Social Analysis

This article considers how actors within digital markets creatively navigate moral ambiguities in their work, and how this shapes the building of (software) material relations. Catching the attention of an app user is considered morally ambiguous behavior in the ‘attention economy’ discourse shaping the Danish app market. Employees of the Danish app agency Monocle navigate this moral ambiguity by ‘personalizing’ apps so that they become relevant at the ‘right time’. However, in app-building practices, this entails a set of quite different personalized configurations. Consequently, I argue that personalization works to mediate different values within digital markets. It thereby allows app makers to pursue projects of fashioning themselves as makers of apps that are ‘good’, both in a technical and moral sense, while making apps that also ‘win the market’.

This article examines the rise and fall of an organization in the municipality of Chicoasén, in Chiapas, Mexico, which mediated between local residents and a state-owned electricity company planning a dam in the region. It describes the practical creation of the organization, with an emphasis on the leaders’ use of an egalitarian framework to make sense of the actors involved in the negotiations, and then highlights how competing egalitarian perspectives led to its disintegration. The analysis of this process indicates that a focus on the dichotomy between hierarchy and egalitarianism can obscure an understanding of concrete leadership practices in an organization, as well as the deeper conflicts between the subjects positioned as the basis of political frameworks.

This article investigates the epistemic transformations experienced by Chinese international students during their journeys abroad. Past anthropological studies have examined the cosmopolitan aspirations of student-migrants through the lens of global citizenship, newfound practical competencies, or novel cultural expectations. This article expands the discussion beyond these previous approaches by illustrating how student-migrants’ transformations into cosmopolites might consist of substantively new ways of relating to ‘knowledge’. In some instances, these transmutations have resulted in a wholesale rejection of the truth claims of their upbringing from within the People's Republic of China. Other times, however, they have led to skepticism about the possibility of ‘knowing’ in the first place.

This article outlines a modal anthropology, defined as the ethnographic description of what is possible and necessary for actors operating within a given (technical, aesthetic, ecological) medium. Spanning a wide array of examples, from evolutionary biomechanics to socialist jokes to village feuds, it surveys extant work on modality and its disciplinary antecedents, while examining some of the tricky issues involved in shifting across modes in relation to environmental inputs. Comparing the same act within different possible modes or the different possible actions within the same mode provides a powerful comparative technique for anthropological analysis, one that is particularly relevant in an era of planetary counterfactuals.

In recent decades, anthropology has been characterized by an experiential turn that connects scholarship increasingly with practical application, on the one hand, and critical reflexivity, on the other. This article throws these trends into historical relief by synoptically considering past emphases in anthropology from the 1830s through the present. These prior developments contextualize recent trends vis-à-vis long-term patterns and permutations in the history of anthropology. In significant respects, current trends reprise in newly critical and reflexive ways aspects of anthropology that were prominent when it was first becoming a scholarly discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. Anthropology's present experiential turn is especially important as our field faces an increasingly uncertain future into the mid-twenty-first century, including dire challenges of funding for new anthropological research and teaching positions, and the risks of being deprofessionalized.