Books by Ilana Gershon
In this book, I turn my attention to the US workplace and how it changed—and changed us—during t... more In this book, I turn my attention to the US workplace and how it changed—and changed us—during the pandemic. I argue that the unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic forced us to radically reexamine our attitudes about work and to think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. These changes also led us as workers to engage more with the contracts that bind us as we rethought when and how we allow others to tell us what to do.
Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon’s book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made the workplace into a laboratory for democratic living—the key place where Americans are learning how to develop effective political strategies and think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens.
What do you need to do to get a job in this digital age? Do you need a LinkedIn profile? Are hi... more What do you need to do to get a job in this digital age? Do you need a LinkedIn profile? Are hiring managers looking for your personal brand? Job-seekers in post-recession America struggle with these questions as hiring and the nature of work changes. Even as unemployment rates begin to fall, contract and freelance work is on the rise, and job tenures are short– the current median tenure is 4.6 years. These changes in technologies and work follow a historical shift in how Americans understand the work contract. Under contemporary capitalism, people increasingly see themselves in business terms: they are the “CEO of Me”. In this perspective, hiring resembles a business-to-business contract, a short-term connection centered upon solving market-specific problems. To be employable you must represent yourself as a business of one, willing to temporarily assist other larger businesses. This raises new ethical challenges about what is a just work relationship. It has not been an easy transition for many looking for jobs, especially when combined with all the new technologies for hiring. This book examines how applying for jobs has transformed in the past 30 years because of new media and new concepts of work.
A few generations ago, college students showed their romantic commitments by exchanging special o... more A few generations ago, college students showed their romantic commitments by exchanging special objects: rings, pins, varsity letter jackets. Pins and rings were handy, telling everyone in local communities that you were spoken for, and when you broke up, the absence of a ring let everyone know you were available again. Is being Facebook official really more complicated, or are status updates just a new version of these old tokens?
Many people are now fascinated by how new media has affected the intricacies of relationships and their dissolution. People often talk about Facebook and Twitter as platforms that have led to a seismic shift in transparency and (over)sharing. What are the new rules for breaking up? These rules are argued over and mocked in venues from the New York Times to lamebook.com.
I was intrigued by the degree to which my students used new media to communicate important romantic information—such as "it's over." I decided to get to the bottom of the matter by interviewing seventy-two people about how they use Skype, texting, voice mail, instant messaging, Facebook, and cream stationery to end relationships. I open up the world of romance as it is conducted in a digital milieu, offering insights into the ways in which different media influence behavior, beliefs, and social mores.
Government bureaucracies across the globe have become increasingly attuned in recent years to cul... more Government bureaucracies across the globe have become increasingly attuned in recent years to cultural diversity within their populations. Using culture as a category to process people and dispense services, however, can create its own problems and unintended consequences. In No Family Is an Island, a comparative ethnography of Samoan migrants living in the United States and New Zealand, I investigate how and when the categories "cultural" and "acultural" become relevant for Samoans as they encounter cultural differences in churches, ritual exchanges, welfare offices, and community-based organizations.
In both New Zealand and the United States, Samoan migrants are minor minorities in an ethnic constellation dominated by other minority groups. As a result, they often find themselves in contexts where the challenge is not to establish the terms of the debate but to rewrite them. To navigate complicated and often unyielding bureaucracies, they must become skilled in reflexive engagement with the multiple social orders they inhabit. Those who are successful are able to parlay their own cultural expertise (their “Samoanness”) into an ability to subtly alter the institutions with which they interact in their everyday lives. Just as the “cultural” is sometimes constrained by the forces exerted by acultural institutions, so too can migrant culture reshape the bureaucracies of their new countries.
Living with Animals is a collection of imagined animal guides—a playful and accessible look at di... more Living with Animals is a collection of imagined animal guides—a playful and accessible look at different human-animal relationships around the world. Anthropologists and their co-authors have written accounts of how humans and animals interact in labs, in farms, in zoos, and in African forests, among other places. Modeled after the classic A World of Babies, an edited collection of imagined Dr. Spock manuals from around the world—With Animals focuses on human-animal relationships in their myriad forms.
This is ethnographic fiction for those curious about how animals are used for a variety of different tasks around the world. To be sure, animal guides are not a universal genre, so Living with Animals offers an imaginative solution, doing justice to the ways details about animals are conveyed in culturally specific ways by adopting a range of voices and perspectives. How we capitalize on animals, how we live with them, and how humans attempt to control the untamable nature around them are all considered by the authors of this wild read.
