ILANA GERSHON
Indiana University
Porous social orders
A B S T R A C T
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 circulation, ritual, scale, and
power. [porous boundaries, social orders, circulation, ritual,
scale, power, fieldwork, ethnography, theory]
W
hat Sherry Ortner wrote in 1984 about anthropology
as a discipline can still resonate on bad days: “The
field appears to be a thing of shreds and patches, of
individuals and small coteries pursuing disjunctive
investigations and talking mainly to themselves”
(Ortner 1984, 126). Yet she productively tracked a set of shared orientations toward practice, one that enabled ethnographers of seemingly disparate sites to enter into vibrant intellectual dialogues. Today, anthropologists are experiencing a similar moment. What looks
like a diverse array of approaches in the discipline is in fact a coherent set of analytical responses to a real need, one generated by
the perceived poverty of the analytical categories that anthropologists have inherited and by the concerns of people in anthropologists’ field sites. Instead of analyzing ethnographic materials through
the lens of practice, with all that practice implies, many anthropologists these days are interrogating what happens when their fieldwork
interlocutors live among multiple social orders that are kept distinct
yet have porous boundaries.1
Ethnographers of multiple social orders share common assumptions and questions that they arrive at in part because of the ethnographic practices they analyze. Their stated interventions are often oriented toward topical subfields and area studies, such as the
anthropology of Christianity, medical anthropology, development
studies, or the new Melanesian ethnography. There is a broad heterogeneity in the intellectual dialogues they engage with when arriving
at this shared set of concerns, as well as a wide range of terms used
to address similar practices. Yet they all engage with ethnographic
conundrums produced by the simultaneous existence of differently
patterned and often contradictory ways of ordering interactions and
relationships. That is, the approach waddles like a theoretical movement, but it doesn’t quack like one.
Many contemporary ethnographers assume that people live
among social orders that are multiple, contingent, and interconnected. In using “social orders,” I refer to a moment in the
late 1990s when critiques of terms such as culture and society
were so prolific and warranted that some anthropologists turned
to the phrase social order as less charged (Bercovitch 1994). Today, ethnographers use many different terms, including regime of
value (Appadurai 1986), epistemic culture (Knorr-Cetina 1999), and
assemblage (Ong and Collier 2005), that all reflect nuanced distinctions in the degree of structure or contingency in a particular
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 00, No. 0, pp. 1–13, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2019 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12829
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Volume 00 Number 0 xxxx 2019
context. Thus, part of anthropology’s heterogeneous muddle may result from the diversity of these terms and the extensive range of what anthropologists engage with as patterned, varyingly structured, and transportable—whether
legal systems, global health regimes, religions, or shared
epistemologies. Focusing too much on the precise nature of
social orders overlooks widespread commonalities in contemporary ethnographic analysis. In this article, I will use
social orders as a broad umbrella term to refer to patterned,
perduring, interwoven, and transportable repertoires of
interactions that are available for reflexive explication.
Social orders are porous, sometimes by design and
sometimes by accident. People who live among multiple social orders continually try to create and maintain boundaries between them, boundaries that are leaky in the right
ways, not in the wrong ways. For this reason, boundaries
emerge as a lens for making visible the distinctions between
social orders, for ethnographers and sometimes for those
they study.2 Often these are boundaries produced largely by
practice and social analysis, but sometimes they are more
concrete. Ethnographers of multiple social orders will focus on translation (Gal 2015) or circulation (Tsing 2005) as
moments when crossing between social orders is likely to
inspire the social analysis in which their interlocutors engage during fieldwork. They also analyze how people create standardized forms that are putatively acontextual (Star
and Lampland 2009), since appearing to cross social orders seamlessly is as much a challenge as distinguishing between them.
Porous boundaries let people, ideas, objects, and forms
circulate between social orders in ways that often keep distinctions between social orders durable. What is an appropriately porous boundary, or appropriate distinction, is often contested, determined by power and perspective. In
general, contemporary ethnographers focus on how people move between multiple social orders and on how they
move objects, forms, and ideas across boundaries using
consciously calibrated strategies.
The following examples may seem all over the map, but
this is evidence for my argument, not a refutation of it. The
widespread focus on social orders and their porous boundaries has emerged because many anthropologists share a
common set of ethnographically derived concerns and similar enough theoretical assumptions. As a consequence,
they have encountered shared conceptual quandaries, generating congruent directions to explore. The assumptions
resonate with a range of theoretical movements; this theoretical analytic is not distinct because it comprises entirely novel theoretical stances. Some moves will resemble
actor-network theory, while other aspects of it will be compatible with the work of certain theorists, such as Bakhtin,
Garfinkel, Massey, and Strathern. In addition, there is a long
tradition in social theory in which ethnographers grapple
with multiple social orders in many fields—readers see this
2
in ethnographies of legal pluralism, postcolonialism, Christianity, human ecology, development, and so on. In particular, linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have long
prefigured the tensions between heterogeneous and emergent patternings of social orders in their analyses of linguistic repertoires and of perduring communicative economies
(Blommaert 2013; Silverstein 2004). Much of the research
has been influenced by semiotic and scalar analyses, which
hold that patterned forms of circulation always already entail their own kinds of differentiations and imaginations
(Irvine and Gal 2000; Strathern 2004; Tsing 2005).
By asking what becomes relevant when emphasizing
the multiplicity of social orders, ethnographers produce
original analyses of familiar topics, such as circulation, ritual, scale, and power. Focusing on circulation and scale
spurs ethnographers to study when and how multiple social
orders are maintained as simultaneously distinct and interconnected. By contrast, ritual and bounded performances
in general let fieldwork interlocutors experiment with creating a separate social order, however temporarily. Lastly,
ethnographers of multiple social orders interrogate how
power is at stake when people maintain, impose, or dismantle social orders and distinguish one social order from another over space and time.
Shared assumptions
When ethnographers assume that everyone lives among
multiple social orders, they make four additional, theoretically significant assumptions. First, they assume that social orders are presupposed and entailed in interactional
moments but do not exist as overarching structures external to those moments. In other words, people create and
re-create social orders by using already existing conceptual
and infrastructural repertoires in the interactional moment.
One can be strategic and inventive, but within limits. Thus
ethnographers who address these conceptual quandaries
tend to have a strong ethnomethodological, performative,
or Bakhtinian sensibility (Merlan 2005; Schram 2018).
