
Brajisalem: Biblical Cosmology, Power Dynamics and the Brazilian Political Imagination
Based on fieldwork with Brazilian neo-Pentecostal pilgrims to the Holy Land and ongoing survey of social media in this article I argue that Brazilian neo-Pentecostals increasingly imagine Brazil as a Promised Land and the Brazilian People as the People of God. Here, different substances associated with the Holy Land, the Jewish People and Jesus Christ are used to disperse in Brazil divine power, which is seen to emanate from God. This imaginary s…
Domesticating Spaces of Security in Israel
Introductory note on play and ritual: Rhythm, pulsation, and fractal dynamics
Dynamics of movement: Intensity, ritualized play and the cosmology of kinship relations in Northeast Brazil
Relations between play and ritual are notoriously problematic. While play tends to produce doubt, uncertainty and paradox, ritual instead clarifies, authenticates and refines the moral order. Focusing ethnographically on a celebration for the Divine Holy Spirit ( Divino Espírito Santo) in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, in this article I nonetheless move away from this common juxtaposition of ritual and play as mutually exclusive conceptual fram…
Moral Topology and the Making of Cosmological Boundaries
Seeking to uproot evil from people’s life, neo-Pentecostal exorcists in Brazil separate between internal and external bodily surfaces and then ‘close’ the victim’s entire body to protect against further malignant intrusion. Based on fieldwork in Brazil and the analysis of expulsion videos online, I demonstrate that exorcists self-consciously use topological imaginaries of connectedness and disjunction to generate a reality in which demons and hum…
Routinergency: Domestic securitization in contemporary Israel
The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call ' routinergency': the naturalization…
Curving the social, or, why antagonistic rituals in Brazil are variations on a theme
What can we learn about religious diversity in Brazil if we isolate ritual practices from their sociocultural surround? Using vocabulary developed by Don Handelman in his framework of ‘ritual in its own right’, I discuss this question in the context of low‐income Northeast Brazil. I demonstrate that Afro‐Brazilian possession rites and Christian‐Evangelical prayers ( oração ) transform the lives of the persons who practise them in ways that are in…
DaMatta revisited: Houses and the spatiality of respect relations in Northeast Brazil
Roberto DaMatta famously argues that in the Brazilian cultural universe stable moral codes buttress familial hierarchy in the house, while situational negotiations underscore egalitarian utopias in the street. In this article, I revise this analytic construct, which a priori assumes that the person of the house and the "individual" of the street are mutually exclusive social categories. Rather than polarize house and street as distinct cultural d…
Paradoxes of Intimacy: Play and the Ethics of Invisibility in North-east Brazil
In this article I examine ordinary ethical practices that underpin intimate relations in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. I focus ethnographically on jealousy and seduction as complementary forms of play, which simultaneously affirm and challenge such aspects of emotional relatedness as trust and love. I argue that since a measure of concealment is inherent in both these play-forms, they render invisible those actions that challenge conventional …
Intimate Events: The Correctness of Affective Transactions in Northeast Brazil
Historicizing Play-Logic in the Making of Relatedness: The Case of Bumba Meu Boi Festival in Maranhão, Northeast Brazil
After the establishment in 1682 of a trading company to monopolize commerce between the colony and the metropolis, the Brazilian state of Maranhão has become one of the main slave ports in Latin America. Abolition in May 1888 nonetheless failed to precipitate the collapse of colonial class hierarchies so that throughout the twentieth century a series of local oligarchs continued to cultivate clientelist political systems. Despite institutionalize…
The Transfer of Affective Knowledge as Anthropological Knowledge
Contemporary academic discourse renders knowledge transfer as a reciprocal procedure, which is supposed to generate political engagement, partnership and consent by sharing truthful information. The travel of information in everyday life may however also be thought of in light of disengaging dynamics associated with falsifying, concealing, deceiving, disguising and lying. Partaking from practices of jealousy, sexual betrayal and gossip in a popul…
Introduction to Issue 12: 1
Introduction to Issue 12: 1 Michael J Shapiro and Jodi Dean (bio) Theory & Event leads off issue 12: 1 with “Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation With Judith Butler,” conducted by Pierpaolo Antonello and Roberto Farneti. The fecund conversation, driven by well-posed queries, provides new contexts for Professor Butler’s extraordinarily productive contributions to philosophy and social theory. Among the many trenchant responses featured in the conversa…
The Outcomes Research Project: An Exploration of Customary Practice in Australian Health Settings
