Papers by Michael M J Fischer
Cultural Anthropology, May 1, 1990
... Rushdie's te... more ... Rushdie's text and social text (and numerous other similar texts) make vivid the point that in ... the religious intelligentsia are engaged in cultural class-warfare, each using systematic discourses the other ... is serious politics that has to do with at least four issues concerning Muslims ...
Routledge eBooks, Apr 17, 2019
Middle East report, Jul 1, 1992
Page 1. Debating Muslims (ZuLluval ^Dialogue* in &amp... more Page 1. Debating Muslims (ZuLluval ^Dialogue* in 'PeslMclcvnUy an? <rL^a7iUien /nuhacl/H. /}. <J-lsch<i* Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. Debating Muslims Page 6. Page 7. DEBATING MUSLIMS Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity ...
American Ethnologist, Aug 1, 1989
Engaging Science, Technology, and Society
Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) p... more Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) presented their archives and accounts of their collective work at two meetings of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S) in Sydney 2018, and New Orleans 2019. These presentations are not only very interesting in themselves, but are housed on a digital platform (Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography or PECE) that poses the question—and attempts to build a solution—of how ethnographic materials can be digitalized and made available for productive further activity. This text is a guiding summary for a set of further engagements published on PECE entitled: “Kenya: Techpreneur, Transnational Node, Kibera” (2023a), “Turkey. Inside and Outside the University” (2023b), “‘Japan’/Japan On Line: NatureCulture” (2023c), and “Ecuador: Thirdspaces amidst Social Conflict” (2023d), and “Bibliography for Varieties of STS” (2023e). These engagements help to ask: do long texts such a...
Medicine Anthropology Theory | An open-access journal in the anthropology of health, illness, and medicine, 2015
What have we learned in the aftermaths of wars across the Middle East as a prolegomena for a new ... more What have we learned in the aftermaths of wars across the Middle East as a prolegomena for a new generation of research frameworks on mental health burdens in the region? Four questions are addressed: what are the moral implications of different forms of intervention? Are there transformations in the discursive structures over the past three decades in response to experiences of war? What are the implications for mental health and social resilience in neighboring countries to those in war? What mix of methods to research these are most helpful? The 2014 ‘Beyond Trauma’ workshop held at Kings College, London, organized by Orkideh Behrouzan, provides a beginning benchmark for new comparative work across the region from the Levant to Afghanistan and Acheh. I discuss the workshop’s case studies, together with other research, to highlight the range of methods utilized and objects examined, and to draw attention to the resonances this research has with the work of many other scholars. A n...
Political Science Quarterly, 2015
enables the authors to test contending IR theories as to "when and why actors comply with interna... more enables the authors to test contending IR theories as to "when and why actors comply with international rules" and bridge the divide between IR scholars, policymakers, and practitioners (p. 5). Yet aspects of the experiment and interpretations of the corporate service provider responses and nonresponses merit further discussion. For example, the authors struggle with the overall low response rate to their e-mail inquiries, shifting back and forth across and within the substantive chapters between rejecting and partially accepting nonresponse as a form of "soft compliance" (p. 61). As patterns of nonresponse change with the use of treatments, again the authors are inconsistent in interpreting the results. The ways in which service providers might be interpreting the wording of the treatments also merits further discussion. For example, among the project's critical findings is the limited impact of reference to Financial Action Task Force standards compared to e-mails that note those of the Association of Certified Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS), leading the authors to point to the relative power of private standards on compliance. But with the project's follow-up surveys revealing little familiarity with either organization, the results may simply be an artifact of the inclusion of the words "money laundering" in the ACAMS email and the failure to use the full name of the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering. These points aside, Global Shell Games is an impressive undertaking that provides new insights into international financial transparency and the challenges of compliance. The authors call renewed attention to the importance of nonstate actors and demonstrate the potential for randomized field experiments in revealing the insights and limitations of prominent IR theories.