A social order’s durability is an achievement, often
commonplace, but an achievement nonetheless. Through
interactions, people call forth social orders and, in doing
so, often labor to distinguish one social order from other
possible ones. When people navigate multiple social orders,
they are also maintaining boundaries between social orders
through their interactions; boundaries are not given or inherently durable.
The effort to create a durable social order is not always
about ensuring the historical longevity of the social order.
It can involve consciously trying to turn away from what
everyone in that context sees as the predictable or culturally
appropriate way to act, and instead seeking alternative and
sustainable relationships. For example, in a female boarding house in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, women
Porous social orders
struggle to create a respectable and modern middle-class
femininity that will permit them to reject a social order enacted through village customs and kinship ties, as described
by Melissa Demian (2017).3 The women aim to create a new
social order almost whole cloth, one that results in companionate marriage and accumulated wealth, neither of which
is possible under other social orders available to them. The
performative act of creation is fragile, and the women must
be vigilant in recognizing and avoiding moments when others will try to enmesh them in more historically grounded
expectations. Even this example shows some crucial aspects
about how social orders operate, demonstrating that these
orders are emergent and vulnerable, as are the distinctions
between them.
Second, ethnographers of multiple social orders make
a concerted methodological and theoretical attempt to
understand how people manage circulation across social
orders, both purposefully and accidently. In doing so,
ethnographers make visible the differences between social
orders. They are not interested in mapping social orders
but in tracking the circulation between them. This emphasis differs from that of previous social theorists who also
viewed people, objects, forms, and ideas as existing among
multiple social orders—be they Pierre Bourdieu’s (1972) social fields, Niklas Luhmann’s (1995) social systems, or many
others. For earlier theorists, social orders were often subsumed by a larger closed system, frequently society writ
large, so the question of circulation was less pressing. Contemporary ethnographers find laminations where earlier
theorists presumed totalities.
In general, this contemporary focus on living among
multiple social orders means that the internal dynamics of a
social order are relevant for analysts largely when these dynamics shed light on the complications and consequences
of how a social order coexists alongside many others. For
example, a religiously defined social order can become
difficult to interweave with a political one, as shown by
Elina Hartikainen’s (2018) analysis of the tensions that AfroBrazilian religious activist groups encounter when they engage with liberal democratic practices. In 2009 the Brazilian government was keen to include religious groups in
various forms of democratic deliberation. Activists were being incorporated into the Brazilian political sphere, encouraged by various government coalitions and the press as advocates of religious tolerance. Yet Afro-Brazilian religious
practitioners felt that democratic egalitarianism potentially
undermined their hierarchical forms of social organization,
which are integral to how they assert their authority and
knowledge.
The contrast between the political and the religious
shapes what it becomes important for the ethnographer to
explain about Afro-Brazilian religions and Brazilian democracy. To understand the conundrum that the religious leaders face, one has to understand the social hierarchy that
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underpins all their interactions, as well as the ideal of active democratic citizenship that the Brazilian government
proffered. Hartikainen thus explores the strategies that religious practitioners develop to maintain both possible forms
of respect—the respect based on equality and the respect
based on hierarchy—by carefully reasserting the boundaries of social orders at every turn. It is the contrast between
these two orders that brings to the fore questions about how
to maintain the respect inherent in hierarchy while opening a space for engaging with the egalitarianism promised
in liberal democratic exchanges. In addition, interweaving
or moving between these two social orders forces people
on the ground to become explicit analysts of the contradictions in their situation as they try to develop practical and
context-specific solutions.
Third, when turning to circulations or encounters,
ethnographers often uncover layers of conflict around what
might be the best way to move people, objects, forms, and
ideas across the boundaries of social orders. Ethnographers
can see power in action by examining how people determine (or refuse to agree on) what makes for proper circulation. In encounters, people often try to figure out how to
manage this circulation in and out of social orders and to
do this successfully enough that, while everyone may not
agree on what counts as proper practices, circulation still
takes place in ways more or less acceptable for all involved.
This good enough circulation, however, often reinforces inequalities. For example, when US medical residents heed the call to participate in global health efforts
and travel to hospitals in Botswana for short-term visits,
they are often captivated by a particular narrative of social causality that Betsey Brada (2011) traces in their understanding of global health. This narrative entails heroically visiting resource-limited medical spaces where their
expertise can bring speedy and visible changes in patients’
health. In this moment, they have a strong sense of what
it means to be a global health worker—traveling to many
different countries and embodying a standardized medical knowledge that makes it possible for them to heal anywhere, regardless of local conditions or legislation. The
putatively “local” doctors and nurses, who spend considerably more time at the hospitals than the visiting US doctors, often try to diminish the global health practitioners’
heroic claims while nevertheless supporting their presence.
They experience the global health narrative as undercutting
their own expertise, since for US health workers to be properly heroic, local medical conditions and medical practices
have to be constructed as grievously lacking. Here, people
struggle over the legitimacy of the narrative that underpins
global health, and thus what counts as the appropriate way
to reflect on the boundaries between medical practices in
Botswana and other parts of the world.
At the same time, who gets to be understood as crossing boundaries is a bit up for grabs in this ethnographic
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setting. Just as the “local” health practitioners often feel
they have to defend their own expertise, they also feel pressure not to acknowledge their own global life trajectories,
even though they have overseas training and often greater
international experiences than the visiting doctors (Brada
2011, 300). Those in the hospital have to negotiate what
counts as global and local, who gets to embody these categories, and what elements of medical practice should be
interpreted as universal—all this to sustain a steady flow of
welcome medical labor and supplies. Even when ethnographers of multiple social orders find relatively successful moments of circulation, they explore the inequalities that are
reproduced through the compromises and infrastructures
that enable circulation in the first place.
Fourth, the boundaries between social orders are not
given, or a natural or logical by-product of how the social order itself functions, which is another difference between this work and that of earlier theorists, who also recognized the existence of a plethora of social orders. These
are boundaries that are typically created in asserting a social
order—to produce a sustained pattern is also to sort what
or whom does not belong. For example, in bureaucracies
(Hetherington 2011; Hull 2012) and courts (Agrama 2012;
Richland 2013), officials are quick to insist that visitors acknowledge the premises of bureaucratic or legal order by
which they must operate within that institutional context.