If you have ever experienced a moment of "what if" curiosity—what is it like to be a gorilla in a zoo, to work in a pig factory farm, to breed cows and horses, this book is for you. A light-handed and light-hearted approach to a fascinating and nuanced subject, Living with Animals suggests many ways in which we can and do coexist with our non-human partners on Earth.
Ever wondered what it would be like to be a street magician in Paris? A fish farmer in Norway? A ... more Ever wondered what it would be like to be a street magician in Paris? A fish farmer in Norway? A costume designer in Bollywood? This playful and accessible look at different types of work around the world delivers a wealth of information and advice about a wide array of jobs and professions. The value of this book is twofold: For young people or middle-aged people who are undecided about their career paths and feel constrained in their choices, A World of Work offers an expansive vision. For ethnographers, this book offers an excellent example of using the practical details of everyday life to shed light on larger structural issues.
Each chapter in this collection of ethnographic fiction could be considered a job manual. Yet not any typical job manual—to do justice to the ways details about jobs are conveyed in culturally specific ways, the authors adopt a range of voices and perspectives. One chapter is written as though it was a letter from an older sister counseling her brother on how to be a doctor in Malawi. Another is framed as a eulogy for a well-loved village magistrate in Papua New Guinea who may have been killed by sorcery.
Beneath the novelty of the examples are some serious messages that I highlight in my introduction. These ethnographies reveal the connection between work and culture, the impact of societal values on the conditions of employment.
Online Magazine Articles by Ilana Gershon
CaMP Anthropology Blog
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Papers on (New) Media by Ilana Gershon
New Media and Society , 2021
Many of the tasks involved in looking for a job these days involve sharing and storing digital da... 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 the Internet or mobile phones? We focus on technology maintenance, the continuous work required to stay digitally connected, to understand how low-income job seekers in northern California manage the circulation and storage of information. We incorporate the concept of delegation from Latour to explore how people consciously consider who or what entities are responsible for technology maintenance, as this varies by government policies related to digital subsidies. This article draws novel connections between the influence of government policy on technology maintenance and how both the policies and digital inequalities shape impoverished job seekers' choices around sharing and storage practices.
International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, 2021
To understand how people navigate shifting media ecologies, linguistic anthropologists have turne... more To understand how people navigate shifting media ecologies, linguistic anthropologists have turned to an array of analytical concepts that address how people communicate using multiple channels. These concepts
include: media ideologies, remediation, participant structures, heteroglossia, and entextualization. We examine each concept in turn before discussing how these concepts shed light on two co-constitutive ways of engaging with a varied media ecology – media coalescence and media-switching.
Ephemera, 2020
Online work distribution platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk or Uber alter how work tasks ar... 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, which privileges approaches to workers that take them to be neoliberal market actors. In this article, we examine how these platforms interact with current ideas about work and contemporary configurations of work by altering the ways work is accomplished both within and outside of an organization through open calls. In particular, we focus on the challenges these platforms bring to the problems of coordination ever-present in any project of designing the work, disseminating the work, and controlling the work process.
When I was interviewing undergraduates at my home institution in 2007 and 2008 about how they wer... more When I was interviewing undergraduates at my home institution in 2007 and 2008 about how they were using new media as they ended friendships and romantic relationships, many people told me about the ways they struggled with being unmanageable selves. This was a narrative that they told all too frequently about themselves – sometimes they were unmanageable in the midst of heartbreak, but all too often, they told stories in which their impulses to use technologies were unruly impulses, regardless of the relationships they were creating or untangling through these technologies. Cell phones and Facebook stand out in my research as two technologies that collected the most anxiety, that were seen to transform people into being selves they didn’t want to be or encouraging them to stay in contact with others in ways they would prefer not to do. They would tell me about how they couldn’t stop searching for more and more information about others on Facebook, they were constantly Facebook stalking. Or conversely, some women reported to me that when they deactivated from Facebook, their friends all commented on how strong they were to be able to abstain from this temptation. By contrast, when my interviewees told me about their experiences as unmanageable selves using cell phones, the stories focused on different types of practices. They talked about how difficult it was to resist texting back once they were caught in a text message fight. Or they talked about giving their friends their mobile phones when they went to bars to prevent the risk of drunk dialing. The technologies seemed to make visible how one might be uncontrollable to oneself in different ways.
