Browse

Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo’s Commuter Train Network is an exploration of collective life formed at the interstices of human and machine operation within one of the most complex and large-scale technical infrastructures in the world. Adopting a simultaneous critical and optimistic approach, it is an attempt to think with the specific quality of relations formed within Tokyo’s commuter rail infrastructure in order to develop a mode of analysis adequate to the technological complexity of contemporary society and to explore emergent ontologies of human and machine co-constitution. In so doing, it draws attention not only to Tokyo’s commuter train network’s infamously packed trains and precision schedule but more importantly its operation at the extreme edge of sustainability beyond its structural capacity. Such a system, it posits, embodies the contradictory and unsustainable logic defining our contemporary relationship with technology. At the same time, through a theoretically novel approach that emphasizes the generative gaps within the network’s immersive mediation, Anthropology of the Machine advances Tokyo’s commuter train network as a unique setting through which to question received discourses on technology and to re-conceptualize the human relationship with machines toward a more sustainable future.

Treats the contemporary explosion of artist film & video practice obliquely, using the 1960s Expanded Cinema as a historical and conceptual optic through which to reconsider entrenched paradigms of medium- and disciplinary-specificity. Contesting an endemic, medium-specific framework that would reinforce film’s proper place within the cinematic theater, the Expanded Cinema sought to displace the moving image from its established situation within the cinematic theatre so as to initiate a series of disruptive encounters across interdisciplinary institutions of artistic exhibition and spectatorship. While existing scholarship on Expanded Cinema has typically focused on European practices of the 1970s, this study explores its earlier emergence within mid-‘60s New York alongside the rise of Minimalist aesthetics and compositional revolution inaugurated by John Cage. The first chapter establishes the conceptual framework for the investigation, differentiating the idea of Expanded Cinema from the multiscreen cinema with which it was historically conflated. Situating it within a broader, post-Cagean aesthetic of institutional disruption, the Expanded Cinema circa 1966 is conceptualized as a fulcrum for the historical emergence of the moving image in the spaces of postwar art. The following chapters then trace a brief history of the idea as it grew from of the Lettrist deconstruction of the cinematic theater in the early ‘50s (chapter 2) to challenge the institutional spaces of the art gallery (chapter 3) and performance stage (chapter 4), before the incorporation of real-time video feedback begins to occasion a shift torwards the more problematically diffuse institutions of televisual culture (chapter 5).

The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality theorizes a historical etiological method as an alternative to the epistemological approaches that play such a vital role in the field-imaginary of sexuality studies. This historical etiological approach recovers a multiplicity of patterns, models, and categories of sexuality, recording their sites of production, tracing synchronic relations between sexual formations, and theorizing the contours of these sexualities by attending to the accounts of their origins. At its broadest, this project seeks not to rationalize what Eve Sedgwick calls “the unrationalized coexistence of different models” of sexuality, but to understand how their coexistence occurred. This book contends that historical etiology is a crucial tool — if not the crucial tool — for periodizing and narrativizing the invention of sexuality. It provides an account of the process by which the gender of object choice becomes the basis of classification and definition for sexuality and a description of the simultaneous speciation of what Michel Foucault calls “minor perverts” who fit “no order”: zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, and numberless more. These minor perverts bring into focus largely vestigial models of sexuality, making visible the formation of and competition between different models of sexuality and helping us to imagine it otherwise.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this book examines the emergence of mobility as an enduring and elusive collective value in contemporary Dakar, Senegal. It takes the concept of embouteillage (bottleneck)—a term used primarily to describe the city’s proliferating traffic jams, but also frustrated migration itineraries, tedious bureaucratic lags, overcrowded residential neighborhoods, overburdened infrastructures, the trickle of investment funds, and the scarcity of foreign visas—as both a concrete point of departure and as a theoretical lens for making sense of everyday life and policy in urban Africa and beyond. This book argues that it was in navigating through and engaging with bottlenecks of all sorts that residents grappled most urgently and intimately with the changing nature of citizenship and governance in the capital city. Moreover, the book asserts that the bottleneck, broadly construed, is not peculiar to Dakar but is instead the defining feature of citizen-state relations throughout the Global South. In this way, the book contributes to scholarly literatures on economic policy and practice after structural adjustment; citizenship and governance in a transnational era; urban space and infrastructure in the Global South; and migration and mobility.