These assertions always acknowledge the possibility that
people might act otherwise, that visitors might insist on operating according to other social logics—that is, these assertions are boundary-making claims that risk being undercut by other claims to valid alternative social orders. In
addition, these boundaries are also always understood to be
permeable, so that people, objects, forms, and ideas from
elsewhere can enter and, hopefully, be transformed or
translated appropriately (while the possibility always remains that this will not happen, that people will interact inappropriately or according to other logics).
The continuum between epistemological
differences and timescapes
Once anthropologists decided that culture and society were
problematic as analytical concepts, authors began to populate the discipline with a new set of terms designed to
make visible continuities, discontinuities, and, generally
speaking, social change. There was, after all, still a pressing need to understand how people encode information
in ways similar enough to accomplish three things: communicate effectively with others (but not everyone; Douglas 1986, 47); determine what is available for moral debate
within a group; and know when and how people share understandings about what constitutes sameness and difference (Douglas 1986, 55). In continuing to deal with a version of social order, however named, anthropologists began
4
to focus on different aspects of continuity and change, and
they have thus been developing two different but complementary approaches to viewing a social order: as a shared
way to understand social relations and as a shared way to
organize social relations across time and space. In other
words, some ethnographers emphasize the epistemological or organizational aspects of the social orders that their
fieldwork interlocutors live among, while others emphasize
their temporal or spatial aspects.4
When ethnographers discuss social orders through a
lens tempered by a nostalgic connection to what the culture
concept used to provide, they are attending simultaneously
to both epistemological difference and social organization.
In these moments, scholars may coin terms like the postcultural (Schram 2018) or intercultural (Merlan 2005) to signal their interlocutors’ varied labors of organizing and classifying. For many scholars, how social orders function along
these lines becomes known by analyzing how epistemological differences—such as different understandings of sociality and selfhood—combine with the ways that people practice social organization.
Yet not all ethnographers use this analytic to express
an ambivalent longing for the theoretical work that the culture concept, however problematic, used to accomplish for
them. Some scholars are instead analyzing time and space
to understand how people’s experiences are partially structured by social orders, which are ever jostling with other
social orders that offer different assemblages of timescapes
and locations. Analyzing time encourages scholars to think
about how different ways of accounting for time are placed
in hierarchical relationships to one another, or how people and infrastructures are not always successfully trying
to coordinate “divergent social rhythms” (Bear 2014, 17).
Although time and space are always understood as intertwined, those who give greater attention to space might
view it as the product of divergent and “distinctive forms
of activity, thought, feeling and social or political relating”
(Stasch 2017, 443), which then requires labor to bring these
forms into relationship with each other.
There is an intellectual puzzle with which scholars of
epistemological differences are more likely to engage than
those who emphasize time and space, namely how different instantiations of social orders provide ways for people
to explore fundamental cultural assumptions about sociality and selves, assumptions that are often in tension with
each other. This is a puzzle that has been known for a long
time. For example, in the 19th and early 20th century, Crow
social organization shifted seasonally so that they could explore a culturally specific version of a tension between autonomy and social coordination (Lowie 1935). Crow Indians had fairly egalitarian forms of decision-making in the
winter months and highly disciplining police during the
summer months, when they hunted buffalo—both forms
of social organization more starkly evinced some ways of
Porous social orders
interacting that are always present in Crow understandings
of how social relations function. Recently, many ethnographers have been seeing such tensions as traces of how people accommodate social orders introduced through colonialism, missionizing, and development projects.
When an ethnographer encounters multiple social orders, and one order has been introduced in recent memory,
the ethnographer often questions how and when the relatively new social order is interwoven with the other frames
available for ordering relationships. For instance, mourning is a moment when Auhelawa Massim people in Papua
New Guinea explore what social relationships are encouraged by Christianity as opposed to kastom, which “is a way
in which people talk about the institutions, rules, and values of a local village community with respect to its difference from foreign ideas and values introduced since the
colonial period” (Schram 2018, 223). Christianity is not external to their logic—by the time Ryan Schram (2018) was
doing fieldwork in the mid-2000s, Christianity was so thoroughly intermeshed with other ways of being Auhelawa that
the Christian path was always an option. As a group, they
view themselves as consciously choosing between Christianity and kastom in how they organize their funerals, although the actual practices of mourning may be more of
a mixture than participants openly acknowledge (Schram
2018, 175). Part of what gives mourning rituals meaning is
this element of choice—to either highlight a collective historical past through a kastom burial or to express an orientation to individuation and a different set of exchange relations through a Christian burial.
Christianity and kastom are distinct types of ritual order in which Auhelawa explore alternative forms of social order and alternative ways of being social. In juxtaposing exchange and sharing as choices in planning ritual
feasts, Auhelawa people imagine themselves as alternately
kin or congregation, and the person as dividual or individual. Within the kastom social order, people explore being
dividuals—nodes of social relationships, some of which are
foregrounded in any exchange—while under the Christian
one, people “imagine themselves as individuals” (Schram
2018, 182). While dividual and individual persons are coconstitutive, they are not equivalent. Auhelawa face a problem when choosing the Christian path because so much
of mourning like a Christian is defined as not kastom, as
“the negation of their being kin,” so in practice it is difficult to show that one is in fact mourning appropriately. This
is an intriguing problem for people on the ground, a problem that can arise when people try to create the correct distinction between social orders—how does one know that
one has established the distinction effectively enough to be
meaningful, productive, and intelligible?
The nature of the distinction between social orders has
led to a debate in the anthropology of Christianity that easily spills out into other arenas when multiple social orders
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are at stake—should scholars view a new juxtaposition of
social orders as one of hybridity or oscillation (Vilaça 2016)?
In a situation in which multiple social orders comprise a hybrid situation, the orders may be kept separate by people
on the ground, the boundaries clearly demarcating distinct
forms of selfhood and sociality—a take on social orders that
Aparecida Vilaça ascribes to Joel Robbins (2015), among
others. Oscillation, by contrast, exists only in a context of
“systematic interconnections” (Vilaça 2016, 13) in which
people consciously interweave the forms of moral orders
available to them, alternating between which one is foregrounded in a context that is often spatially defined. As a
discussion of Christianity, this easily becomes a question of
what kind of cultural transformation is generated by largescale conversion. But transposed to an issue of social orders
in general, the question of the relationships between social
orders—encompassing, distinct, or alternating—turns into
a question about the nature of the boundaries between social orders. When it is a general question of how boundaries
are used to make distinctions, this is a question best answered ethnographically, case by case.