In response to the new ‘outcomes movement’ in health care settings internationally, social workers are increasingly expected to communicate their practice using the language of outcomes. Yet, little research has focused on the language that social workers use to describe their practice and how they identify appropriate interventions and link them to clearly defined evaluative outcomes. This paper is part of a large programme of research exploring…
Preference Parameters and Behavioral Heterogeneity: An Experimental Approach in the Health and Retirement Study
This paper reports measures of preference parameters relating to risk tolerance, time preference, and intertemporal substitution. These measures are based on survey responses to hypothetical situations constructed using an economic theorist's concept of the underlying parameters. The individual measures of preference parameters display heterogeneity. Estimated risk tolerance and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution are essentially uncorre…
Metropolitan Lagos1
The Traditional Family in Israel in the Process of Change--Crisis and Continuity
The purpose of this study has been to analyse the way in which 'traditional' immigrant families maintain and transform themselves in the process of rapid social change. The analysis is based on the situation in a smallholders' co-operative village in Israel-the Moshav,2 established in 1951 in the Jerusalem District and settled by seventy households of immigrants from Iraqi Kurdistan (Zafrira). The data are drawn from a questionnaire administered …
Law and Politics in the Supreme Court. New Approaches to Political Jurisprudence
Routinergency: Domestic securitization in contemporary Israel
The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call ' routinergency': the naturalization…
Brajisalem: Biblical Cosmology, Power Dynamics and the Brazilian Political Imagination
Based on fieldwork with Brazilian neo-Pentecostal pilgrims to the Holy Land and ongoing survey of social media in this article I argue that Brazilian neo-Pentecostals increasingly imagine Brazil as a Promised Land and the Brazilian People as the People of God. Here, different substances associated with the Holy Land, the Jewish People and Jesus Christ are used to disperse in Brazil divine power, which is seen to emanate from God. This imaginary s…
Curving the social, or, why antagonistic rituals in Brazil are variations on a theme
What can we learn about religious diversity in Brazil if we isolate ritual practices from their sociocultural surround? Using vocabulary developed by Don Handelman in his framework of ‘ritual in its own right’, I discuss this question in the context of low‐income Northeast Brazil. I demonstrate that Afro‐Brazilian possession rites and Christian‐Evangelical prayers ( oração ) transform the lives of the persons who practise them in ways that are in…
Intimate Events: The Correctness of Affective Transactions in Northeast Brazil
Paradoxes of Intimacy: Play and the Ethics of Invisibility in North-east Brazil
In this article I examine ordinary ethical practices that underpin intimate relations in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. I focus ethnographically on jealousy and seduction as complementary forms of play, which simultaneously affirm and challenge such aspects of emotional relatedness as trust and love. I argue that since a measure of concealment is inherent in both these play-forms, they render invisible those actions that challenge conventional …
The Traditional Family in Israel in the Process of Change--Crisis and Continuity
The purpose of this study has been to analyse the way in which 'traditional' immigrant families maintain and transform themselves in the process of rapid social change. The analysis is based on the situation in a smallholders' co-operative village in Israel-the Moshav,2 established in 1951 in the Jerusalem District and settled by seventy households of immigrants from Iraqi Kurdistan (Zafrira). The data are drawn from a questionnaire administered …
Metropolitan Lagos1
DaMatta revisited: Houses and the spatiality of respect relations in Northeast Brazil
Roberto DaMatta famously argues that in the Brazilian cultural universe stable moral codes buttress familial hierarchy in the house, while situational negotiations underscore egalitarian utopias in the street. In this article, I revise this analytic construct, which a priori assumes that the person of the house and the "individual" of the street are mutually exclusive social categories. Rather than polarize house and street as distinct cultural d…
The Risks of the Mask
In this article we go beyond epidemiological models to make a case for a more holistic approach to the use of face masks as a risk mitigation factor in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. We argue that while masking offers a measure of protection from infection, its moral, political, and affective implications produce two main collateral risks. These are: (1) the heightening of social boundaries, which thus increase the potential of conflict be…
Dynamics of movement: Intensity, ritualized play and the cosmology of kinship relations in Northeast Brazil
Relations between play and ritual are notoriously problematic. While play tends to produce doubt, uncertainty and paradox, ritual instead clarifies, authenticates and refines the moral order. Focusing ethnographically on a celebration for the Divine Holy Spirit ( Divino Espírito Santo) in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, in this article I nonetheless move away from this common juxtaposition of ritual and play as mutually exclusive conceptual fram…