This Handbook is the definitive source of major academic research on university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship, featuring chapters from the leading scholars in this field. Given that the literature on university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship is highly interdisciplinary, another important aspect of this Handbook is that our contributors represent a variety of social sciences (e.g., economics, sociology, psychology, and political science), fields in business administration (e.g., strategy, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, marketing, and finance), and other professional programs and areas of study (e.g., law, public administration, and engineering). Since university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon, the Handbook also includes a substantial amount of international evidence, which reflects a variety of national perspectives on this topic.

The construction of tens of thousands of large dams across the planet’s surface brought about one of the largest biophysical transformations of the twentieth century and has irrevocably altered human-environment relations. The geopolitical dimensions of this “concrete revolution” have remained largely hidden. The history of large dams and more generally river basin development is simultaneously environmental, social, technical and geopolitical. This book focuses on the activities of the United States government, in particular the Bureau of Reclamation, America’s premier water development agency, to exercise and disseminate technical expertise regarding large hydroelectric dams and river basin planning and development to the world’s “underdeveloped regions” from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Bureau’s water resource development activities, which ranged from short-term consultations to intensive multi-year programs, were deeply influenced by the imperatives of US foreign policy during the Cold War era. Detailed cases presented in the book—including Bureau interventions in China, Lebanon, Ethiopia and the Mekong Basin—underscore how the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War facilitated an alignment of economic and technical networks of development that were highly favorable to the dissemination of large dams. Large dams and other technology-centered development projects are never purely technical undertakings whose successes or failures hinge on the ingenuity of the engineers who design and build them or the motivations of state officials who fund and promote them. The lessons of the history presented here are that large dams and river basin planning are complex hybrids of nature, technology and society.

This volume introduces the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to help explain the divergent ways in which states and societies conceptualize futures achievable through and supportive of advances in science and technology. Sociotechnological imaginaries add a new dimension to work in anthropology and political theory dealing with collective beliefs about social order. Work in these fields has not been properly attentive to the role of science and technology in shaping human possibilities. At the same time, sociotechnical imaginaries supplement more micro-focused work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), showing how developments in science and technology take place within wider cultural understandings of how societies ought to live, and how such developments are bound up with existing structures of normativity and power. Through a mix of case studies, together with a theoretical introduction and a synoptic conclusion, the volume demonstrates how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the politics of science and technology. The case studies illustrate how different imaginations of the goals, priorities, benefits and risks of social life are co-produced along with the construction of science and technology—at scales ranging from institutional to national to global. Chapters ask how the work of collective imagining responds to and accommodates some of the salient political challenges of modernity: democracy, the expert/lay divide, novel understandings of life, public ethics, and institutional accountability. The book thereby opens up a fertile space for the comparative analysis of science, technology, politics, and political cultures, as well as for methodological cross-fertilization among diverse STS-related disciplines.

Heightened awareness of the problem of sexual abuse has led to deep anxiety over adults touching children—in nearly any context. Though our society has moved toward increasingly strict enforcement of this taboo, studies have shown that young children need regular human contact, and the benefits of breastfeeding have been widely extolled. Exploring the history of love, desire, gender, sexuality, parenthood, and inequality, this book probes the disquieting issue of how we can draw a clear line between natural affection toward children and perverse exploitation of them. The author demonstrates that we cannot determine what is wrong about sexual abuse without first understanding what is good about appropriate sensual affection. Looking at topics such as the importance of touch in nurturing children, the psychology of abuse and victimhood, and recent ideologies of motherhood, she argues that we must expand our philosophical and theological language of physical love and make a distinction between sexual love and erotic love. Taking on theological and ethical arguments over the question of sexuality between unequals, the author arrives at the conclusion that it can be destructive to completely bar eroticism from these relationships.