Using the language of boundaries, however, could lead
analysts to misrepresent people’s experiences of moving between different social orders. Sometimes the social orders
exist simultaneously for people, and the social labor involves making one social order dominate while others rescind into the background.5 This occurred often in my own
research on Samoan diasporic ritual exchanges in the late
1990s, as Samoan families exchanged money, cloth, fine
mats, and food during a wedding or funeral in a church
built soon after Samoan families began to migrate to New
Zealand or the United States in the 1950s (Gershon 2012). In
the church hall, for example, there would be a soda vending machine that might be the source of the soda can that
would substitute for a coconut during the ritual exchange.
The traces of capitalist exchanges and colonial historical
trajectories were present throughout the ceremony in the
clothes people wore, the vehicles they used to get to the
church, the food they served, and the objects (aside from
fine mats) they exchanged. While some of these traces were
very much on participants’ minds—such as the dollar bills
that were part and parcel of the exchange—this was still
very much a Samoan ritual.
What people said, how they interacted, how they interpreted the exchanges, and what they ignored during these
exchanges all called forth a Samoan social order. Hybridity
was not the goal. In a given context, there may be indices of
other cultural contexts, times, and places, but the social task
at hand is to ensure that those participating are oriented toward letting one specific social order dominate. Other ways
of interacting most likely have contributed to forming the
moment at hand, but do not define it.
Scholars who emphasize time and space might explore different conundrums involving how people navigate
5
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multiple social orders, largely having to do with how the
nature of time and space enables spatiotemporal orders to
overlap or clash. One common thread that scholars explore
is how people manage to be in one location with multiple
spatial orderings. By focusing on spatial multiplicity, analysts can turn to how the as-if and the otherwise also affect
interactions, for example when illegal migrants engage in
daily activities as if they were legally in the United States,
yet always conscious of performing a legitimacy they lack
(Yngvesson and Coutin, forthcoming). There is more of an
emphasis in these ethnographic accounts on how social orders let people not only repeat previous practices but also
reimagine them. As Keith Basso (1996, 6) puts it, “Building
and sharing place worlds . . . is not only a means of reviving
former times but also of revising them, a means of exploring
not merely how things might have been but also how, just
possibly they might have been different from what others
have supposed.”
In these instances, multiplicity functions as potentiality. People on the Greek-Albanian border engage with multiple logics that define the spaces they dwell in, as Sarah
Green (forthcoming) demonstrates. The residual layers of
the Ottoman Empire’s spatial ordering shape how they understand moving through that landscape as much as the recent national borders do. At any moment, those living on
this border might see the land as part of their families’ long
history with the places, as belonging to two distinct nationstates, and as the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, whose
relationships to territory were so different from those of the
modern nation-state. In a given context, the question people living on this border face is which form of ordering will
dominate: Who will have the power to make one location,
or a specific configuration of locations, determine how social interactions unfold in a given moment? For many who
oppose nation-state representatives, multiplicity is the goal.
Thus resistance might involve maintaining alternative spatial orderings for as long as possible.
Many contemporary efforts to define a spatial or temporal frame for others are justified by calls for standardization, and thus a dominant theme for analysts has become
how standardization occurs and spreads (Star and Lampland 2009). For example, Nepali development projects function in part by producing a generic notion of the Nepali
village, as Stacy Pigg (1992) argues. While most of Nepal is
rural, the village as a portable spatial form did not exist until various development projects began to mobilize it as a
concept through policies, media outlets, and educational
material.
The Nepali village was an especially useful construct
for development discourse, since it posited a site where
progress could take place, as well as a site where national
identity could be imagined. To formulate policy, development projects required a standardized village and a generic
villager, even though people’s actual experiences of village
6
life were quite varied and villages themselves were formed
from complex historical trajectories (Pigg 1992, 504–5). In
short, development workers required a standardized relationship to a generic place populated by typifiable people
in order to fashion what they considered the proper teleological orientation to a modernizing future. Development
workers found standardization good to think with as a way
to lay the groundwork for creating the social changes they
were committed to. Here and elsewhere, standardization is
an attempt to undercut the potential as-ifs inherent in coexisting multiple spatial orders while trying to create a more
homogenized future.
Everyone is a social analyst
While contemporary ethnographers may disagree about
what precisely constitutes a social order, there is a general commitment to engaging with one’s interlocutors
in the field as social analysts in their own right, interlocutors whose reflexive social analysis is integral to how
they both enact and traverse social orders. Unlike many previous theorists of culture or society, contemporary ethnographers take reflexivity to be crucial as people manage (and
mismanage) boundaries. Thus reflexivity, however named,
is also a shared analytical focus when ethnographers interrogate how porous social orders are constituted. Ethnographers of multiple social orders level the playing field between their interlocutors and themselves, thus responding
to critiques of previous claims to ethnographic authority
and current critiques of ontological perspectivism (Bessire
and Bond 2014; Killick 2014). By definition, fieldwork demands that ethnographers engage with multiple cultural
repertoires simultaneously. Yet in depicting their interlocutors as having a culture or, more recently, an ontology,
anthropologists often render invisible the indications that
their interlocutors are as versatile as they are at switching
frames of reference. The question of how people engage
with radically different assumptions at the same time would
and still does haunt fieldwork. Yet this question can vanish when anthropologists write about their fieldwork and
describe their own versatility while overlooking their interlocutors’ (Bowman 1997; Sperber 1985, 62–63).
Increasingly, ethnographers reject their privileged authorial position—people on the ground are social analysts
in their own right, and their perspective on multiple social orders and their techniques for traversing them should
be valued. How fieldwork interlocutors classify and understand different social orders is crucial for how social relationships in given circumstances will unfold. While the classification may be crucial, it is not determinative. When one
is doing social analysis on the fly, so to speak, how one
understands a situation might shape one’s actions and reactions, but it does not define how the situation will unfold. Ethnographers may be able to understand how people
Porous social orders
classify these contrasting social orders and the differences
produced by them, but such understanding is insufficient
for predicting what anyone is likely to do.
