Theorists of civil society often view civil society as a site for democratic education.
Civil society is supposed to assist democratic practice by offering people contexts in which
they practice promoting the common good. This article, following Nina Eliasoph ‘s intervention,
takes this to be a claim requiring ethnographic exploration. The…[Read more]

When U.S. college students tell breakup stories, they often indicate what medium was used for
each exchange. In this article, I explore what this practice reveals about people’s media
ideologies. By extending previous scholarship on language ideologies to media, I trace how
switching media or refusing to switch media contributes to the labor o…[Read more]

In this article, I explore how people use the culture concept in legislatures to understand the minorities they legislate for
and about. I focus on recent debates in the New Zealand parliament over whether the indigenous Ma¯ ori are a cultural group or a racial
group. A Westminster parliament system encourages these debates, in which political…[Read more]

This article suggests that linguistic anthropology offers useful
analytical tools to documentary studies because both fields wrestle with questions
that emerge from the circulation of indexical representations that are putatively
constructing truths. Linguistic anthropology is deeply concerned with the ways
that texts circulate, and how this…[Read more]

This article examines how science studies in general and actor-network theory
(ANT) in particular can inform scholarship on documentary. More specifically, we
argue that both ANT scholars and documentary scholars are faced with the question
of how a particular set of interactions are transformed into representations of reality
that can travel…[Read more]

In 1989 New Zealand legislators revised their child welfare legislation, partially
in response to M¯aori and Pacific Island critiques that the previous state-centered
regime had failed to take into account their culturally distinctive techniques for being
a family and had failed to support culturally specific practices of decision making
and…[Read more]

Both undergraduates and older adults would tell me about relationships that included breakups that didn’t take, relationships filled with cycles of fighting, ending a relationship and then getting back together over and over again. This would turn the end of a relationship into somewhat of a mystery, and the stories told became detective stories o…[Read more]

What insights can the literature on legal pluralism and cultural pluralism written by
ethnographers of courts provide to ethnographers of legislatures? Focusing on Anglo-
American legal systems, I explore how analyses of cultural pluralism can change
when one moves from courts to legislatures. Three analytical shifts can occur when
switching…[Read more]

In this essay, I discuss how Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory might be useful for
anthropologists. After providing a summary of Luhmann’s theory, I address the
quandaries anthropologists might face when deploying a theory that presumes systems
without selves. I also recount how other anthropologists have made use of Luhmann’s
systems theor…[Read more]

Studies of assimilation tend to focus on whether or not members of a migrant
group are adjusting to their new surroundings. This article inverts this focus, asking not
how migrant groups adjust, but rather how migrant groups use the language of
assimilation to explain generation gaps and other exigencies of migration. This inversion
sheds…[Read more]