From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, black gay men produced a rich and diverse body of cultural work—poetry, fiction, literary journals and anthologies, magazines, newspapers, performance and visual art—to narrate their experiences with and everyday struggles against racism, homophobia, capitalism, and HIV/AIDS. This book discusses this cultural renaissance, and focuses on activities in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Drawing on literary analysis, archival materials, oral histories, and interviews, the book demonstrates how black gay men used these literary and cultural forms to address trauma and violence in their communities, build connections among black gay men, engage in political mobilization, and assert more complex narratives of racial, gender, and sexual selfhood. Individual chapters focus on the magazine Blacklight and the performance group Cinque; the works of Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam; the history and cultural production of writers’ group, Other Countries Collective; and the diaries of poet, novelist, translator, and scholar Melvin Dixon.

Crossing Europe, the Mediterranean, Middle East, North Africa, south and east Asia, as well as the major conflicts of a century, this book takes shape where empires, states, and individuals meet, compete, and collide. It traces interactions between the states of Europe and Ottoman-born Jews who held, sought, or lost the legal protection of a European power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the early modern capitulatory regime gave way to a modern passport regime and the Ottoman Empire to successor states. Some Ottoman Jewish protégés remained in their birthplace as extraterritorial subjects, partaking in a transition from empire to nation-state, protectorate, or mandate regime. Others carried their status as émigrés or passed their legal identity to descendants born outside the empire. All told, protection proved a matter of negotiation and experimentation and a measure of the diffuse and unruly nature of state power: and citizenship a spectrum for individuals to navigate rather than a possession to claim. Extraterritorial Dreams demonstrates that authorities athwart Europe harboured phantasmagorical ideas about the benefits Ottoman Jews offered (or the threat they posed to) the state, particularly at times of war and imperial expansion; that Jewish protégés’ histories resonated with those of non-Jewish protégés, would-be protégés, and colonial subjects; and that Jewish holders and seekers of protection employed creative means of manipulating state law to their advantage. Even as the capitulatory regime and Ottoman Empire were crumbling, protection proved a plastic entity shaped by the competing dreams and nightmares of the parties involved.

This book explores the worship and community central to the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), a coalition of predominantly African American, LGBT congregations with a Pentecostal style of worship. TFAM's central doctrine is "radical inclusivity," a commitment to embrace all those who might have been rejected or marginalized by mainstream black churches, but which has been expanded to include all persons regardless of race, sexuality, or religious background. The book looks closely at how TFAM worship is legitimated through the use of historical insignia of black culture, how it challenges traditional concepts of charismatic leadership, and how it elaborates ideas about authenticity.

One of the twentieth century’s most controversial sexologists—or “fuckologists,” to use his own term—John Money was considered a trailblazing scientist and sexual libertarian by some, but damned by others as a fraud and a pervert. This is the first book to contextualize and interrogate Money’s writings and practices across his three key diagnostic concepts, “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia.” The book offers a multidisciplinary critique of the tensions and controversies that engendered and followed from Money’s work. He invented the concept of gender in the 1950s, yet fought its uptake by feminists. He backed surgical treatments for transsexuality, but argued that gender roles were set by reproductive capacity. He shaped the treatment of intersex, advocating experimental sex changes for children with ambiguous genitalia. He pioneered drug therapy for sex offenders, yet took an ambivalent stance towards pedophilia. In his most publicized case study, Money oversaw the reassignment of David Reimer as female following a circumcision accident in infancy. Heralded by many as proof that gender is pliable, the case was later discredited when Reimer revealed that he had lived as a male since his early teens. Bringing Money’s ideas into dialogue with both the theoretical humanities and the history of medicine, the book also addresses Money’s lesser-known work on topics such as animal behavior, cybernetics, brain development, and the philosophy of science.