Focusing on interlocutors’ social analysis provides a
certain vantage point for analyzing the often strenuous
work people perform to keep the social orders distinct. Yet
this work does not take place from an external point of reflection outside a social order. Social orders are partly distinguished by many people’s epistemological assumptions,
social organization, and strategies, which are specific to
that particular social order. When viewed in terms of interlocutors’ social analysis, this means that the analysis,
and the reflexive awareness inherent to it, is in dialogue
with how the social orders structure knowledge (Gershon
2006).
The discrepancies between fieldwork interlocutors’ social analysis and the ethnographer’s analysis can be productive, showing that, while reflexivity is a general mode
of being social, it is not necessarily experienced in the
same way across social orders. One of the ways that people engage with and move across multiple social orders
is through strategic forgetting or not knowing, sometimes
overlooking the people or objects that are traversing orders.
Ethnographers will trace when and how people or objects
are overlooked, using to analytical advantage the difference between their reflexive gaze and that of their fieldwork
interlocutors.
For example, Nigerians of different religions either ignore or pay attention to particular sounds as they move
through urban spaces. This allows Christians and Muslims
to live together in a city that has become especially cacophonous thanks to loudspeakers proclaiming religious
views and openly demanding that others switch religions
(Larkin 2014). City dwellers understand the noise emanating from loudspeakers as background noise that they
agree to ignore, which Brian Larkin found more difficult
to do during fieldwork. Yet those around him overlooked
with ease any religious practitioner’s attempts to convert
them using a loudspeaker. Not all media that traverse social orders are treated with the same equanimity: when a
Christian group switched medium and distributed religious
pamphlets written in Arabic, violence broke out. Nigerians
viewed both loudspeakers and pamphlets as broadcast media, but while they viewed loudspeakers as indiscriminately
addressing everyone, they thought pamphlets should address only those who share the author’s faith and should not
be used to convert people. This example illustrates that not
all circulation is noticed: loudspeakers can be ignored, but
pamphlets in certain languages are not. By using strategic
inattention to the same forms of address, albeit in different
media, different religious groups could coexist and treat the
boundaries between the religious orders as not so permeable. These were media ideologies that Larkin did not share
and thus investigated.
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Alternatively, to maintain the boundaries, people
sometimes must actively not know different aspects in different social orders. In Samoan ritual exchange, one must
overlook all the learning that takes place before one can inhabit a role, yet when the same Samoan migrants engage
in capitalist exchanges, they must ignore the labor that goes
into producing commodities (Gershon 2012). Role fetishism
is one form of reflexive engagement, commodity fetishism
another. While people’s analyses of social orders are central to how these social orders are both fashioned and distinguished from each other, the reflexivity involved can be
specific to that social order, which can be unpacked by
comparing whether what is known or ignored, related or not
related (Strathern 2018), remembered or forgotten, occurs
differently across social orders.6
Circulation
What kind of analysis emerges when ethnographers are
interested in ethnographic moments when circulation is
occurring across social orders that are constituted by how
participants understand and enact these orders? Here,
the dilemmas of coordination, translation, encounter, and
standardization tend to take center stage. At the heart
of these concerns is a series of questions. How does one
translate objects, ideas, and subject positions from one type
of social order to another (Gal 2015)? To what extent can
meaning stay stable as objects and people travel through
these orders, and what labor goes into maintaining stable
meaning or translatable elements? How does coordination
across social orders occur when the stability of meaning
is radically up for grabs? What effects do efforts toward
standardization have on circulation through multiple social
orders?
Circulation always involves complex forms of coordination, encouraging people on the ground to engage explicitly with how value and meaning are attributed under
different social orders. For example, when Minnesotan and
Malagasy Lutherans organize the flow of humanitarian
medical aid between the United States and Madagascar,
they must also coordinate how objects travel across different ways of attributing value, as Britt Halvorson (2018)
shows. The circulation of medical material transforms expired medical products or used equipment, which US insurance corporations consider medical waste, into useful supplies in Africa.
The situation offers a new twist on a concern that Arjun
Appadurai (1986) raised in The Social Life of Things, namely
how people coordinate the circulation of objects in and out
of different regimes of value. People are not only coordinating different ways of ascribing use and exchange value to
objects, but also viewing their exchange practices through
ethical or sacred frameworks. The ethnographer’s task is to
understand
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Volume 00 Number 0 xxxx 2019
not only how capitalist, ethical, and sacred values coexist in the aid warehouses but also how, through situated moments of social recognition, they reverberate
in people’s labor activities, sometimes harmonizing together and other times creating discord through their
differences. (Halvorson 2018, 103)
Much of the labor of ascribing different values to objects occurs through sorting, through different volunteers’
classifications and reclassifications of medical waste into
potentially useful supplies or junk (for an account of how
value is produced as new actors sort anew previously classified objects, see Tsing 2013). As they classify, volunteers
anticipate others’ perspectives and practices, often those of
people in Madagascar whom they will never meet. They are
thus creating the boundaries between social orders through
the practicalities of classification, which can create humanitarian aid out of risky products (so risky that they are uninsurable in the United States). Yet once these supplies reach
Madagascar, a new way of determining value dominates,
and the items are often not viewed as useful supplies but
as desirable symbols of sustained global interactions. To
achieve these complex transfers through multiple and occasionally conflicting value regimes, participants have to perform well-calibrated acts of simultaneous recognition and
forgetting so that objects can move across social orders. In
this case, in the United States, they must ignore the risk inherent in turning medical discards into aid. In Madagascar
they must also ignore the loss of symbolic capital in being
forced to accept another’s waste, and they do this by focusing on the links to global commerce that the exchanges
create.
Halvorson (2018) never uses the term boundary object,
but in her multisited ethnography, medical waste in fact
functions as such—as objects that have interpretive flexibility, creating “a sort of arrangement that allow[s] different groups to work together without consensus” (Star 2010,
602). For some, personal objects that are no longer needed,
such as eyeglasses that worked only for their younger self’s
eyes, constitute medical waste. For others, they are an insurance risk or objects to be sorted for their potential usefulness in Africa, or signs of an enduring international relationship. Part of why eyeglasses can travel from Minnesota
to Madagascar is precisely because they are boundary objects; there is enough commonality of practice and purpose that all the groups involved in circulating this form
of humanitarian aid can “work together without consensus” (Star 2010, 602). Boundary objects become significant
when scholars track objects as they move across boundaries
in ways that can still be viewed as appropriate by groups
who do not share a common perspective or who disagree
on meanings and value.
