Projects

 1. The Motion of Culture

Throughout my career, I have been fascinated by the motion of culture — how and why it makes its way through space and time. As early as my late undergraduate and early graduate student days, I began thinking about social transmission processes, at that point coming up with what I regard today as a principle of cultural motion: that culture gets transmitted in proportion to the interaction time between people and the perceptible objects in which the culture is made inter-subjectively accessible — spoken sounds, behaviors, physical things. For example, the more we listen to a story, the better we understand it and the more likely we are to be able to transmit it to others in a form that resembles the story as we heard it. Similarly, the more a professional dancer works on a movement, the more likely they will be to accurately reproduce it.

My attempt to develop the mathematical side of this interest can be found in “A Method for Measuring the Motion of Culture.” My earlier book, Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World,” set the stage for this empirical work. Here is a paper dealing with replication processes: “Cultural Replication: The Source of Monological and Dialogical Models of Culture.” My most recent work (with Jessica N.K. Urban) has explored the role of affect: “Affect in the Circulation of Cultural Forms.” Most of my publications deal primarily with the qualitative analysis of cultural motion, with quantitative measures employed to augment the qualitative analysis.

During the 2022-23 academic year, however, I am immersed in a year-long research project, focused on systematizing the mathematical reasoning behind the study cultural motion. Though I am uncertain how feasible this will turn out to be, I refer to this phase of my work using the descriptor: “Mathematical Principles of Cultural Motion.”

2. Ethnographic Research on Business Corporations

In addition to continuing experimental work, my recent research has focused on the ethnography of modern business corporations (see the review article, “Ethnographic Research on Modern Business Corporations, co-authored with Kyung-Nan Koh). One synthesis of the corporations research has appeared under the title “Corporations in the Flow of Culture.” A little known publication that set the stage for this work is “‘No Carry-Over Parts’: Corporations and the Metaculture of Newness.” Another piece is “Symbolic Force: A Corporate Revitalization Video and Its Effects,” which draws on Victor Turner’s idea of the dominant symbol, but places corporate symbols in the context of cultural motion. A work that bridges my current research interests in corporations with that in citizenship and constitutions is the volume I edited entitled Corporations and Citizenship. I have two other related articles , “The Magic of Making Money” and “Corporate Compliance as Problem of Cultural Motion“, and a book chapter ranging broadly over ideas about corporate form: “Collective Economic Actors.” A recent piece is “Business,” published in the Third Edition of the Handbook of Economic Anthropology.”

3. Comparative Constitutional Discourse

Over many years, I have been accumulating interview data for a project on comparative constitutional discourses. The research involves studying the discourse (words, phrases, clauses, and higher level structures) in national constitutions, with a focus on circulation — how and why some fragments of discourse catch on and undergo replication in country after country. My article, “The Circulation of Secularism,” is an example of this work. Cultural motion ideas also inform two conceptual pieces, one on “Citizenship as a Mode of Belonging by Choice,” and the other on “Freedom and Culture.” I examine a single sentence and its global circulation and transformation in “A Sentence That Shaped the Modern World.” A recent piece in this series is “The Circulation of Constitutional Discourse.”

4. Discourse Circulation in Indigenous South America

The orientation to cultural motion, especially in the form of discourse circulation, can be seen in virtually all of my early research on South American Indigenous Languages and Cultures, including A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Myths and Rituals and Metaphysical Community: The Interplay of the Senses and the Intellect. Developed in the early research, and especially in the little-known article, “Repetition and Replication: Three Examples from Shokleng,” is the concept of replication, which has been central to my thinking about the motion of culture for as long as I can remember. It continues to be central to me today. I hope to return again to my field notes and to re-engage with the community around issues of linguistic change and language preservation.