1,720,979 research outputs found
Magic, an appreciation
No full textResponse to comments on Jones, Graham M. 2017. Magic’s reason: An anthropology of analogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters: Gender, Secrecy, and Fraternity in Italian Masonic Lodges by Lilith Mahmud.
Full text linkProfound paradoxes motivate Lilith Mahmud’s singular ethnography of Italian Freemason women: although the Enlightenment’s core democratic values of liberty, equality, and fraternity in many ways originated within Euro-American Freemasonry, most Italians suspect present-day Freemasons of involvement in nefarious antidemocratic conspiracies. Moreover, Freemasons’ marginalization of women betrays how deep-rooted exclusivity compromises their guiding principle of universal
brotherhood. It is among the social networks of women who nevertheless gravitate to Freemasonry’s official auxiliary societies and to mixed-gender or women-only lodges not sanctioned by Freemasonry’s paramount governing body that Mahmud conducts a form of ethnography she terms “profane”—mostly (but not always) outside sacred ritual spaces. In describing how these women style themselves as “brothers” and aspire to enact fraternity as a genderless value, Mahmud casts light on the broader tradition of European liberal humanism and its limitations
In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language - By Arika Okrent
No full textWhile it is not a scholarly work, Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages recommends itself to linguistic anthropologists on a variety of counts. An intellectual picaresque describing the author’s historical and ethnographic forays into the imaginative worlds of language inventors and their followers, it offers engaging examination of shifting motivations behind the production and promotion of constructed languages (conlangs). It could be used alongside similarly accessible trade books in teaching introductory language and culture type courses. In this context, Okrent, who has graduate training in psycholinguistics, presents an argument that largely complements the linguistic anthropological perspective. Students primed with key concepts will be able to draw pertinent theoretical connections
MAGIC WITH A MESSAGE: The Poetics of Christian Conjuring
No full textThis article examines the performance practices of U.S. gospel magicians, evangelical Christians who convey religious messages with conjuring tricks. Emphatically denying that they possess supernatural powers and scrupulously avoiding effects that resemble biblical miracles, they take pains to present their tricks as unambiguously skillful performances intended to entertain, uplift, and instruct. When patterned on a Christian motif, otherwise self-referential magic tricks constitute a versatile signifying medium. Addressing the poetics of gospel magic in the setting of instructional workshops, this analysis explores a variety of ways performers utilize iconic resemblances between conjuring effects and Christian referents to produce complex and evocative expressions of faith. At the same time, they carefully manage signifiers of virtuosic agency that are intrinsic to the efficacy of gospel magic performance, but that also threaten to undermine their Christian message.Fellowship of Christian Magician
Rites of the Republic: Citizens' Theater and the Politics of Culture in Southern France
No full textSpecificity of place and the emplacement of politics are key themes running through Mark Ingram’s ethnography of civic-minded theater in southern France. This multi-sited study juxtaposes the Theatre Rural d'Animation Culturelle (TRAC), an amateur troupe from the Vaucluse with a strong rural identity, and the Friche, professional theatrical artists who identify with the urban setting of cosmopolitan Marseille. Comparing these groups, Ingram develops a broader perspective both on the local mediation of a national politics of culture and on the shifting political significance of territoriality in the experience of place. Drawing on research spanning two decades, he is well positioned to address how these cultural producers creatively respond to a perceived crisis of post-colonial French identity and to processes of Europeanisation and globalization. The result is a widely accessible ethnography that will appeal to scholars of contemporary France both inside and outside the field of anthropology
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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