8
Sometimes, those involved in circulating objects are
less concerned with making sure that the objects circulate
than with ensuring that their meaning stays stable as they
circulate. Everyone involved in the Swedish criminal justice
system works to ensure that forensic evidence can travel
from crime scene to lab and from lab to court, and that it
retains throughout the appropriate indexes despite traveling through such different orders, as Corinna Kruse (n.d.)
traces. Most participants involved are very conscious that it
is difficult to move objects labeled Evidence from one context to another in a stable enough fashion that they function
effectively as evidence, although not all of them attribute
this difficulty to the difference in epistemic orders between
lab and court.
Forensic technicians have to remove objects from
crime scenes in such a way that they can be treated as evidence to be analyzed in a laboratory. Yet they then have
to turn this evidence into descriptions in reports that they
present in court—and do so in such a way that they are easily interpellated as expert witnesses. At every stage, those involved are quite conscious of the work that goes into keeping traces of crimes stable enough that they can function as
evidence.
Circulation is often also anticipatory—people or objects can be valued for how they seem to mix social orders,
allowing the person or object to travel in different directions. Yet how precisely this mixture should be embodied
will change as the travel takes place. Tongan beauty pageant
contestants, for example, are expected to perform certain
mixtures of modern and traditional Tongan orders, mixtures that are valued differently as the women move from
local contests to regional ones, according to Niko Besnier
(2011). In local pageants, the competitors must walk a fine
line between being modest and culturally knowledgeable,
on the one hand, and seeming poised and fluent in Western status markers onstage on the other: “The contestants
are required to be Tongans in and of the world, but still Tongans” (Besnier 2011, 130). Their performances must simultaneously signal two social orders that Tongans experience
as distinct, but they must be mixed in the right ways. Yet
when the winner enters the regional contests, judges and
audiences can no longer evaluate her cultural expertise effectively; they become far more concerned with “cosmopolitan svelteness” (15). In these moments, the women are
judged by how they might succeed by the standards of the
global stage, and they are required to embody a different
combination of traditional and modern markers. The challenge of multiple social orders, in short, does not function
as the same kind of challenge for every endeavor.
Ritual
When scholars focus on social orders, ritual becomes relevant as an ethnographic site through which people on the
Porous social orders
ground create temporarily distinct social orders. A classic
topic in anthropology looks different when ethnographers
view rituals as “organized in their own right” (Handelman
2004, 4) and “microdomains of organization” (11). Rituals
are analyzed as moments when participants join to create a temporally bounded order that is distinct from the
surrounding social orders and that generates within itself
a self-referential form of organization. The emphasis here
is not on the implicit interconnections between ritual and
other social orders or how a liminal social order contributes
to a larger totality, as it is for Arnold Van Gennep (1960)
or Victor Turner (1969). Instead, this analytic encourages
ethnographers to view rituals as moments when their
fieldwork interlocutors are experimenting with creating sui
generis social orders. Not all rituals are equally distinct from
their surroundings; the more internally complex the ritual,
the more it can be self-referentially distinct as a form of
order (12).
Ritual, however, does not remain distinct—it is, after
all, a bounded moment of separation, and participants will
return to other social orders once the ritual has ended. All
social orders are historically contingent, but ritual is experienced as particularly temporary. Sometimes, when a ritual
ends, it has affected the surrounding social orders—its participants have changed status or shifted their reflexive perspective on how a particular social order is constituted. But
the ritual need not always have this effect. A ritual will selforganize by
curving towards self-closure, to some degree of selforganization, however momentary, however transient,
separating itself from the social field, existing in its
own right, then ending, twisting back, torqueing into
broader social fields, dissipating, its character influencing encounters to come. (Handelman 2004, 13)
Unlike those who use other anthropological approaches, scholars of multiple social orders view ritual not
primarily as a symbolically charged space in which to reflect on larger social structures, but as a moment in which
to play with boundary making and to form autopoietically
organized interactions. For example, in South Africa, Zulu
men use the autopoietic qualities of ritual to carve out a
powerful warrior masculinity during the ngoma dance ritual, in sharp contrast with the subdued masculinity of the
miner or the black man walking down a city street (Meintjes 2017). Here, people use ritual to create social bonds and
masculinities that travel only imperfectly and haltingly outside the moments of the dance. Through the dance, men
form bonds with each other that make possible an alternative expression of gendered bodies, an expression of masculinity that is never openly discussed by Louisa Meintjes’s
interlocutors. What the body performs in this dance calls
forth other futures from what these men experience in their
American Ethnologist
daily lives. At the same time, the fact that the ritual comes
to an end affirms the temporariness of the social order that
the dance creates and brings into stark relief the challenge
of bringing the possibility inherent in one’s ritual masculinity into other contexts. Studying ritual thus reveals both the
tactics and potential in fashioning separate social orders,
and the dilemmas people face when hoping that some aspects of a recently created social order will travel.
Scale
Studying ritual reveals how people on the ground produce
social orders that can be temporary and separate, while focusing on scale reveals how people on the ground contrast
and interweave social orders. Just as boundaries and social orders are not a given, neither is scale. It is “the actor’s
own achievement” (Latour 2007, 185), accomplished by referencing contrasting spatiotemporal orders. “Scaled hierarchies are the effects of efforts to sort, group, and categorize
many things, people, and qualities in terms of relative degrees of elevation or centrality” (Carr and Lempert 2016, 3).
People produce scale to showcase locatable and hierarchical relationships among people, objects, and social unities.
Social orders, however, shape the kinds of scale-making
projects that people can attempt, and at times they will consciously turn to specific social orders for the scale making
that they make possible. After all, not every social order permits expansive scale-making projects; some social orders
support primarily local scale making, while others sustain
interactions that can travel far and wide. Social orders make
possible certain kinds of scale-making projects, and focusing on them quickly becomes a lens through which to view
how power is expressed. Claims to universality are all too
often one social order’s attempt at creating a far-reaching
and infinitely reproducible scale-making project (Pigg 1992;
Tsing 2005).
