Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Media Switching and Media Ideologies

When U.S. college students tell breakup stories, they often indicate what medium was used for each exchange. In this article, I explore what this practice reveals about people’s media ideologies. By extending previous scholarship on language ideologies to media, I trace how switching media or refusing to switch media contributes to the labor of disconnecting the relationship, determining whether phrases such as “it’s over” are effective or not

Knowing adoption and adopting knowledge

In the 1960s, the descent versus alliance debate dominated kinship studies-anthropologists wanted to determine what relationship offered the best analytic lens for understanding how social groups were formed. Those who favored descent felt that the most relevant question to ask was how groups constituted and reconstituted themselves across generations. From the perspective of descent theorists, existential facts—death and generational shifts—ensured that all social groups had to resolve the problem of maintaining themselves as continuous units. Alliance theorists took issue with this emphasis, believing that constructing group boundaries was an equally important task and one that required a focus on marriage as the beginning point for analysis. This debate was more than an argument about which type of relationship was more important. Those involved were questioning how best to understand the ways groups were constituted through kinship. In this review article, I ask a "what if question: What would have happened in kinship studies if kinship theorists had taken a third relationship—adoption—as a starting point? Had anthropologists followed Jack Goody's (1969) initiative in focusing on adoption, would this have led to a new perspective on relatedness

Outspoken Indigenes and Nostalgic Migrants: Maori and Samoan Educating Performances in an Aotearoa New Zealand Cultural Festival

Theorists of civil society often view civil society as a site for democratic education. Civil society is supposed to assist democratic practice by offering people contexts in which they practice promoting the common good. This article, following Nina Eliasoph 's intervention, takes this to be a claim requiring ethnographic exploration. The article provides an ethnographic answer to the question, What do people actually tell each other about the common good or national well-being in civil society moments? To explore this question, the authors turn to how a Samoan cultural group and a Maori cultural group rehearse and perform in a citywide high school cultural festival in Auckland. This article compares how migrant high school students and indigenous high school students use performances of traditional songs and dances to explore their relationships to the New Zealand nation. The article examines how the rehearsals take place, particularly who disciplines whom and how different levels of expertise are displayed. The authors compare how tutors circulate knowledge and discipline in the rehearsals with how the students perform their relationships to the New Zealand nation on stage

Documentary Studies and Linguistic Anthropology

This article suggests that linguistic anthropology offers useful analytical tools to documentary studies because both fields wrestle with questions that emerge from the circulation of indexical representations that are putatively constructing truths. Linguistic anthropology is deeply concerned with the ways that texts circulate, and how this circulation affects how indexical representations are structured and how constructions of reality are produced. The question this article tackles is: how can insights that linguistic anthropologists have been developing about circulation, indexicality, and the construction of facts be usefully mobilised to think about documentaries

Compelling culture: The rhetoric of assimilation among Samoan migrants in the United States

Studies of assimilation tend to focus on whether or not members of a migrant group are adjusting to their new surroundings. This article inverts this focus, asking not how migrant groups adjust, but rather how migrant groups use the language of assimilation to explain generation gaps and other exigencies of migration. This inversion sheds light on the ways a migrant group’s epistemological assumptions underlie their understandings of cultural identity, and shape how they might respond to dilemmas caused by migration. Building upon ethnographic fieldwork among Samoan migrants in the United States, the article explores how and why community workers use the rhetoric of assimilation to teach Samoan parents how to raise children in the U.S. context

Bullshit Genres: What to Watch For When Studying the New Actant ChatGPT and Its Siblings.

I lay out what I believe ethnographers of AI who engage with large language models (LLMs) might want to pay attention to in the next couple of years. My starting point is that it would be helpful to explore how people are responding to ChatGPT in terms of genre, that people’s reactions to ChatGPT is to treat it at its core as though it is a genre machine—that is, a machine intelligence that reproduces and tweaks genres in just the right way for human consumption

Media Ideologies: An Introduction

This volume began with the question: what analytical possibilities can scholarly work on language ideologies offer the study of media? Studying media ideologies is not new, but calling the metalanguage that emphasizes the technology or bodies through which we communicate a “media ideology” is. By examining media ideologies, the authors in this volume are building on previous ethnographies of how people on the ground understand the ways the medium shapes the message (see e.g., Barker 2008; Schieffelin 2000; Spitulnik 1998/1999). Media ideologies as a term can sharpen a focus on how people understand both the communicative possibilities and the material limitations of a specific channel, and how they conceive of channels in general

Seeing like a system: Luhmann for Anthropologists

In this essay, I discuss how Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory might be useful for anthropologists. After providing a summary of Luhmann’s theory, I address the quandaries anthropologists might face when deploying a theory that presumes systems without selves. I also recount how other anthropologists have made use of Luhmann’s systems theory to analyze auditing, legal pluralism, and biosecurity hazards

Everytime We Type Goodbye: Heartbreak American-Style

Both undergraduates and older adults would tell me about relationships that included breakups that didn’t take, relationships filled with cycles of fighting, ending a relationship and then getting back together over and over again. This would turn the end of a relationship into somewhat of a mystery, and the stories told became detective stories of a sort. In telling their breakup stories, people were piecing together a series of ambiguous and unclear conversations into an overarching narrative that revealed that a breakup had happened. And for Americans, often the medium becomes an essential clue in this unraveling

Keepin’ It Real: Facebook’s Honesty Box and Ethnic Verbal Genres

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