The Transfer of Affective Knowledge as Anthropological Knowledge
Contemporary academic discourse renders knowledge transfer as a reciprocal procedure, which is supposed to generate political engagement, partnership and consent by sharing truthful information. The travel of information in everyday life may however also be thought of in light of disengaging dynamics associated with falsifying, concealing, deceiving, disguising and lying. Partaking from practices of jealousy, sexual betrayal and gossip in a popul…
The Outcomes Research Project: An Exploration of Customary Practice in Australian Health Settings
In response to the new ‘outcomes movement’ in health care settings internationally, social workers are increasingly expected to communicate their practice using the language of outcomes. Yet, little research has focused on the language that social workers use to describe their practice and how they identify appropriate interventions and link them to clearly defined evaluative outcomes. This paper is part of a large programme of research exploring…
Law and Politics in the Supreme Court. New Approaches to Political Jurisprudence
The Traditional Family in Israel in the Process of Change--Crisis and Continuity
The purpose of this study has been to analyse the way in which 'traditional' immigrant families maintain and transform themselves in the process of rapid social change. The analysis is based on the situation in a smallholders' co-operative village in Israel-the Moshav,2 established in 1951 in the Jerusalem District and settled by seventy households of immigrants from Iraqi Kurdistan (Zafrira). The data are drawn from a questionnaire administered …
Metropolitan Lagos1
Preference Parameters and Behavioral Heterogeneity: An Experimental Approach in the Health and Retirement Study
This paper reports measures of preference parameters relating to risk tolerance, time preference, and intertemporal substitution. These measures are based on survey responses to hypothetical situations constructed using an economic theorist's concept of the underlying parameters. The individual measures of preference parameters display heterogeneity. Estimated risk tolerance and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution are essentially uncorre…
The Outcomes Research Project: An Exploration of Customary Practice in Australian Health Settings
In response to the new ‘outcomes movement’ in health care settings internationally, social workers are increasingly expected to communicate their practice using the language of outcomes. Yet, little research has focused on the language that social workers use to describe their practice and how they identify appropriate interventions and link them to clearly defined evaluative outcomes. This paper is part of a large programme of research exploring…
Introduction to Issue 12: 1
Introduction to Issue 12: 1 Michael J Shapiro and Jodi Dean (bio) Theory & Event leads off issue 12: 1 with “Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation With Judith Butler,” conducted by Pierpaolo Antonello and Roberto Farneti. The fecund conversation, driven by well-posed queries, provides new contexts for Professor Butler’s extraordinarily productive contributions to philosophy and social theory. Among the many trenchant responses featured in the conversa…
The Transfer of Affective Knowledge as Anthropological Knowledge
Contemporary academic discourse renders knowledge transfer as a reciprocal procedure, which is supposed to generate political engagement, partnership and consent by sharing truthful information. The travel of information in everyday life may however also be thought of in light of disengaging dynamics associated with falsifying, concealing, deceiving, disguising and lying. Partaking from practices of jealousy, sexual betrayal and gossip in a popul…
Intimate Events: The Correctness of Affective Transactions in Northeast Brazil
Historicizing Play-Logic in the Making of Relatedness: The Case of Bumba Meu Boi Festival in Maranhão, Northeast Brazil
After the establishment in 1682 of a trading company to monopolize commerce between the colony and the metropolis, the Brazilian state of Maranhão has become one of the main slave ports in Latin America. Abolition in May 1888 nonetheless failed to precipitate the collapse of colonial class hierarchies so that throughout the twentieth century a series of local oligarchs continued to cultivate clientelist political systems. Despite institutionalize…
Curving the social, or, why antagonistic rituals in Brazil are variations on a theme
What can we learn about religious diversity in Brazil if we isolate ritual practices from their sociocultural surround? Using vocabulary developed by Don Handelman in his framework of ‘ritual in its own right’, I discuss this question in the context of low‐income Northeast Brazil. I demonstrate that Afro‐Brazilian possession rites and Christian‐Evangelical prayers ( oração ) transform the lives of the persons who practise them in ways that are in…
DaMatta revisited: Houses and the spatiality of respect relations in Northeast Brazil