Cultural Anthropology, 2012
The writing culture "moment" really began for me with the arrival of a visitor to our department ... more The writing culture "moment" really began for me with the arrival of a visitor to our department at Rice in 1980 (we were collectively discussing, I recall, orality and writing in the production of ethnography), with his (Harvard book) bag full of books. .. The visitor was James Clifford, and he presented an early version of his paper, "On Ethnographic Authority," as he passed around valuables-exemplars (I recall most memorably, Jeanne Favret-Saada's Deadly Words [1980])-of what was to become the reflexive turn of experiment and all of its variants in "writing culture." [What is the equivalent of such a bag of books in thinking about legacies of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) today?] * * * An exchange of endorsements.. .. A particular kind of exchange of "The Gift" that defines and entwines scholarly careers: 1 The "Late Editions" project (eight annuals, edited by me, and published by the University of Chicago Press, 1992-2000) was one major preoccupation of mine in the decade-which happened to be the fin de siècle-following the publication of Writing Culture and the subsequent debates that it stimulated. I understand this as a bridge project between the challenge to documentary representation raised by the Writing Culture critique and current experiments with forms alongside and
Engaging Science Technology and Society, 2023
Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) p... more Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) presented their archives and accounts of their collective work at two meetings of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S) in Sydney 2018, and New Orleans 2019. These presentations are not only very interesting in themselves, but are housed on a digital platform (Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography or PECE) that poses the question-and attempts to build a solution-of how ethnographic materials can be digitalized and made available for productive further activity. As one possible response, four engagements texts are published on STS-Infrastructures: "KENYA: Techpreneur, Transnational Node, Kibera" (2023a), "TURKEY: Inside and Outside the University" (2023b), "'Japan'/Japan On Line: NatureCulture" (2023c), and "ECUADOR: Thirdspaces amidst Social Conflict" (2023d), along with a consolidated list of references entitled: "Bibliography for Varieties of STS" (2023e). All of these are extensions of the overarching text published in the Engagements genre of the ESTS journal entitled: "Varieties of STS: Luminosities, Creative Commons, and Open Curation" (2023f). This engagement focuses on Ecuador.
Engaging Science, Technology and Society, 2023
Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) p... more Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) presented their archives and accounts of their collective work at two meetings of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S) in Sydney 2018, and New Orleans 2019. These presentations are not only very interesting in themselves, but are housed on a digital platform (Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography or PECE) that poses the question-and attempts to build a solution-of how ethnographic materials can be digitalized and made available for productive further activity. As one possible response, four engagements texts are published on STS-Infrastructures: "KENYA: Techpreneur, Transnational Node, Kibera" (2023a), "TURKEY: Inside and Outside the University" (2023b), "'Japan'/Japan On Line: NatureCulture" (2023c), and "ECUADOR: Thirdspaces amidst Social Conflict" (2023d), along with a consolidated list of references entitled: "Bibliography for Varieties of STS" (2023e). All of these are extensions of the overarching text published in the Engagements genre of the ESTS journal entitled: "Varieties of STS: Luminosities, Creative Commons, and Open Curation" (2023f). This engagement focuses on Japan.
Engaging Science, Technology and Society, 2023
Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) p... more Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) presented their archives and accounts of their collective work at two meetings of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S) in Sydney 2018, and New Orleans 2019. These presentations are not only very interesting in themselves, but are housed on a digital platform (Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography or PECE) that poses the question-and attempts to build a solution-of how ethnographic materials can be digitalized and made available for productive further activity. As one possible response, four engagements texts are published on STS-Infrastructures: "KENYA: Techpreneur, Transnational Node, Kibera" (2023a), "TURKEY: Inside and Outside the University" (2023b), "'Japan'/Japan On Line: NatureCulture" (2023c), and "ECUADOR: Thirdspaces amidst Social Conflict" (2023d), along with a consolidated list of references entitled: "Bibliography for Varieties of STS" (2023e). All of these are extensions of the overarching text published in the Engagements genre of the ESTS journal entitled: "Varieties of STS: Luminosities, Creative Commons, and Open Curation" (2023f). This engagement focuses on Turkey.
