Ilana Gershon

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 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 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 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 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 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.

An article on Aeon that discusses how living according to Hayek's neoliberal logics leads to a job market filled with people constantly anticipating quitting their current job for another, and what some of the consequences of this attitude are.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-work-changed-to-make-us-all-passionate-quitters

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.

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 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.

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.

How is the newness of new media constructed? Rejecting technological determinism, linguistic anthropologists understand that newness emerges when previous strategies for coordinating social interactions are challenged by a communicative channel. People experience a communicative channel as new when it enables people to circulate knowledge in new ways, to call forth new publics, to occupy new communicative roles, to engage in new forms of politics and control—in short, new social practices. Anthropologists studying media have been modifying the analytical tools that linguistic anthropologists have developed for language to uncover when and how media are understood to provide the possibilities for social change and when they are not. Taking coordination to be a vulnerable achievement, I address recent work that elaborates on the ways that linguistic anthropology segments communication to explore how a particular medium offers its own distinctive forms of authorship, circulation, storage, and audiences.

In interviews with Indiana University college students, undergraduates insisted that Facebook could be a threat to their romantic relationships. Some students choose to deactivate their Facebook accounts to preserve their relationships. No other new media was described as harmful. This article explores why Facebook was singled out. I argue that Facebook encourages (but does not require) users to introduce a neoliberal logic to all their intimate relationships, which these particular users believe turns them into selves they do not want to be.

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.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:14917/

Breakups are events that primarily take place through conversations (although sometimes dishes are thrown). Often they occur during the course of several different
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.

This paper analyzes what is American about U.S. undergraduate breakup narratives in a digital age.  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.

Full Reference:
Gershon, Ilana. 2013. “Every Time We Type Good-Bye: Heartbreak American Style.”  Anthropology Now 5(1): 93-101.

Free download link:
https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:14907/

This article engages with Teri Silvio’s 2010 challenge to treat animation as a central trope for understanding the relationship between selves and media. We discuss how animation can illuminate aspects of interactions that performance, the current dominant trope, can not—such as addressing what it means to be human when what distinguishes the human from the nonhuman is how one is being controlled. We discuss how focusing on animation can shed light on social interactions both in virtual worlds and with media practices in which online and offline exchanges are inextricably intertwined.

https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau3.3.006/449

The public sphere is increasingly being depicted as a site of inadequately assessed risk when American undergraduates post blogs, videos, and Facebook updates that become viral, prompting others to mutter ‘don’t they know better than to press send?’ In this article, I offer an analytical frame for such posting that does not re-inscribe US tendencies to attribute ignorance or misguided selfishness to unwelcome behavior. In the United States, there are multiple and mutually defining understandings of how publics are constituted. Historically, these ideas often change when Americans respond to the ways new technologies alter how communication is made public or private. This is an ethnographic account of one way that multiple publics are seen to co-exist uneasily as people negotiate the newness of new media. Grounded in my ethnographic research, I explore how cautionary stories about ‘pressing send’ reflect neoliberal concerns about  allocating risk and responsibility among individual choice-makers.

A review essay on how linguistic anthropologists approach media. What, then, are the questions we are encouraged to ask when, as Webb
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.

A Review Essay for these books:
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).

This article examines how science studies in general and actor-network theory (ANT) in particular can inform scholarship on documentary. More specifically, we argue that both ANT scholars and documentary scholars are faced with the question of how a particular set of interactions are transformed into representations of reality that can travel into other contexts with their truth value intact. The ANT perspective views putative truth as circulating through a series of networks shaped through
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.

This article examines how science studies in general and actor-network theory (ANT) in particular can inform scholarship on documentary. More specifically, we argue that both ANT scholars and documentary scholars are faced with the question of how a particular set of interactions are transformed into representations of reality that can travel into other contexts with their truth value intact. The ANT perspective views putative truth as circulating through a series of networks shaped through 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 transformed 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.

How does a fascism emerging after neoliberalism differ from a fascism that had the Weimar Republic as the backdrop? Or put another way, can abiding support for Trump be partially motivated by Trump’s apparent rejection of some basic neoliberal tenets?

Comparing different versions of Undercover Boss reveals how an assemblage of TV producers, camera crews, businesses , and broadcasters choose to portray corporate hierarchies during the financial crisis of 2008 when corporations seemed like especially vulnerable forms of social organization for workers to rely upon. This article approaches the same show done in two different countries as a natural experiment that can reveal national differences through a textual comparison. The US show relies upon a sentimental imagination such that knowledge of the other is based on an emotional connection to the past. The UK show relies upon an organizational imagination in which the structural roles one plays in a company shape what one knows of how the company functions. Each version portrays distinctive approaches to three issues: (1) what can be known about people as social actors; (2) what is portrayed as ethical or appropriate workplace relationships; and (3) what kinds of tacit critiques of contemporary capitalism are possible.