In 2005 the World Bank released a gender assessment of the nation of Jordan, a country that, like many in the Middle East, has undergone dramatic social and gender transformations, in part by encouraging equal access to education for men and women. The resulting demographic picture there—highly educated women who still largely stay at home as mothers and caregivers—prompted the World Bank to label Jordan a “gender paradox.” This book shows that assessment to be a fallacy, taking readers into the rarely seen halls of a Jordanian public school, the al-Khatwa High School for Girls, and revealing the dynamic lives of its students, for whom such trends are far from paradoxical. Through the lives of these students, the book explores the critical issues young people in Jordan grapple with today: nationalism and national identity, faith and the requisites of pious living, appropriate and respectable gender roles, and progress. In the process, the book shows the important place of education in Jordan, one less tied to the economic ends of labor and employment that are so emphasized by the rest of the developed world. In showcasing alternative values and the highly capable young women who hold them, it raises fundamental questions about what constitutes development, progress, and empowerment not just for Jordanians, but for the whole world.

This book discusses the life and work of the best-known Israeli scholar, the Kabbalah historian of German Jewish descent, Gershom Scholem (1897 – 1982). It offers a new perspective on this seminal figure and on major historical events and ideological struggles that took place during the first part of the 20th century in Europe and the Middle East. The book also makes a certain claim about how new knowledge is created. Scholem, it is here argued, is known beyond the narrow confines of his academic because, beyond being a capable philologist, he was a story-teller of unique talent. The two stories that make up Scholem’s fame are the story he told of himself and the story of Jewish history, told through the lens of his historiography of the Kabbalah. The objective of this book is therefore to critically retell these two stories thus that each story would shed light on the other. Pitting Scholem’s biography over and against his historiography, the book is able to approach questions about nationalism, spiritual revival, and colonialism in the 20th century. The discussion thus reflects the geo-political transformations that took place in Germany and in Palestine during this period. It gives a new perspective on Scholem’s life and his historiographical undertaking. And finally it shows that new knowledge is often the result, not of discovery but of re-reading and invention. Scholem, it is here argued, recreated Jewish mysticism in light of the political, social and spiritual questions of his time.

This book takes on the globalization of sexuality, examining the ways in which desire and pleasure—as well as ideas about gender, political power, and public health—are framed, shaped, or commodified by a global economy in which more and more cultures move into ever-closer contact.

The Hoarders argues that the mental illness of hoarding (Hoarding Disorder) is not an individual pathology. While abnormal psychology and social work use classification systems such as Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (DSM-5) to legitimize the activity as a mental disorder, this book disputes these diagnoses. Examining how scientific research, the entertainment industry, the professional organizing industry, and others promote knowledge about hoarding, this book presents an extended cultural study of improper forms of collecting and unorthodox material culture in the modern United States. It also connects hoarding to social fears over urban disorder, proper housekeeping, and old age. To do so it offers four cultural biographies of things that established hoarding’s entry into DSM-5. These chapters each trace a different backstory of the disease. Collyer Brothers syndrome, Chapter 1 argues, advanced what experts refer to as chronic disorganization, a trait often considered a symptom of Hoarding Disorder. Chapter 2 reveals abnormal collecting to be a cornerstone of the DSM diagnostic. Chapter 3 does likewise for Messy House syndrome, Pack Rat syndrome, and fears over excessive clutter. Senile squalor syndrome, Chapter 4 details, established stereotypes of the elderly as aberrant hoarders. Together these accounts narrate how hoarding shifted from an eccentric engagement with ordinary things such as curios, clutter, keepsakes, and collectibles into a twenty-first century mental disease.