Engaging Science, Technology and Society, 2023
Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) p... more Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) presented their archives and accounts of their collective work at two meetings of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S) in Sydney 2018, and New Orleans 2019. These presentations are not only very interesting in themselves, but are housed on a digital platform (Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography or PECE) that poses the question-and attempts to build a solution-of how ethnographic materials can be digitalized and made available for productive further activity. As one possible response, four engagements texts are published on STS-Infrastructures: "KENYA: Techpreneur, Transnational Node, Kibera" (2023a), "TURKEY: Inside and Outside the University" (2023b), "'Japan'/Japan On Line: NatureCulture" (2023c), and "ECUADOR: Thirdspaces amidst Social Conflict" (2023d), along with a consolidated list of references entitled: "Bibliography for Varieties of STS" (2023e). All of these are extensions of the overarching text published in the Engagements genre of the ESTS journal entitled: "Varieties of STS: Luminosities, Creative Commons, and Open Curation" (2023f). This engagement focuses on Kenya.
Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 2023
Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) p... more Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) presented their archives and accounts of their collective work at two meetings of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S) in Sydney 2018, and New Orleans 2019. These presentations are not only very interesting in themselves, but are housed on a digital platform (Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography or PECE) that poses the question-and attempts to build a solution-of how ethnographic materials can be digitalized and made available for productive further activity. This text is a guiding summary for a set of further engagements published on PECE entitled: "Kenya: Techpreneur, Transnational Node, Kibera" (2023a), "Turkey. Inside and Outside the University" (2023b), "'Japan'/Japan On Line: NatureCulture" (2023c), and "Ecuador: Thirdspaces amidst Social Conflict" (2023d), and "Bibliography for Varieties of STS" (2023e). These engagements help to ask: do long texts such as these four parts create need to be fragmented, tagged, and curated, into perhaps GPT-4 chunks, to be useful on new digital platforms such as PECE? Will this be required for next generation literacy of humans and machines alike, or more-than-human readers, analysts, and synthesizers?
Engaging Science, Technology and Society (ESTS), 2023
Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) p... more Four STS (science, technology and society) collectives (from Kenya, Turkey, Japan, and Ecuador) presented their archives and accounts of their collective work at two meetings of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S) in Sydney 2018, and New Orleans 2019. These presentations are not only very interesting in themselves, but are housed on a digital platform (Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography or PECE) that poses the question-and attempts to build a solution-of how ethnographic materials can be digitalized and made available for productive further activity. This text is a guiding summary for a set of further engagements published on PECE entitled: "Kenya: Techpreneur, Transnational Node, Kibera" (2023a), "Turkey. Inside and Outside the University" (2023b), "'Japan'/Japan On Line: NatureCulture" (2023c), and "Ecuador: Thirdspaces amidst Social Conflict" (2023d), and "Bibliography for Varieties of STS" (2023e). These engagements help to ask: do long texts such as these four parts create need to be fragmented, tagged, and curated, into perhaps GPT-4 chunks, to be useful on new digital platforms such as PECE? Will this be required for next generation literacy of humans and machines alike, or more-than-human readers, analysts, and synthesizers?
Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2017
In Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (Fordham, 2015), we listen with Das to ordinary ethics in... more In Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (Fordham, 2015), we listen with Das to ordinary ethics in challenged lives of poverty, illness, and family relations; and in three registers of (a) advocacy, (b) moral engagement, and (c) acknowledgement of the inherent uncertainties in the very fabric of living these lives, including hers and ours. In this article, I take up the text of Affliction, and comment on moral engagements and sparks of references to the Mahabharata and other traditional, especially Muslim, modes of ethical thought. This commentary can be read as what in Islamic scholarship often are called ‘hashiye’, marginal notes on the main text. I conclude by discussing a mosaic of coverage and gaps in the contemporary ethics of Indian health care and its anthropologies.
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Papers by Michael M J Fischer
II. Deep Play, Shadow Play & Gender in the Age of Filmic Reruns
III. Primordial Sentiments & Civic Activation in the Digital Age
How art becomes critique in hypermodern Singapore (Charles Lim, Sandra Tan, Zai Kuning, et al.)