George E. Marcus

Fast Capitalism: Para-Ethnography and the Rise of the Symbolic Analyst

The social theorist’s oscillation between the market as the artifact of knowledge and as evidence of its limits finds powerful expression in the events now shaping the financial world. In the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis and the consciousness of so-called “systemic risk” amplified, the failure of the economic models that were the source of central bankers’ expertise to offer useful predictions or finetuned policy solutions to recent market problems, and current efforts by global banks to do away with the regulation and management of the market by state actors altogether... [T]he central bankers at the Bank of Japan...were both amazed at what they imagined as their own creation—a global market of seemingly infinite scale and complexity—and fearful of their own powerlessness vis-a-vis their creation. In particular, these central bankers’ sense of powerlessness took the form of a heightened awareness of the contradictions in their role as creators and guardians of the global market. (Riles 2001: 6

Experimental forms for the expression of norms in the ethnography of the contemporary

This article considers the methodological state of ethnographic projects that are situated in the context of complex global assemblages and projects, and of a tradition of critique that has defined the purpose of much anthropological research over the past two decades. How does the recent surge of concern with value as the analytic object of study mesh with the explicit normative concerns in the ways that many ethnographic projects are conceived and narrated? Value is both an object and informing frame of such projects. This article probes experiments in the weaving of longstanding theoretical orientations to value in the mesh of contemporary fieldwork itself.

Theatricality in Ethnography at the World Trade Organization. The Para-Site as Experimental Form

Abstract Contemporary anthropological research requires innovation in method that can take the measure of consequential reflection by many subjects on knowledge production within their own domains and anticipate how a research project might connect productively with various discursive communities and networks given the increasing complexity of ethnographic scale and context. One such innovation, the para-site, addresses these challenges by enlisting reflexive subjects as epistemic partners in orchestrated interactions situated alongside ongoing fieldwork activities. Our experiment set the para-site in the x93Green Roomx94 of the World Trade Organization and employed linguistic anthropology to facilitate exchanges at the level of our ethnography′s guiding concepts.

Obstruction and Intervention as Creative Methods in Anthropological Research

Abstract Could it be that creativity thrives under the methodological asceticism of imposed limitations? Drawing on von Triers and Leths film experiment The Five Obstructions, this introduction outlines the creative potentialities of rethinking anthropological methodology through interventions and obstructions into the works of ones peers.

Reflexivity in Anthropology

Reflexivity has been an essential dimension of cultural and social anthropologys emblematic method of inquiry: ethnographic fieldwork and writing. However, this core feature in the making of anthropological knowledge only became theorized and widely discussed in the 1980s and 1990s when an interdisciplinary intellectual movement with many facets and influences intensively assessed all aspects of the culture concept. Distinctive forms of reflexive thinking, analysis, and writing in anthropology have become canonical. This article reviews intellectual roots of this turn, its period of incorporation, and how it is manifested in contemporary anthropological research.