Roberto DaMatta famously argues that in the Brazilian cultural universe stable moral codes buttress familial hierarchy in the house, while situational negotiations underscore egalitarian utopias in the street. In this article, I revise this analytic construct, which a priori assumes that the person of the house and the "individual" of the street are mutually exclusive social categories. Rather than polarize house and street as distinct cultural d…
Paradoxes of Intimacy: Play and the Ethics of Invisibility in North-east Brazil
In this article I examine ordinary ethical practices that underpin intimate relations in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. I focus ethnographically on jealousy and seduction as complementary forms of play, which simultaneously affirm and challenge such aspects of emotional relatedness as trust and love. I argue that since a measure of concealment is inherent in both these play-forms, they render invisible those actions that challenge conventional …
Routinergency: Domestic securitization in contemporary Israel
The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call ' routinergency': the naturalization…
Moral Topology and the Making of Cosmological Boundaries
Seeking to uproot evil from people’s life, neo-Pentecostal exorcists in Brazil separate between internal and external bodily surfaces and then ‘close’ the victim’s entire body to protect against further malignant intrusion. Based on fieldwork in Brazil and the analysis of expulsion videos online, I demonstrate that exorcists self-consciously use topological imaginaries of connectedness and disjunction to generate a reality in which demons and hum…
Domesticating Spaces of Security in Israel
Introductory note on play and ritual: Rhythm, pulsation, and fractal dynamics
Dynamics of movement: Intensity, ritualized play and the cosmology of kinship relations in Northeast Brazil
Relations between play and ritual are notoriously problematic. While play tends to produce doubt, uncertainty and paradox, ritual instead clarifies, authenticates and refines the moral order. Focusing ethnographically on a celebration for the Divine Holy Spirit ( Divino Espírito Santo) in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, in this article I nonetheless move away from this common juxtaposition of ritual and play as mutually exclusive conceptual fram…
The Risks of the Mask
In this article we go beyond epidemiological models to make a case for a more holistic approach to the use of face masks as a risk mitigation factor in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. We argue that while masking offers a measure of protection from infection, its moral, political, and affective implications produce two main collateral risks. These are: (1) the heightening of social boundaries, which thus increase the potential of conflict be…
Brajisalem: Biblical Cosmology, Power Dynamics and the Brazilian Political Imagination
Based on fieldwork with Brazilian neo-Pentecostal pilgrims to the Holy Land and ongoing survey of social media in this article I argue that Brazilian neo-Pentecostals increasingly imagine Brazil as a Promised Land and the Brazilian People as the People of God. Here, different substances associated with the Holy Land, the Jewish People and Jesus Christ are used to disperse in Brazil divine power, which is seen to emanate from God. This imaginary s…
Crypto-Egalitarian Life: Ideational and Materialist Approaches to Bitcoin
In this article I explore the fundamental tension in the world of Bitcoin between ‘maximalists’, who see Bitcoin as a tool for the promotion of a moral revolution, and ‘traders’, who approach Bitcoin pragmatically as a financial tool. Based on ethnography of a crypto gold rush that took place in the Bitcoin Embassy in Tel Aviv, I argue that, despite heuristic distinctions, both of these attitudes advance egalitarian tendencies. While maximalists …
Surveillance
Surveillance—watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose—can connote a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Anthropology has explored and complexified this picture. While surveillance can enable intensive control over space, social categorisation, and the affective states of large societies, among other things, such asymmetries can also be evaded, refashioned, or re…
Reassessing social trust: Gossip, self-policing, and Covid-19 risk communication in Norway
This article analyses patterns of compliance with COVID-19 regulations in Southwest Norway. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and a series of interviews, we contrast grassroots discourses with the Norwegian government’s own emphasis on ‘trust’ in its risk communication strategies. As opposed to the official claim that Norwegians complied with COVID-19 emergency regulations because they trusted the authorities, the evidence suggests that citizens co…
The Extractive Power of Automated Surveillance
Experts in Open-Source Intelligence (osint) and "Development Security Operations" (Dev-Sec-Ops) increasingly use automated tools to monitor databases, survey "targets" and identify cybersecurity threats. While the information they seek is usually freely available online, finding and extracting it requires special expertise. The extractive power of automated machines accelerates in this way the ubiquity of synoptic surveillance, while raising new …
Digital friction surfaces and new alterity formations
Sociology (15 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works)