In the contemporary moment, these differences in
scale-making projects can underlie how people experience
inequalities. In a hospital in Papua New Guinea, the lack
of resources means that doctors, nurses, and patients must
work with many uncertainties, as Alice Street (2014) documents. A biomedical framework was but one of the ordering repertoires that people were using to understand how to
give and receive care. The boundaries between social orders
are often especially uncertain, and in the hospital, people
could not always establish clear boundaries between village
forms and biomedical forms of ordering relations.
Yet clear and bounded social orders emerge between
internationally trained medical researchers who use the
Papua New Guinean hospital as a research site and hospital
health workers, such as doctors, nurses, and lab technicians. Researchers had access to dramatically different
resources from the hospital workers, such as international
travel and well-functioning labs. This distinction does
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not easily lend itself to being labeled intercultural. Nevertheless, the differences were stark enough that “from the
perspective of hospital workers, research and public health
are two different ‘places’ in Madang Hospital, with different
infrastructures and different spatiotemporal capacities
built into them” (Street 2014, 219). For example, in practice, doctors in the Madang hospital saw their patients as
ordered on a “single spectrum of sick” (111) instead of suffering from different types of diseases. As a result, doctors
often treated patients with remedies they had available
rather than with those based on a test-based diagnosis.
This was in part because the hospital workers’ labs were in
such demand and diagnostic equipment was so faulty that
it was difficult to get a timely diagnosis.
The patients functioned differently for the researchers,
who not only lacked relationships of care with these people but also had access to infrastructures such as labs and
scientific literature. These infrastructures brought the specimens that represented these patients into a more globally
transportable classificatory schema. In essence, for hospital
workers and patients, the hospital represented one kind of
“truth-spot” (Gieryn 2018), a place that supports claims to a
form of truth, but a truth-spot that was constructed differently for patients and their care-givers than for researchers.
This divergence hinges in part on the different access actors
had to differently scaled infrastructures, some of which had
more global reach than others.
Power
If focusing on multiple social orders only allowed ethnographers to address circulation, ritual, and scale in new ways,
this focus might not be so widespread. The analytical force
lies in what ethnographers can learn about power by focusing on porous social orders and reflexivity. To address how
people experience and enact power relationships in a given
social order, scholars often focus on the contestation over
which version of social order gets to dominate in a particular context. Not everyone in a given situation has equal authority or ability to determine the social order or classifications that will shape how relationships and interactions unfold in a particular situation. This is a well-documented dynamic in, for example, bureaucracies, border crossing, and
resettlement camps.
Yet as ethnographers have noticed time and time again,
disadvantaged people can refuse the social order imposed
on them and insist on alternatives, even in interactions with
representatives of the state. When Mohawk cross national
borders, for example, they insist on their own definitions
of indigeneity and sovereignty as members of an Iroquois
Confederacy that preexisted both Canada and the United
States as nations, as traced by Audra Simpson (2014). Most
other accounts of border crossings describe moments when
the crossers are forced to inhabit multiple identities as they
10
encounter different classifications embedded in the social
orders they move in and out of. Mohawk travelers have a
different experience, because they are “reserve members or
Iroquois before they cross, they are especially Iroquois as
they cross, and they are Iroquois when they arrive at the
place they want to be” (Simpson 2014, 116–17). Being Iroquois is a historically rich way of organizing political and
family relationships in these moments, a way that for Mohawk travelers stays stable throughout. They repeatedly insist that they are members of a sovereign nation that is not
recognized by the customs officials or even by all the states’
bureaucrats who decide whether they can cross national
borders.
In these instances, the state defines what counts as a
nation and as sovereignty, and how that shapes the ways
that people can move. Mohawk understand the social order that is imposed on them; this is not a moment of miscommunication through misunderstanding. Mohawk travelers can and do refuse the imposition, insisting on their
historical connections to the Jay Treaty of 1794, which guarantees their rights as Iroquois to legitimize the social orders
that they wish would dominate.
In other contexts, people cannot create the assemblages that typically produce desired forms of order because of historical changes to infrastructure or classificatory schemas. In the decades before Laura Bear’s (2015) research on the effects of sovereign debt on a South Asian river
port, ship pilots could coordinate the temporal demands
of the river with the capitalist demands to produce profit,
creating social hierarchies of skill and expertise that coordinated “divergent rhythms and temporal representations” (Bear 2015, 149) with relative success. In contrast, under austerity capitalism, it became increasingly impossible
for people with different perspectives and forms of symbolic capital to coordinate enough so that they could move a
ship from port to sea. In these and similar moments, power
is experienced as unraveling or outright blocking others’ attempts to create a temporary and efficacious social order.
When these failures occur in contexts in which these assemblages had once been successful, people on the ground will
often view these failures as evidence of historical change.
Conclusion: New questions and new foci
When contemporary ethnographers assume that multiple
social orders exist, they do not engage in a typological
project whose goal is to describe each distinct social order.
Rather, ethnographers of porous social orders seek to understand how people on the ground deal with multiplicity,
how they labor to ensure the coexistence of multiple social orders, and manage the boundaries between them, and
how they foreground and background social orders at different moments and for different purposes.
Porous social orders
In addition, ethnographers emphasize how people, objects, forms, and ideas circulate. By highlighting when permeable and contingent boundaries and circulation matter
in social life, theorists avoid treating social orders as totalizing or object-like. This emphasis, however, opens the door
to potential disagreement among scholars in this vein on
how orderly these social orders truly are. The scholars I have
cited analyze social orders as having varying degrees of institutional fixity, and thus their ethnographic encounters or
theoretical inclinations might lead them to argue for differing intensities of patterned and interwoven repertoires.
Given these starting points, there are in any situation a number of ethnographic quandaries to figure out.
In the most abstract terms, ethnographers explore what
kinds of connections exist between these social orders and
how boundaries between them are produced. This is often a question in which the historical background to a social order matters—is the relationship between social orders a product of colonialism, missionization, development
projects, or the spread of democracy and lawcraft? If so,
then ethnographers often start trying to understand the
connections between the preexisting and introduced social
orders. This can lead to debates in which the underlying
disagreement revolves around determining the type of relationship that underlies how social orders interact with each
other. The debates can sometimes be framed as “Do people oscillate between social orders, or does the logic of one
social order increasingly dominate, infiltrating other social
orders?” Admittedly, I am far more interested in what gets
revealed as people on the ground engage with and move
among social orders—for example, how different social orders give rise to different timescapes or different scalemaking projects, and how people are reflexively engaged
with the consequences of these juxtapositions.
