Books by Justin Shaffner
Cosmopolitics: Collected Papers of the OAC, Volume I (2017)
Editors, Justin Shaffner and Huon War... more Cosmopolitics: Collected Papers of the OAC, Volume I (2017)
Editors, Justin Shaffner and Huon Wardle
Foreword by Keith Hart
1“Introduction: Cosmopolitics as a Way of Thinking,” by Huon Wardle and Justin Shaffner
2 "Cosmopolitics and Common Sense," by Huon Wardle
3 "What Did Kant Mean by and Why Did He Adopt a Cosmopolitan Point of View in History?," by Thomas Sturm
4 "Can the Thing Speak?," by Martin Holbraad
5 "Devouring Objects of Study Food and Fieldwork," by Sidney W. Mintz
6 "Cosmetic Cosmologies in Japan Notes Towards a Superficial Investigation," by Philip Swift
7 "Why do the gods look like that? Material Embodiments of Shifting Meanings," by John McCreery
8 "How Knowledge Grows An Anthropological Anamorphosis," by Alberto Corsín Jiménez
9 “An Amazonian Question of Ironies and the Grotesque,” by Joanna Overing
10 "Lance Armstrong: The Reality Show (A Cultural Analysis)," by Lee Drummond
11 "Ritual Murder?," by Jean La Fontaine
12 "An Extreme Reading of Facebook," by Daniel Miller
13 "Friendship, Anthropology," by Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco
Papers by Justin Shaffner
For each People to be a Light amongst the Nations. 1. We affirm with the God as our witness the r... more For each People to be a Light amongst the Nations. 1. We affirm with the God as our witness the right to self-determination for all Ancients as Ancients, as People thinking with each other as People[s] at the Center of the Universe. We take the Ancients to be each one of us-the African, the Indigenous, the Proletariat, the Worker, the Migrant, the Refugee, the Jew, the Terran-ordinary People everywhere. 2. We call for real diplomacy, one that dialogues with the stated aims of the Ancients in all their projects, one that thinks with and always sees both sides of any reciprocity of perspectives. 3. The Ancient is a subjective stance, a contemporary position and attitude, to think from the Center of the Universe, not as an objectifying category, nor as a mere game of demographic identification looking at history. The Ancients think and live in the here and now, and continue to speak as Ancients. 4. We believe that everyone can and must act as a Generic Diplomat, that to speak and act as an Ancient is to practice real diplomacy between the Peoples. 5. Strict adherence to secular forms of mediation, morality, and outrage has limited the possibilities for the composition of worlds, and failed to produce understanding and conviviality amongst the Nations. It is necessary to take seriously all possible agents of history and everything that motivates and composes the People. 6. Thinking-with others is not necessarily agreeing with them, or allowing them to commit evil or to lie. It is not a relativism in which anything is true, but the only possibility of coming to the truth through collective negotiation with others. 7. We critique the conflation of the People[s] solely with the United Nations of the World, with official representatives and institutions of the World[-System]. We call on all People[s] everywhere to be diplomats, to come together and compose themselves as the United Nations of Generic Ancients. 8. The United Nations of the World operates in the name of the World rather than the People. For the Moderns, the Nation is first and foremost a secular Statecomposed of individual citizens and interest groups-while for the Ancients, the Nation is first and foremost the unity of a People acting in their own name. 9. We affirm the Ancients' right to act as a unity, as a People and a Nation, to assemble, organize and act autonomously together, independently and outside of the authority of the World[-System], to freely address issues and obstacles, such as climate change, that threaten the integrity of the People to live and reproduce ourselves as People.
Anthropology for the Ecozoic, 2023
American Anthropologist , 2023
Roy Wagner, a visionary theorist of cultural meaning and creativity, died on September 10, 2018, ... more Roy Wagner, a visionary theorist of cultural meaning and creativity, died on September 10, 2018, at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was known for his work on kinship, ritual, and myth in Papua New Guinea and for his experiments in representing anthropological thought as a "reciprocity of perspectives" that helped to inspire the "ontological turn" as well as reverse, symmetrical, and cross anthropologies.
