Many job applicants spend an inordinate amount of time struggling with the task of fashioning the most appealing biography of the increasingly skillful self out of interwoven genres that can also circulate individually. These struggles are most frequently articulated as questions of how best to manage different genres’ chronotopic expectations. U…[Read more]

How to Know When Not to Know: Strategic Ignorance When Eliciting for Samoan Migrant Exchanges

Converting Meanings and the Conversion of Meaning in Samoan Moral Economies

In independent and American Samoa, Samoan representatives have historically been successful at furthering their communities’ interests when dealing with various colonial regimes. Yet during my fieldwork in California, I kept witnessing failed encounters between Samoan migrants and government officials. I argue that government officials helped…[Read more]

This article explores what long-standing analytical traditions in Pacific ethnographies can offer Pacific diaspora studies. In particular, I advocate researchers’ reconceptualizing their unit of analysis when interrogating the relationships between families and diasporas, and argue that family networks fashion diasporas’ longevity and tangibility.…[Read more]

Indigeneity for Life: Bro’town and Its Stereotypes

Mirrors and Numbers among Others: Technologies of Identification in Papua New Guinea

For the past year, I have been collecting people’s stories about how they break-up using new social technologies – text-messaging, instant messaging, Facebook, email, voicemail, and so on. These are narratives about how changes in media create new possibilities for disconnecting with others. In telling these stories, people are also being explicit…[Read more]

When writing, ethnographers are faced with the hermeneutic task of interweaving their dialogues with scholars and their dialogues with their interlocutors in the field. This article is a critique of a long-standing tendency in anthropology to conflate social analysis in texts with social analysis on the ground. I am taking issue with a tendency to…[Read more]

Bruno Latour

This article addresses the challenges a neoliberal conception of agency poses to anthropologists. I first discuss the kind of self that a neoliberal agency presupposes, in particular a self that is a flexible bundle of skills that reflexively manages oneself as though the self was a business. I then explore the dilemmas this neoliberal agency…[Read more]

On the Internet, Everyone Knows You’re a Dog.A Review Essay

In interviews with Indiana University college students, undergraduates insisted that Facebook could be a threat to their romantic relationships. Some students choose to deactivate their Facebook accounts to preserve their relationships. No other new media was described as harmful. This article explores why Facebook was singled out. I argue that…[Read more]

And Then She Texted: Entextualization and the End of Relationships

Legislative Authenticity and the Politics of Recognition: How to be a Maori Member of Parliament

This article engages with Ten Silvio’s 2010 challenge to treat animation as a central trope for understanding the relationship between selves and media. We discuss how animation can illuminate aspects of interactions that performance, the current dominant trope, can not—such as addressing what it means to be human when what distinguishes the h…[Read more]

Language and Media/Technology

What if performance is no longer the dominant trope for understanding the mediated self? What if animation is as or more important as a trope? This essay explores what questions scholars would ask if they were to begin with animation as the starting point.

This article discusses personal branding, a performance genre that many job seekers in the United States are told to master in order to get a job. I discuss the specific techniques you are supposed to use to brand yourself, some of the origins of these techniques, and the reasons why people find it challenging to put these techniques into…[Read more]

Keepin’ It Real: Facebook’s Honesty Box and Ethnic Verbal Genres