This conceptual lens encourages ethnographers to explore how different social orders intersect in a particular
site, instead of focusing only on one site. If an ethnographer is studying religion in northern Nigeria, for example,
the focus should be not only on the evangelical Christian
churches and their congregants, but also on how the forms
and practices of Nigerian evangelical Christianity dwell side
by side with Muslim worship (Larkin 2014). If the focus is
on exchange relationships, then one asks, How do objects
and people circulate between different exchange systems,
and what must one know and do to perform such crossings
(e.g., Akin and Robbins 1999)? If one is studying legal pluralism: How do people engage with different legal systems, and
how does the presence of alternative legal systems shape
how courts act (Agrama 2012)? That is, ethnographers are
encouraged to focus on the interactions between social orders instead of delineating the workings of a single one.
In addition, when ethnographers explore how the
boundaries between social orders are produced, they must
turn to questions of power and morality: Who and what
American Ethnologist
produces and maintains these distinctions? How do people decide which social order will dominate in a context,
and how is that ensured? What is the right way to go
about this? When scholars turn their attention to appropriately porous boundaries, what is appropriate for whom,
and when? How do people, objects, forms, and ideas cross
these social boundaries, and with what consequences? Is
there conflict surrounding how boundaries are supposed to
be maintained or to leak, and how does this conflict play
out? Here, ethnographers need to tackle questions of translation, contact zones, and encounters—the moments when
the crossing or clashing is enacted. They also have to deal
with boundary objects (Star 2010) or strategically deployed
shifters (Urciuoli 2003)—when asking what stays stable and
what is transformed as people, objects, forms, and ideas circulate across these social orders.
By beginning with porous boundaries and multiple
social orders, ethnographers address anew difference and
reflexivity, organization and uncertainty, circulation and
power. They explore how social orders and their boundaries
require constant maintenance and repair so that circulation can take place in the ways people on the ground find
most preferable. At the same time, there is always an element of surprise. People do not always realize that a boundary is leaky in the right way, until suddenly their attempts
at circulation fail and they learn that there has been a shift
in how differences between social orders were being constituted. Or people discover that introducing a new social
order alters in unpredictable ways how all the other more
established social orders constitute themselves and their
distinctions.
And yet . . . porous boundaries has been a handy
phrase to capture distinctions between social orders, but
it is not without its conceptual limitations. Would ethnographers start asking a slightly different set of questions
if the metaphor weren’t boundaries but rather ecotones—
those borderlands in which two ecological zones coexist in
the same place? Perhaps that substitution would lead to a
greater focus on the differences that make a difference between social orders, for, as Don Brenneis (2017, 370) reminds readers,
Sometimes such ecotones are characterized by mixed
assemblages—a bit of this, a bit of that—but they
are also known among academic ecologists as zones
in which more than the usual number of ideal types
emerge; difference is most clearly marked not in the
center but along the edges.
If ecotones were a starting point, then ethnographers
might be more prone to see if the explicit contrasts between
social orders lead people to draw more clearly and carefully
delineated distinctions, while moving toward the implicit
lets more of a mixture to suffuse through all interactions.
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Volume 00 Number 0 xxxx 2019
Ecotones instead of boundaries might lead to more questions about contrasts than about circulation, just as social
zones instead of social orders might encourage a focus on
overlaps instead of sieving.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This article has been discussed and circulated widely before publication, and it has been much improved as
a result. I owe much to comments and readings by Mark Anderson,
Debbora Battaglia, Richard Bauman, Don Brenneis, Matei Candea, Melissa Demian, David Graeber, Sarah Green, Britt Halvorson,
Elina Hartikainen, Laura Kunreuther, Brian Larkin, Susan Lepselter, Nidhi Mahajan, Yasmine Musharbash, Sarah Osterhoudt, Joel
Robbins, Janet Roitman, Jen Roth-Gordon, Ryan Schram, Rupert
Stasch, Marilyn Strathern, and Jerry Yee. I received helpful feedback from audiences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and
the University of Helsinki, as well as from anonymous reviewers. In
the final stages, when I needed help translating my intuitions into
a clearer argument on the page, Niko Besnier and Jessica Greenberg offered invaluable advice, and Pablo Morales made me less
cryptic. All missteps and infelicitous phrasings are mine and mine
alone.
1. I was inspired to write this article after reading critiques of ontological perspectivism, or the ontological turn, that were phrased
in similar ways. According to critics of this turn, people are surrounded by multiple social orders that they continually traverse.
Lucas Bessire and David Bond find more compelling a world of “unstable and rotational temporalities, of epistemic and material ruptures, of categories and things unraveling and being reassembled”
(Bessire and Bond 2014, 450). Also rejecting the ontological turn,
Radhika Govindrajan (2018, 13) commits herself to a world that “is
‘composed’ at the juncture of multiple worlds that are constituted
by the daily practices of a heterogeneous range of actors and that
is subject to the constraints of time and space.” After reading these
evocative but brief descriptions, I realized that it would be useful to
more systematically explore an approach that presumes multiple
worlds.
2. I am strongly influenced by Susan Leigh Star’s (2010) discussion of boundary objects, in which she describes them as sufficiently underdetermined to circulate with ease between different
communities.
3. There are so many ethnographers whose work I could mention here that I choose to focus predominantly on work by junior
scholars and scholars working outside anthropological metropoles.
4. Turning to spatiotemporal orders does not obviate an interest
in difference and organization, and there are scholars who attend
both to timescapes and epistemological difference (although often
in separate publications).
5. For people familiar with Melanesian notions of personhood
and relationality, I am describing an analogous engagement with
social orders. Just as in a moment of exchange, Melanesian social
actors are choosing to foreground one relationship or one way of
being related while letting others fade into the background (but
not vanish entirely); so it is also with social orders. Actors will foreground some social orders while the traces of other social orders
remain present but retreat into the surroundings.
6. While ethnographers of multiple social orders know that
those they write about are social analysts in their own right, it
is also the case that social analysts of context tend to experience time and strategy differently from social analysts in context
(Gershon 2009).
12
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Ilana Gershon
Department of Anthropology
Indiana University
701 East Kirkwood Avenue
Bloomington, IN 47405
igershon@indiana.edu
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Ilana Gershon