The Great Skills Gap, 2021
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Capacity building is a pervasive idea that has received little critical treatment from anthropolo... more Capacity building is a pervasive idea that has received little critical treatment from anthropology. In this introduction, we outline the growing use of the idea of 'capacity building' within and beyond development settings, and highlight mechanisms by which it gains footholds in both policy and practice. This special issue centres and questions its histories, assumptions, intentions and enactments in order to bring ethnographic attention to the promises it entails. By bringing together cases from different sectors and continents, the collection pursues capacity building's self-evident character, opening up what capacities themselves are thought to be. By not taking capacity building's promises for granted, the articles collected here have two aims: to interrogate the means of capacity building's ubiquity, and to develop critical purchase on its persuasive power.
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Capacity building is a pervasive idea that has received little critical treatment from anthropolo... more Capacity building is a pervasive idea that has received little critical treatment from anthropology. In this introduction, we outline the growing use of the idea of 'capacity building' within and beyond development settings, and highlight mechanisms by which it gains footholds in both policy and practice. This special issue centres and questions its histories, assumptions, intentions and enactments in order to bring ethnographic attention to the promises it entails. By bringing together cases from different sectors and continents, the collection pursues capacity building's self-evident character, opening up what capacities themselves are thought to be. By not taking capacity building's promises for granted, the articles collected here have two aims: to interrogate the means of capacity building's ubiquity, and to develop critical purchase on its persuasive power.
Capacity building is a pervasive idea that has received little critical treatment from anthropolo... more Capacity building is a pervasive idea that has received little critical treatment from anthropology. In this introduction, we outline the growing use of the idea of ‘capacity building’ within and beyond development settings, and highlight mechanisms by which it gains footholds in both policy and practice. This special issue centres and questions its histories, assumptions, intentions and enactments in order to bring ethnographic attention to the promises it entails. By bringing together cases from different sectors and continents, the collection pursues capacity building’s self-evident character, opening up what capacities themselves are thought to be. By not taking capacity building’s promises for granted, the articles collected here have two aims: to interrogate the means of capacity building’s ubiquity, and to develop critical purchase on its persuasive power.
From its launch in 2009, the Open Anthropology Cooperative (OAC) and its publications series were... more From its launch in 2009, the Open Anthropology Cooperative (OAC) and its publications series were shaped by what we can reasonably call cosmopolitical concerns. Weeks after its creation, the OAC gathered hundreds, then thousands, of visitors and members from every region of the world -everywhere there is a networked computer at least. A flurry of discussion immediately took place on the OAC forum around what to make of the fact that within a few months an unprecedented global assembly of anthropologists had sprung into being. The whole world of anthropology seemed to have arrived at one virtual site, and the question was what to do with this singularity. From this point of view, the numbers proved illusory -perhaps a disappointment -if the expectation was that, like Venus on her seashell, a new kind of global anthropological politics would also spring up out of the waves. Many people visited, read what was offered, and left comments -perhaps modeling their behaviour on how they used 1 HUON WARDLE AND JUSTIN SHAFFNER other social network sites -but, for most, the OAC was simply a launch pad to "go" somewhere else. (It is worth remembering that like other websites the OAC is only metaphorically "a place", but then it is not "just a place" either). The OAC had proved its global reach, sure enough, but this did not initiate any definable architecture of social change itself. Thus, arguably the OAC has not built on its initial promise of creating a globally articulated forum, and in that sense, the ideas fomented by this venue for openness and cooperation have been more a sign of the times than an expression of a realizable social future (Barone and Hart 2015).