Media workers have always adopted branding tactics for themselves: creating and managing a certain persona, doing the emotional labour necessary in largely informal and reputation-driven working environments to suggest a persona, performing this identity dutifully in order to make it work. However, branding is not an inevitable practice -- it is not even all that measurably effective. In this chapter, we argue that the notion of branding accompanied a shift in how people understood what it meant to work for others. They now view the self as metaphorically a business., and if a business, then something to be branded.

Social practices and contingencies always exceed the
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.

This article discusses personal branding, a performance genre that many job seekers in the United States are told to master in order to get a job. I discuss the specific techniques you are supposed to use to brand yourself, some of the origins of these techniques, and the reasons why people find it challenging to put these techniques into practice. I analyze the self that personal branding assumes everyone should be able to present to others by deploying a set of semiotic practices meant to create the impression of a coherent authentic self. Personal branding is treated as a lens into some lived dilemmas that emerge when one tries to put a model of a neoliberal self into practice, with special attention drawn to the tension between flexibility and legibility.

This article addresses the challenges a neoliberal conception of agency poses to anthropologists. I first discuss the kind of self that a neoliberal agency presupposes, in particular a self that is a flexible bundle of skills that reflexively manages oneself as though the self was a business. I then explore the dilemmas this neoliberal agency poses to different scholarly imaginations. I conclude by proposing that a neoliberal agency creates relationships that are morally lacking and overlooks differences in scale, deficiencies that an anthropological imagination would be able to critique effectively.

In the contemporary U.S. workplace, corporate personhood is increasingly becoming the metaphor structuring how job seekers are supposed to present themselves as employable. If one takes oneself to be a business, one should also take oneself to be an entity that requires a brand. Some ethnographic questions arise when job seekers try to embody corporate personhood. How does one transform oneself into a brand? What are the obstacles that a person encounters adopting a form of corporate personhood? How does one foster relationships or networks that will lead to a job, not just a circulation of one's brand identity? Based on research in Indiana and northern California, this article explores the conundrums of marketing oneself as a desirable employee on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and so on. I address the reasons why the increased use of social media contributes to popularizing a notion of self-branding. I also discuss the quandaries people face when using social media to create this self-brand. In sum, this article investigates the obstacles people face when they try to embody a form of corporate personhood across media, a form of self putatively based on the individual, but one that has been transformed into a corporate form that people can not easily inhabit.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:15985/

How would the anthropology of the 1990’s have been different if anthropologists understood what it meant to be a writing subject describing Others the way that Bakhtin did? These questions are undercurrents in this essay, as I summarize what early Bakhtin has to offer contemporary anthropology so that you, gentle reader, might make a more informed decision about whether it is worth tackling this exhaustingly dense prose yourself, since these are manuscripts less concerned with specific novels or utterances than with the nature of Being and the underlying relationality of the self.

This article suggests that one of the understudied and substantive ways 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. In his essay on speech genres, Bakhtin (1986) noted that speech genres are "the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language" (65). For Bakhtin, certain genres came to define or "set the tone" of literary language more broadly, embedding norms and understandings about meaning, addressivity, and function that went largely unnoticed but were vital in shaping the production of language. Bakhtin introduced to linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics an orientation to situating sets of genres within ideological frames connected to and situated within history (see, among others, Bauman 1999; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs 1993; Hanks 1987). In developing Bakhtin's ideas further, these scholars discussed how "the capacity of genre to create textual order, unity and boundedness" and, conversely, fragmentation and disorder that "can be invoked to varying degrees" dependent on one's participant role "is of profound interactive, ideological and political-economic significance" (Bauman and Briggs 1992: 156). Since the early 1990s, genre has fallen a bit out of fashion as an analytical tool to wield. In this piece, we suggest that there is much at stake in thinking with genres again to

Many cultural anthropologists today share a common theoretical commitment: to view the people they encounter during fieldwork as living among multiple social orders that are interconnected and contingent. When social orders are multiple, ethnographers are quickly faced with the question of how people construct the boundaries between these social orders to be both durable (enough) to keep social orders distinct and porous (enough) to allow people, objects, forms, and ideas to circulate across them in appropriate ways. What counts as appropriate is, not surprisingly, often hotly contested. Despite contemporary ethnographers' varied intellectual trajectories, a crosscutting set of theoretical assumptions unites their work and shapes how they approach familiar anthropological foci, such as

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.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:14815/

What insights can the literature on legal pluralism and cultural pluralism written by ethnographers of courts provide to ethnographers of legislatures? Focusing on Anglo-American legal systems, I explore how analyses of cultural pluralism can change when one moves from courts to legislatures. Three analytical shifts can occur when switching institutional perspectives. First, in Anglo-American courts, contexts are often made cultural as one technique among many to create a suitable interpretation that will lead to resolution. In the corresponding legislatures, contexts are often made cultural through a form of quantification. Second, in these courts, outsiders (not court officials) tend to embody culture, contributing to an ahistorical account of what culture is. In the legislatures, anyone, even representatives themselves, can be cultural, transforming being cultural into a political tactic that renders historical and social connections visible. Therefore, people are made cultural in different ways in the two settings. Third, in Anglo-American legislatures, law is always a compromise. As laws travel out of legislatures and into courts, the agonism at laws' origin is forgotten, and laws are seen as acontextual. Thus, I suggest, cultural difference has the potential to lead to systemic transformation more easily at legislative levels than it can in courts.

Democratic representation is an analytically productive vantage point for examining the differences between classically liberal and neoliberal demands for performing indigeneity. As legal contexts have shifted from being classically liberal to neoliberal, multicultural democratic representation has changed markedly, especially in its core conceptions of what constitutes alliances, representation, and culture. These transformations become visible when issues of democratic representation are at stake, especially in cases of indigenous self-representation, such as when indigenous Māori politicians are representing their indigenous Māori constituents. In this article, I compare two different historical moments in the New Zealand parliament – the turn of the 20 th century and the turn of the 21 st century – to contrast being an indigenous democratic representative in a liberal era and being an indigenous democratic representative in a neoliberal era. Through this comparison, I shed light on the ways in which neoliberal perspectives in legal contexts have changed the role of indigenous politicians.

In this article, I explore how people use the culture concept in legislatures to understand the minorities they legislate for and about. I focus on recent debates in the New Zealand parliament over whether the indigenous Maori are a cultural group or a racial group. A Westminster parliament system encourages these debates, in which political parties argue that Maori are either cultural or racial but not both. For the ruling Labour Party and its allies, Maori are cultural; for their opposition, the National Party and its allies,  Maori are a racial group. This division is possible only because of the legislators' neoliberal assumptions about identity categories. To complicate these political divisions, Maori MPs currently belong to political parties from all parts of the political spectrum, and their effectiveness as culture bearers in a parliamentary context can disrupt the terms of this debate.
https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:14915/

Ethnographies of Pacific kinship and exchange practices have much to offer Pacific diaspora studies. In particular, the scholarly focus on families offers a useful set of strategies for analyzing how diasporas can be culturally
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.

In 1989 New Zealand legislators revised their child welfare legislation, partially in response to M¯ aori and Pacific Island critiques that the previous state-centered regime had failed to take into account their culturally distinctive techniques for being a family and had failed to support culturally specific practices of decision making and conflict resolution. Legislators instituted a new and increasingly popular form of alternative dispute resolution—the family group conference—in an attempt to create a bureaucratic response to family dysfunction that was capacious enough to allow for any and every family's involvement. In the process, however, they continued to understand what counts as a family along nuclear family lines. Against the New Zealand lawmakers' assumptions, this article illustrates how, in the context of transnational migration, Samoan families experience tensions between the nuclear family unit that lawmakers envision and their lived extended kinship groups. As extended families, Samoan migrant families' goal is not to produce socially productive citizens for the nation-state, but rather to produce a transnational family reputation. Thus, despite the legislators' efforts to create culturally sensitive forms for family conflict resolution, Samoan social workers and community counselors had to translate the legislative act for Samoan families, negotiating and managing the conflicting presuppositions of what it means to be a nuclear family embedded in the act and what it means to be an extended family for Samoans.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:14909/

In independent and American Samoa, Samoan representatives have historically been successful at furthering their communities' interests when dealing with various colonial regimes. Yet during my fieldwork in California, I kept witnessing failed encounters between Samoan migrants and government officials. I argue that government officials helped create these problems through the ways they expected Samoan migrants to act as culture-bearers. I conclude by exploring how cultural mediators become the focal point for tensions generated by the contradictory assumptions government system-carriers and Samoan culture-bearers hold about how to relate to social orders.

When writing, ethnographers are faced with the hermeneutic task of
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.

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. Purpose: 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.

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.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:14919/

In migration, people are accumulating resources in contexts where the primary ethnographically imagined totality for shaping identity through exchange is not one's relationship to a finite totality of family knowledge. Instead, the assumption is one in which the totality in question is the totality of commodities which the consumer, with a finite amount of money, encounters. The relationship between part and totality revolves around commodities, the person is not in a metonymic relationship to a totality based on commodities. People are accessing a totality, they are not part of a totality. In fact, it is precisely this presumption that people and commodities are fundamentally separate that underlies commodity fetishism. The misrecognition lies in refusing to see that one's own finite capacity to produce also contributes to the actual possibilities of consumption — that one's own labour and its finitude is part and parcel of the desired commodity. As a result, when people move between these two exchange perspectives, the forms of misrecognition they must negotiate are logically incompatible. Under Samoan capitalism, to exchange one must ignore the physical labour that made it possible, while under the Samoan system, to exchange is to ignore the social labour that made it possible.

In this chapter, I will discuss how contemporary conversion requires that Samoans attribute meaning and meaninglessness anew to various forms of Christian
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.

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 US context.

A review essay for the following books:

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.