Race and Ethnicity in Digital Culture, 2017
Launched in June 2007, the Honesty Box was a Facebook application that allows people to write ano... more Launched in June 2007, the Honesty Box was a Facebook application that allows people to write anonymously to a Facebook profile. The Honesty Box was a fad, popular among some groups at the time of my research in 2007–2008, but which is no longer available. At the time that some IU students were adopting the Honesty Box with a degree of enthusiasm, there was a clear ethnic divide between who was willing to put the Honesty Box on their Facebook profile and who would react with disquiet and even horror when I brought up the possibility of having one. Yet, few people I interviewed saw the Honesty Box as a Black-inflected technology, or an application adopted primarily by those affiliated with African American communities on campus. And conversely, no one during my research mentioned avoiding the Honesty Box as a specifically white thing to do. In this chapter, I discuss why using this Facebook application in particular seemed to fall along ethnic lines, yet it was not openly invoked as a marker of ethnic identity. I explore how different ethnic communities’ shared semiotic ideologies about anonymity, gossip, and insults shape undergraduates’ decisions to adopt and use new media.
Dan Hassoun compiled this database tracking what companies are participating in the Lifeline Prog... more Dan Hassoun compiled this database tracking what companies are participating in the Lifeline Program for Low-Income Households state-by-state.
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Books by Ilana Gershon
Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon’s book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made the workplace into a laboratory for democratic living—the key place where Americans are learning how to develop effective political strategies and think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens.
Many people are now fascinated by how new media has affected the intricacies of relationships and their dissolution. People often talk about Facebook and Twitter as platforms that have led to a seismic shift in transparency and (over)sharing. What are the new rules for breaking up? These rules are argued over and mocked in venues from the New York Times to lamebook.com.
I was intrigued by the degree to which my students used new media to communicate important romantic information—such as "it's over." I decided to get to the bottom of the matter by interviewing seventy-two people about how they use Skype, texting, voice mail, instant messaging, Facebook, and cream stationery to end relationships. I open up the world of romance as it is conducted in a digital milieu, offering insights into the ways in which different media influence behavior, beliefs, and social mores.
In both New Zealand and the United States, Samoan migrants are minor minorities in an ethnic constellation dominated by other minority groups. As a result, they often find themselves in contexts where the challenge is not to establish the terms of the debate but to rewrite them. To navigate complicated and often unyielding bureaucracies, they must become skilled in reflexive engagement with the multiple social orders they inhabit. Those who are successful are able to parlay their own cultural expertise (their “Samoanness”) into an ability to subtly alter the institutions with which they interact in their everyday lives. Just as the “cultural” is sometimes constrained by the forces exerted by acultural institutions, so too can migrant culture reshape the bureaucracies of their new countries.
This is ethnographic fiction for those curious about how animals are used for a variety of different tasks around the world. To be sure, animal guides are not a universal genre, so Living with Animals offers an imaginative solution, doing justice to the ways details about animals are conveyed in culturally specific ways by adopting a range of voices and perspectives. How we capitalize on animals, how we live with them, and how humans attempt to control the untamable nature around them are all considered by the authors of this wild read.
If you have ever experienced a moment of "what if" curiosity—what is it like to be a gorilla in a zoo, to work in a pig factory farm, to breed cows and horses, this book is for you. A light-handed and light-hearted approach to a fascinating and nuanced subject, Living with Animals suggests many ways in which we can and do coexist with our non-human partners on Earth.
Each chapter in this collection of ethnographic fiction could be considered a job manual. Yet not any typical job manual—to do justice to the ways details about jobs are conveyed in culturally specific ways, the authors adopt a range of voices and perspectives. One chapter is written as though it was a letter from an older sister counseling her brother on how to be a doctor in Malawi. Another is framed as a eulogy for a well-loved village magistrate in Papua New Guinea who may have been killed by sorcery.
Beneath the novelty of the examples are some serious messages that I highlight in my introduction. These ethnographies reveal the connection between work and culture, the impact of societal values on the conditions of employment.
Online Magazine Articles by Ilana Gershon
https://aeon.co/essays/how-work-changed-to-make-us-all-passionate-quitters
https://hbr.org/2017/06/a-friend-of-a-friend-is-no-longer-the-best-way-to-find-a-job
Papers on (New) Media by Ilana Gershon
include: media ideologies, remediation, participant structures, heteroglossia, and entextualization. We examine each concept in turn before discussing how these concepts shed light on two co-constitutive ways of engaging with a varied media ecology – media coalescence and media-switching.
Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon’s book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made the workplace into a laboratory for democratic living—the key place where Americans are learning how to develop effective political strategies and think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens.
Many people are now fascinated by how new media has affected the intricacies of relationships and their dissolution. People often talk about Facebook and Twitter as platforms that have led to a seismic shift in transparency and (over)sharing. What are the new rules for breaking up? These rules are argued over and mocked in venues from the New York Times to lamebook.com.
I was intrigued by the degree to which my students used new media to communicate important romantic information—such as "it's over." I decided to get to the bottom of the matter by interviewing seventy-two people about how they use Skype, texting, voice mail, instant messaging, Facebook, and cream stationery to end relationships. I open up the world of romance as it is conducted in a digital milieu, offering insights into the ways in which different media influence behavior, beliefs, and social mores.
In both New Zealand and the United States, Samoan migrants are minor minorities in an ethnic constellation dominated by other minority groups. As a result, they often find themselves in contexts where the challenge is not to establish the terms of the debate but to rewrite them. To navigate complicated and often unyielding bureaucracies, they must become skilled in reflexive engagement with the multiple social orders they inhabit. Those who are successful are able to parlay their own cultural expertise (their “Samoanness”) into an ability to subtly alter the institutions with which they interact in their everyday lives. Just as the “cultural” is sometimes constrained by the forces exerted by acultural institutions, so too can migrant culture reshape the bureaucracies of their new countries.
This is ethnographic fiction for those curious about how animals are used for a variety of different tasks around the world. To be sure, animal guides are not a universal genre, so Living with Animals offers an imaginative solution, doing justice to the ways details about animals are conveyed in culturally specific ways by adopting a range of voices and perspectives. How we capitalize on animals, how we live with them, and how humans attempt to control the untamable nature around them are all considered by the authors of this wild read.
If you have ever experienced a moment of "what if" curiosity—what is it like to be a gorilla in a zoo, to work in a pig factory farm, to breed cows and horses, this book is for you. A light-handed and light-hearted approach to a fascinating and nuanced subject, Living with Animals suggests many ways in which we can and do coexist with our non-human partners on Earth.
Each chapter in this collection of ethnographic fiction could be considered a job manual. Yet not any typical job manual—to do justice to the ways details about jobs are conveyed in culturally specific ways, the authors adopt a range of voices and perspectives. One chapter is written as though it was a letter from an older sister counseling her brother on how to be a doctor in Malawi. Another is framed as a eulogy for a well-loved village magistrate in Papua New Guinea who may have been killed by sorcery.
Beneath the novelty of the examples are some serious messages that I highlight in my introduction. These ethnographies reveal the connection between work and culture, the impact of societal values on the conditions of employment.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-work-changed-to-make-us-all-passionate-quitters
https://hbr.org/2017/06/a-friend-of-a-friend-is-no-longer-the-best-way-to-find-a-job
include: media ideologies, remediation, participant structures, heteroglossia, and entextualization. We examine each concept in turn before discussing how these concepts shed light on two co-constitutive ways of engaging with a varied media ecology – media coalescence and media-switching.
https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:14917/
conversations. That is, people may have a few conversations leading up to deciding to break up, a couple more conversations in which this decision is worked out, and several conversations after the decision in which people are disentangling from one another. As a result, the breakup stories I collected via interviews at Indiana University in 2007-2008 were almost always compilations of other conversations. When I transcribed these
interviews, I often found myself typing narrated accounts of conversational turn-taking: “and then she said . . . .”; “and then I said. . . .” Admittedly, because I was interviewing people on their use of new media, it would just as frequently be a story of: “and then she
texted . . .”; “and then I left a message on her voicemail. . . .” In short, people told the story of a break-up as a sequence of discrete conversations, often carried out in different media. Strung together as a story, these conversations all contributed to forming one event – the breakup.
Full Reference:
Gershon, Ilana. 2013. “Every Time We Type Good-Bye: Heartbreak American Style.” Anthropology Now 5(1): 93-101.
Free download link:
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Keane recommends (2003), one places the materiality of the sign front and center as the focus of analysis? In the first section, we examine the topics that one studies when focusing on the materiality of the medium itself, aspects such as entextualization, participant structure, and remediation. In the second section, we discuss analyses that result when one takes mediated communication to be the opposite of immediacy, when the central analytical dichotomy is between mediated communication and co-presence. In our third section, we discuss how a focus on materiality has the potential to transform who or what counts as a mediator, framing in unexpected ways the roles humans and non-humans might play in mediating communication.