Ilha Revista de Antropologia, 2010
In this paper I attempt to clarify what might count as 'ontology' in Melanesia, particularly in l... more In this paper I attempt to clarify what might count as 'ontology' in Melanesia, particularly in light of Michael Scott's recent critiques of the New Melanesian Ethnography (NME). I do so in relation to Melanesian concepts of the body, and in particular, to my own ethnography of Marind speakers of the southern lowlands of New Guinea. I claim that what the NME literature has in common is the attempt to obviate or displace the work that 'nature' and 'context' do in 'modern' anthropological knowledge practices, and in turn, replace it with something like a 'negative symbol'. In doing so, I argue that for Melanesia it is the body, whether human, animal, spirit, thing/gift or landscape, which operates as a kind of negative symbol.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2011
(2010). Edith Turner: A Lifetime of Encountering the Other. Poiesis: A Journal of Arts and Commun... more (2010). Edith Turner: A Lifetime of Encountering the Other. Poiesis: A Journal of Arts and Communication, (12), 50-57.
Drafts by Justin Shaffner
The Sky is falling and there are too few who recognize the importance of holding it up. We conten... more The Sky is falling and there are too few who recognize the importance of holding it up. We contend that many of the pressing problems of our times, including climate catastrophe and global inequality, are direct consequences of the cosmology of the Moderns. We argue that anthropology as a discipline should think with ordinary people everywhere and with the Universe at once. We propose the Sky-Earth System as a cosmology in which to think and live as Ancients, to suspend the impersonal World of the Moderns. The Sky-Earth System is a metaframe that replaces the Nature/Culture schema of the Moderns and puts the Human back at the Center of the Universe, ending the Copernican era as seen from within the history of the Moderns. It allows us to think generically, meaning to think with everyone anywhere and anywhen. We think-with revival movements of the Ancients that are taking place everywhere across the Sky-Earth System, practices of symmetric anthropology in the Upper Rio Negro of the Amazon, in the city of Manaus and in Brazil, the Village-as-University in Melanesia and the Boazi revival, Afro-Centric, Polytheist, Psychedelic, and other movements occurring in North America and elsewhere at the ends of the World.
One world, or many? Cosmopolitics has two current meanings. The first is Kant's: we all live in t... more One world, or many? Cosmopolitics has two current meanings. The first is Kant's: we all live in the same world and the aim of anthropology is to explore the politics of that fact starting with each human being’s particular knowledge of the world and their judgements about it. The second is newer, but echoes Leibniz: human worldviews are not detachable from the network of perspectives and agencies that help sustain them: humanity has no universal register: human lives exist as elements of ethnologically and ontologically diverse cosmoses-in-the-making: there can be no clear translation between these; only a politics of approximation and negotiation. The Open Anthropology Cooperative's first volume of collected papers sets about exploring this fundamental antinomy in contemporary anthropology drawing on a series of individual works originally published and discussed at its online site.
Cosmopolitics: Collected Papers of the OAC, Volume I
Editors, Justin Shaffner and Huon Wardle
1“Introduction: Cosmopolitics as a Way of Thinking,” by Huon Wardle and Justin Shaffner
2 "Cosmopolitics and Common Sense," by Huon Wardle
3 "What Did Kant Mean by and Why Did He Adopt a Cosmopolitan Point of View in History?," by Thomas Sturm
4 "Can the Thing Speak?," by Martin Holbraad
5 "Devouring Objects of Study Food and Fieldwork," by Sidney W. Mintz
6 "Cosmetic Cosmologies in Japan Notes Towards a Superficial Investigation," by Philip Swift
7 "Why do the gods look like that? Material Embodiments of Shifting Meanings," by John McCreery
8 "How Knowledge Grows An Anthropological Anamorphosis," by Alberto Corsín Jiménez
9 “An Amazonian Question of Ironies and the Grotesque,” by Joanna Overing
10 "Lance Armstrong: The Reality Show (A Cultural Analysis)," by Lee Drummond
11 "Ritual Murder?," by Jean La Fontaine
12 "An Extreme Reading of Facebook," by Daniel Miller
13 "Friendship, Anthropology," by Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco
This is a draft introduction to Cosmopolitics: Collected Papers of the Open Anthropology Cooperat... more This is a draft introduction to Cosmopolitics: Collected Papers of the Open Anthropology Cooperative Press, Volume I. The volume brings together work by Alberto Corsin Jimenez, Daniel Miller, