Calling the Irrational Unmanageable Neoliberal Self

Every Click You Make, I’ll Be Watching You: Facebook Stalking and Neoliberal Information

In every US city or college campus, it is possible to attend workshops designed to teach job seekers how to fashion the genre repertoire required to apply for a job. Over the past 15 years, these workshops are arenas for hailing the neoliberal subject, teaching different genres as forms that interpellate job applicants as authors of their own ever…[Read more]

Comparing different versions of Undercover Boss reveals how an assemblage of TV producers, camera crews, businesses, and broadcasters choose to portray corporate hierarchies during the financial crisis of 2008 when corporations seemed like especially vulnerable forms of social organization for workers to rely upon. This article approaches the same…[Read more]

Many cultural anthropologists today share a common theoretical commitment: to view the people they encounter during fieldwork as living among multiple social orders that are interconnected and contingent. When social orders are multiple, ethnographers are quickly faced with the question of how people construct the boundaries between these social…[Read more]

How would the anthropology of the 1990’s have been different if anthropologists understood what it meant to be a writing subject describing Others the way that Bakhtin did? These questions are undercurrents in this essay, as I summarize what early Bakhtin has to offer contemporary anthropology so that you, gentle reader, might make a more i…[Read more]

This article suggests that one of the understudied and substantive ways in which actors produce and transform social hierarchies and classifications is by aligning and misaligning genres. Alignments within and across genres have furnished methods for construing and evaluating qualities of people – as examples, the genre repertoires of job a…[Read more]

To understand how people navigate shifting media ecologies, linguistic anthropologists have turned to an array of analytical concepts that address how people communicate when using multiple channels: media ideologies, remediation, participant structures, heteroglossia, and entextualization. After demonstrating how these concepts are pertinent to…[Read more]

Online work distribution platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk or Uber alter how work tasks are chosen or assigned. Put succinctly, instead of the employer choosing the employee, the worker chooses the task. Responses to these new technological possibilities for distributing tasks are all deeply influenced by the contemporary historical moment,…[Read more]

Many of the tasks involved in looking for a job these days involve sharing and storing
digital data. Digital technology is now required for job seekers to research employers,
store resumes, complete applications, and schedule interviews. What is the employment
process for people who are living on the poverty line, without reliable access to…[Read more]

The special issue brings together anthropologists working at the intersection of language and economy to draw attention to the dynamics of how people’s experiences of social change are articulated through genre work in different institutional contexts. In recent years, many scholars working in cultural economy have turned to language as an a…[Read more]

This document lays out a series of points in regard to a recently posted pre-print on the history of plague in late medieval and early modern Europe: Marcel Keller et al., “A Refined Phylochronology of the Second Plague Pandemic in Western Eurasia.” I am a historian of medicine and I am presenting these as historical questions. I have written it…[Read more]

Thijs Porck, “Runenoefeningen. De Oudgermanistiek in Leidse kinderschoenen”, in Tot publijcque dienst der studie: Boeken uit de Bibliotheca Thysiana, ed. Wim van Anrooij & Paul Hoftijzer (Hilversum: Verloren, 2023), 118-119

Against the background of the often female-focused view of sexual abuse victims, this paper addresses the issue of male-identifying victims of sexual violence through the lens of the Bible. I tackle one particular form of sexual abuse: female-on-male sexual violence, of the “forced/made to penetrate” type through a re-reading of Genesis 19:…[Read more]

Thijs Porck, “I can read Hollandsch very fairly. The Correspondence between James Murray (1837-1915) and Pieter Jacob Cosijn (1840-1899)”, in Language Use, Usage Guides, and Linguistic Norms, ed. Luisella Caon, Marion Elenbaas & Janet Grijzenhout (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021), 107-129.

In this paper, the author introduces and explores the concept of synesthetic language, a multisensory linguistic system that integrates various sensory experiences into fundamental units called “synesthemes.” The author argues that synesthetic language forms the foundation of our internal thought processes, while communication with others involves…[Read more]

This essay examines three cases in which pentateuchal ritual law is employed in Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles: the Sukkôt celebration in Neh 8:13–18, Hezekiah’s Passover in 2 Chr 30, and Josiah’s Passover, in 2 Chr 35:1–19. These case studies reveal that the scribes responsible for Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles considered the ritual texts of the P…[Read more]

Historians have long argued that arbitration was the preferred means of
resolution for most disputes in later medieval England; but does this apply
also to the settlement of homicides? Despite the strenuous efforts of the
English legal system after the Norman Conquest to force homicides through
the royal courts, historians have argued that…[Read more]

This article explores how the priestly wilderness shrine functions as a monumental space in the sanctuary construction account of Exod 25–31, 35–40. It draws on spatial theory and studies of monumental architecture to identify five features of the tent of meeting that infuse it with monumentality: first, its significance in negotiating the pat…[Read more]

De entre las muchas y generosas lecciones que el maestro don Julio Valdeón ha brindado al medievalismo hispánico destacaremos aquella que fundamentará las páginas siguientes: la importancia de la propaganda ideológica favorable a la dinastía Trastámara durante la guerra civil castellana entre los años 1366 y 1371. Este conflicto fratric…[Read more]