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Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, by Mary L. Gray (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
Children and the Internet, by Sonia Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2009).
Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networking, by Theresa M. Senft (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008).
specific interactions, and identifies the interlinking of the networks as crucial to the preservation of truth value across them. Furthermore, the ANT perspective provides
tools for understanding how representations are ransformed into facts through the labour of specific networks. We thus refuse sharp distinctions between documentary production, distribution and reception, and instead see all aspects as central to how documentaries themselves function as actants and representations.
neoliberal models by which people currently try to contain
the inherent unpredictability of accomplishing social tasks
with others, such as getting a job. Contradictions in
neoliberal logics emerge when people try to live according
to neoliberal precepts, engaging with other social entities
as though all are corporate persons and all alliances are,
metaphorically speaking, business-to-business alliances.
Moments in US corporate hiring challenge scholarly
critiques of neoliberal logics that have made neoliberalism
seem too reductive and too prescriptive. At such moments,
Americans find that one neoliberal principle is incompatible
in practice with a different neoliberal principle—as when,
for example, being a flexible worker is antithetical to being
a legible job candidate.
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https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:14815/
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specific circulations. Tongans construct and extend diasporas according to principles of social organization that differ from those of Samoans or Cook Islanders, for example. By suggesting that diaspora studies should
become studies of diasporas, I am recommending analytical tools that privilege the differences emerging when people circulate knowledge and objects. For scholars, family members become nodes in a culturally specific network, that is, conduits for distributing knowledge and resources. Thus, both knowledge and resources move through and between people in more
or less predictable ways, a predictability that allows families to emerge as cohesive and culturally specific networks. It is through this specificity that families fashion diasporas that are culturally different, with different longevities and paradoxes.
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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 compare social theorists such as Heidegger or Bakhtin with the social analysts met during fieldwork. In this intellectual thought exercise, I compare structural functionalists with Samoan migrants to explore some of the differences between writing and practicing social analysis.
The authors argue that through the rehearsals and the performance,
the Samoan migrant students and the indigenous Maori students adopt different relationships to the nation. The Samoan migrant students see themselves as more aligned to Samoa as the homeland that few of them have visited. They are out of place in the New Zealand nation and use nostalgic performances to perform this sense of dislocation. The Maori students, on the other hand, use the performances to express a political disenchantment with the New Zealand nation. They are constantly critiquing government policies in the context of these performances. In short, both Samoan and Maori students are expressing the ways in which they do not belong to the nation through their performances.
Gershon, Ilana. 2007 “Outraged Indigenes and Nostalgic Migrants: Māori and Samoan Educating Performances in an Aotearoa New Zealand Cultural Festival” with Solonaima Collins. Teachers College Record 109 (7): 1797-1820.
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worship, generating reflexive explanations of their personal transformations. I focus on Samoan migrants in New Zealand who join evangelical churches, rejecting Catholicism or more established Protestantism.
The types of conversion I am discussing here—shifting from one form of Christianity to another—is not a rejection of one set of moral guidelines for another. I argue that they were rejecting the reflexive stance taken to a moral order by members of a Samoan church congregation involved in ritual exchanges, and instead adopting
a different stance, one they consider more valid. This transition is based on the ways in which ritual exchanges and capitalism structure certain reflexive stances as moral. People are literally moving between different moral economies, not religions.
in which actors produce and transform social hierarchies and classifications is by aligning and mis-aligning genres. Alignments within and across genres have furnished methods for construing and evaluating qualities of people – as examples, the genre repertoires of job applications or promotion dossiers. A fine attunement to new and emergent semiotic alignments via genres can also reveal how people are engaging with social and technological transformations. To study this, we advocate turning to four focal points: shifting genre hierarchies, stabilizing genres, cross-genre identities, and empty genres.
Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment, and Secret
Adoption in Morocco. Jamila Bargach. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. xvii + 304 pp., bibliography,
index.
A Sealed and Secret Kinship: The Culture of Policies
and Practices in American Adoption. Judith Modell.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. vi + 220 pp., bibliography,
index.
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule. Ann Laura Stoler. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002. ix + 335 pp., photographs,
notes, bibliography, index.