This book is about various linguistic aspects and consequences of the effective colonization of Latin America by Portugal and Spain since the dawn of the 16^th century. It is about how Portuguese and Spanish (then known only as Castilian) have both been influenced by their contacts with indigenous and other languages in their Iberian colonies, as well as how the indigenous languages in particular have also been affected by the colonial languages. The book provides novel perspectives onto how the European colonists first communicated with the Natives, onto the role played by the “factors,” missionaries, Mestizos, and Pardos as interpreters, and onto why one should not assume that jargons or pidgins emerged of necessity out of the initial inter-group contacts. Insights are likewise provided about the gradual ways in which Portuguese and Spanish spread, about how some major indigenous languages (such as Quechua and Tupinambá) at first benefited from the European colonization and from their adoption by missionaries as lingua francas for proselytizing, as well as about why some Native American languages are being threatened only now or don't appear to be (seriously) endangered yet. Throughout the volume, one has to ask who have been the actual agents and/or drivers of the changes that have affected both indigenous and initially exogenous languages, positively or negatively, in Latin America. And what are the relevant ecological factors that have triggered or simply borne on these evolutions? The subject of African substrate influence is also dealt with, alongside that of Italian adstrate influence on Argentine Spanish.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Mexico attracted an international roster of artists and intellectuals—including Orson Welles, Katherine Anne Porter, and Leon Trotsky—who were drawn to the heady tumult engendered by battling cultural ideologies in an emerging center for the avant-garde. Against the backdrop of this cosmopolitan milieu, this book reconstructs the years that the renowned Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein spent in the country to work on his controversial film ¡Que Viva Mexico! Illuminating the inextricability of Eisenstein's oeuvre from the global cultures of modernity and film, the author situates this unfinished project within the twin contexts of postrevolutionary Mexico and the ideas of such contemporaneous thinkers as Walter Benjamin. In doing so, the author explains how Eisenstein's engagement with Mexican mythology, politics, and art deeply influenced his ideas, particularly about sexuality. She also uncovers the role Eisenstein's bisexuality played in his creative thinking and identifies his use of the baroque as an important turn toward excess and hybrid forms. Beautifully illustrated with rare photographs, This book provides the most complete genealogy available of major shifts in this modern master's theories and aesthetics.

He leaped from his chair, ripped off his microphone, and lunged at his ex-wife. Security guards rushed to intercept him. The audience screamed, then cheered. Were producers concerned? Not at all. They were getting what they wanted: the money shot. From “classy” shows like Oprah to “trashy” shows like Jerry Springer, the key to a talk show's success is what the book calls the money shot—moments when guests lose control and express joy, sorrow, rage, or remorse on camera. In this new work, it takes us behind the scenes of daytime television talk shows, a genre focused on “real” stories told by “ordinary” people. Drawing on extensive interviews with producers and guests, attendance of dozens of live tapings around the country, and more than a year's experience working on two nationally televised shows, the book shows us how producers elicit dramatic performances from guests, why guests agree to participate, and the supporting roles played by studio audiences and experts. The book traces the career of the money shot, examining how producers make stars and experts out of ordinary people, in the process reproducing old forms of cultural hierarchy and class inequality even while seeming to challenge them. It argues that the daytime talk show does give voice to people normally excluded from the media spotlight, but it lets them speak only in certain ways and under certain rules and conditions. The book asks not just what talk shows can tell us about mass media, but also what they reveal about American culture more generally.

A psychiatrist writes a letter to a journal explaining his decision to marry a former patient. Another psychiatrist confides that most of his friends are ex-patients. Both practitioners felt they had to defend their behavior, but the author of this book, a psychoanalyst, could not pinpoint the reason why. What was wrong about the analysts' actions? The author explores and explains that problem of “correct behavior.” He demonstrates that the inflated and official expectations that are part of an analyst's training—that therapists be universally curious, hopeful, kind, and purposeful, for example—are often of less help than simple empathy amid the ambiguous morality of actual patient interactions. Being a good therapist and being a good person, he argues, are not necessarily the same. Drawing on case studies from his own practice and from the experiences of others, as well as on philosophers such as John Dewey, the author breaks new ground and leads the way for therapists to understand the relationship between private morality and clinical practice.