Meta F. Janowitz, Diane Dallal (eds.): Tales of Gotham, Historical Archaeology, Ethnohistory and Microhistory of New York City (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, anthropology, archaeology, city, ethnoarchaeology, ethnography, history, new york
Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory of New York City: Tales and Microhistory of Gotham is a collection of narratives about people who lived in New York City during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, people whose lives archaeologists have encountered during excavations at sites where these people lived or worked. The stories are ethnohistorical or microhistorical studies created using archaeological and documentary data. As microhistories, they are concerned with particular people living at particular times in the past within the framework of world events.
The world events framework will be provided in short introductions to chapters grouped by time periods and themes. The foreword by Mary Beaudry and the afterword by LuAnne DeCunzo bookend the individual case studies and add theoretical weight to the volume. Topics in the book include:
- Native Americans and Europeans in New Amsterdam
- Stories of Dutch women in the colonial period
- African history in New York City, including the African Burial Ground
- Craftsmen and Churchmen of New York City
- A portrait of Stephen Allen, a New York City Mayor
Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory of New York City: Tales and Microhistory of Gotham focuses on specific individual life stories, or stories of groups of people, as a way to present archaeological theory and research. Archaeologists work with material culture—artifacts—to recreate daily lives and study how culture works; this book is an example of how to do this in a way that can attract people interested in history as well as in anthropological theory. As such, this volume is an invaluable resource for archaeologists, historians, ethnographers, anthropologists, and anybody interested in the rich history of one of the world’s most influential cities, New York City.
With a Foreword by Mary Beaudry
With an Afterword by LuAnne DeCunzo
Publisher Springer, London, 2013
ISBN 1461452716, 9781461452713
369 pages
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Comment (0)Yongming Zhou: Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, china, history of technology, internet, politics, technology, telegraphy, web
It is widely recognized that internet technology has had a profound effect on political participation in China, but this new use of technology is not unprecedented in Chinese history. This is a pioneering work that systematically describes and analyzes the manner in which the Chinese used telegraphy during the late Qing, and the internet in the contemporary period, to participate in politics.
Drawing upon insights from the fields of anthropology, history, political science, and media studies, this book historicizes the internet in China and may change the direction of the emergent field of Chinese internet studies. In contrast to previous works, this book is unprecedented in its perspective, in the depth of information and understanding, in the conclusions it reaches, and in its methodology. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is accessible to a broad audience.
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2006
Asian Studies / Political Science series
ISBN 0804751285, 9780804751285
304 pages
Michael Taussig: Fieldwork Notebooks (2011) [English/German]
Filed under pamphlet | Tags: · anthropology
What is it that makes notebooks so fascinating? Anthropologist Michael Taussig, for whom fieldwork notebooks are an indispensable tool, discusses this very question. A starting point of his investigation is Walter Benjamin, who obsessively filled his own notebooks and was intrigued by their materiality. Roland Barthes, Le Corbusier, and Joan Didion are some of the many other notorious note takers that Taussig visits so as to crystallize his ideas of what a notebook really is. Far more than a mere “thing,” Taussig argues that a notebook develops a life of its own, a life, which is often fed by what hasn’t been written down and other externalities. In the end, this history can even take possession of its possessor by transforming a notebook into a magical object, a fetish.
Publisher Hatje Cantz, July 2011
Series: dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken No. 001
English/German edition
ISBN 3775728503, 9783775728508
26 pages
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Lucy Suchman: Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd ed (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computing, ethnomethodology, human-computer interaction, interface, machine, robots, software, technology
This 2007 book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of human-like machines, to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice, and with what theoretical, practical and political consequences. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted.
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2007
Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives series
ISBN 052167588X, 9780521675888
314 pages
Marc Augé: Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992-) [EN, ES, CR]
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, ethnology, modernity
A provocative study of the ‘non-space’ which defines our age’s love for excess of information and space.
An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls “non-space” results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of “supermodernity” to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.
Originally published in French as Non-lieux: Introduction á une anthropologie de la surmodenité, Editions de Seuil, 1992
English edition
Translated by John Howe
Publisher Verso, 1995
ISBN 1859840515, 9781859840511
122 pages
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Augé, Marc – Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (English, trans. John Howe, 1995)
Los no lugares: Espacios del anonimato: Una antropología de la sobremodernidad (Spanish, trans. Margarita Mizraji, 2000)
Nemjesta: Uvod u moguću antropologiju supermoderniteta (Croatian, trans. Vlatka Valentić, 2002)
Roberto Esposito: The Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal (2007/2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · animal, anthropology, biology, biopolitics, life, nazism, personhood, philosophy, politics, subjectivity
All discourses aimed at asserting the value of human life as such–whether philosophical, ethical, or political–assume the notion of personhood as their indispensable point of departure. This is all the more true today. In bioethics, for example, Catholic and secular thinkers may disagree on what constitutes a person and its genesis, but they certainly agree on its decisive importance: human life is considered to be untouchable only when based on personhood. In the legal sphere as well the enjoyment of subjective rights continues to be increasingly linked to the qualification of personhood, which appears to be the only one capable of bridging the gap between human being and citizen, right and life, and soul and body opened up at the very origins of Western civilization.
The radical and alarming thesis put forward in this book is that the notion of person is unable to bridge this gap because it is precisely what creates this breach. Its primary effect is to create a separation in both the human race and the individual between a rational, voluntary part endowed with particular value and another, purely biological part that is thrust by the first into the inferior dimension of the animal or the thing. In opposition to the performative power of the person, whose dual origins can be traced back to ancient Rome and Christianity, Esposito pursues his strikingly original and innovative philosophical inquiry by inviting reflection on the category of the impersonal: the third person, in removing itself from the exclusionary mechanism of the person, points toward the orginary unity of the living being.
First published in Italian as Terza Persona, Giulio Einaudi, 2007
Translated by Zakiya Hanafi
Publisher Polity, 2012
ISBN 0745643981, 9780745643984
200 pages
E. Gabriella Coleman: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · anonymous, anthropology, code, computing, floss, free software, hacker culture, hacking, intellectual property, internet, internet activism, software, web
Who are computer hackers? What is free software? And what does the emergence of a community dedicated to the production of free and open source software–and to hacking as a technical, aesthetic, and moral project–reveal about the values of contemporary liberalism? Exploring the rise and political significance of the free and open source software (F/OSS) movement in the United States and Europe, Coding Freedom details the ethics behind hackers’ devotion to F/OSS, the social codes that guide its production, and the political struggles through which hackers question the scope and direction of copyright and patent law. In telling the story of the F/OSS movement, the book unfolds a broader narrative involving computing, the politics of access, and intellectual property.
E. Gabriella Coleman tracks the ways in which hackers collaborate and examines passionate manifestos, hacker humor, free software project governance, and festive hacker conferences. Looking at the ways that hackers sustain their productive freedom, Coleman shows that these activists, driven by a commitment to their work, reformulate key ideals including free speech, transparency, and meritocracy, and refuse restrictive intellectual protections. Coleman demonstrates how hacking, so often marginalized or misunderstood, sheds light on the continuing relevance of liberalism in online collaboration.
Publisher Princeton University Press, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License
ISBN 1400845297, 9781400845293
264 pages
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