GABlog

“Redeem” is word with intertwined economic, political and religious meanings: it means to buy back or to pay off; it means to make up for; it means to buy or recover a slave or hostage; and it means to be delivered from one’s state of sin. It’s easy to see that it’s essentially the [...]

Continue reading The Rights of the Anyown 1: A Politics of Redemption

When we speak about the “arbitrariness” of the sign, someone usually hastens to add that what is meant by that is, of course, its conventionality. “Arbitrary” is the right word, though, for what is assumed: that the sounds we make in speaking the languages we speak could just as easily be any other [...]

Continue reading Self-Evidency

We all know about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (and if you don’t, you can google it)—it’s really Whorf, who was a student of Sapir’s and greatly expanded a couple of much more tentative suggestions from Sapir regarding the relations between language, thought and culture, who is responsible for the notion that grammatical structures influence thought and [...]

Continue reading A Sapir-Katz Hypothesis

I’ve opened this post to discussion of Chronicles 399 & 400.

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw399.htm

A few months ago I saw a student wearing a t-shirt with the words “Us vs. Them” on solid background (I don’t remember the color of the shirt or the lettering). It seems to me an example of minimalist brilliance. It first of all must be read ironically, as criticizing all the ultimately “arbitrary” divisions [...]

Continue reading The Right of the Idiom, Yet Again

Below is the paper I read today at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism’s conference on Modernity.” It was a rather interesting conference, which I will perhaps feel moved to comment on at some point. For, now, though, I’d like to state the central conclusion I arrived at from the [...]

Continue reading Anti-Semitism

Disciplinary spaces are both open and closed: when you just enter a disciplinary space, a space with a real focus, an evolved vocabulary, and means—both explicit and tacit—for rerouting the attentions of the others within the space; when you just enter such a a space you don’t really know what’s going on. Even [...]

Continue reading The Right of the Idiom, 3

The elemental form of freedom is that of the discipline: a shared, inviolate and inexhaustible locus of attention. Sciences are disciplines, developing vocabularies and histories, and framing their objects so that another “layer” of understanding can always be sought. But so are congregations around some object of faith or communities of criticism [...]

Continue reading The Right of the Idiom, 2

Hi Everybody,

The 4th annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference (GASC) 2010 is shaping up to be a very exciting event, with presentations from many of the regular Anthropoetic contributors and several first-time attendees. We are all looking forward to Eric Gans’ Plenary lecture on “Haven’t We Always Been Modern,” a lecture in dialogue with Bruno Latour’s [...]

Continue reading GASC 2010 Update

I’m up again at zombies contentions (a rewriting of my recent post here, without the theory). You can find your way, can’t you?