In recent years a growing number of social science studies have pointed out the significance of expectations in science and technology innovation. This special issue of Technology Analysis and Stra...

The sociology of expectations in science and technology

Introduction Anthropology and the Savage Slot Global Transformations Adieu, Culture The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization Anthropology for a Changing World A Note on Methodology: Beyond Fieldwork Who Needs Anthropologists?

Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World

Nostalgia has been viewed as the conceptual opposite of progress, against which it is negatively viewed as reactionary, sentimental or melancholic. It has been seen as a defeatist retreat from the present, and evidence of loss of faith in the future. Nostalgia is certainly a response to the experience of loss endemic in modernity and late modernity, but the authors argue that it has numerous manifestations and cannot be reduced to a singular or absolute definition. Its meaning and significance are multiple, and so should be seen as accommodating progressive, even utopian impulses as well as regressive stances and melancholic attitudes. Its contrarieties are evident in both vernacular and media forms of remembering and historical reconstruction. The authors argue that these contrarieties should be viewed as mutually constitutive, for it is in their interrelations that there arises the potential for sociological critique.

The Modalities of Nostalgia

This essay identifies the potential of an emerging archaeological turn for anthropology—and for archaeology itself. I argue that despite the critiques of the past two decades, the temporality of modernity and a belief in its exceptionalism still structure much of anthropological thought, as exemplified in the division of archaeology and ethnography and in the subfield of historical archaeology and its dystopic treatment of modern urban ruins. But alternative temporalities and analytical possibilities are also emerging, ones attentive to the folding and recycling of cultural elements that Walter Benjamin described with such philosophical depth. On the ground, Benjamin’s insights can be put to use by paying greater attention to the spatiotemporal dynamics of capitalism’s creative destruction, to the social life of ruins, and to projects that challenge the linear divide between modernity and antiquity. Releasing anthropology from progressive time necessarily entails a reintegration of the subfields and a dir...

http://www.osea-cite.org/class/quetzil/Quetzil2010_Current-Anthropology_Comment_on_Shannon_Dawdy_Clockpunk-Anthropology.pdf

Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity

This article seeks to clarify the concept of “historicity” and how it might guide ethnographic research. The argument is developed with particular reference to the eight studies of historicity in diverse societies ranging from the Pacific to North America contained in this special issue. The authors contend that the standard Western concept of “history” is culturally particular and not necessarily the best tool for cross‐cultural investigations. Western history is generally predicated on the principle of historicism: the idea that the “past” is separated from the present. People around the world, including Western historians, recognize, however, that the past, present and future are mutually implicated. The notion of “historicity” is intended to open out the temporal focus to a “past‐present‐future”. Studies of historicity address the diverse modes through which people form their presents in world societies.

Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity

Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time

Jenemann, David. Adorno in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 243 pp. $22.95 paperback. David Jenemann's reconsideration of Theodor W Adorno's American years is a welcome contribution to the recent wave of new publications on Adorno. The book is intended to dispel the stereotype of Adorno as a detached European elitist who scorned and misunderstood everything American. The myth of Adorno as being anti-American is misleading. On the contrary, Adorno admired American democracy and, despite his well-known vehement criticisms of American commercialism, even felt "genuine love" (188) for the country whose passport he carried from 1943 to 1954. What emerges from Jenemann's often quite entertaining study is the image of a radically non-identical Adorno, characterized by a productive ambivalence towards his exile home. Jenemann is especially apt at discovering sources and contexts that allow a more nuanced view of Adorno's intellectual response to and engagement with the culture industry. Most investigations of Adorno's American exile focus on his overwhelmingly pessimistic evaluation of the culture industry, and it is the great merit of Jenemann's book to demonstrate that Adorno was also an insider who immersed himself in "myriad forms of entertainment and communication" (xvii). Jenemann's eloquent plea for a more nuanced analysis of Adorno's American experience aims at a dialectical understanding of modernity as preserving vestiges of subjective immediacy even in the most technologically and commercially advanced apparatuses of mass-medial mediation and manipulation. Jenemann's approach is based on the premise that the link between Adorno's exile experience and his theory of the fate of subjectivity in the age of modern mass media and culture can best be appreciated when investigated from the margins, by scrutinizing Adorno's little-known activities and minor projects instead of reexamining his major philosophical works such as Dialektik der Aufklarung (1944) or Philosophie der Neuen Musik (1948). It is well known that Adorno, as a contributor to Paul Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Research Project, refused to commit to the kind of administrative research conducted by his American colleagues, but in Jenemann's book we are told how this research was carried out in practice and why Adorno refused to accept quantitative research as an end in itself. Adorno did not simply reject the empirically-oriented American social sciences as "positivistic," he also benefited from his encounter with them because it forced him to rethink and restate the significance of theory for a fuller understanding of subjectivity and modernity. …

Adorno in America

Table of Contents List of Abbreviations Note on Translations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Adorno's Literary Criticism 1. The Art of Transition 2. Rauschen: Eichendorff 3. Conjuration: Rudolf Borchardt 4. As If: Stefan George 5. The Wound: Heine 6. Exhaustion: Goethe Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Ulrich Plass

Papers

Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time

Adorno in America

Language and history in Theodor W. Adorno's Notes to literature

The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World

Moral Critique and Private Ethics in Nietzsche and Adorno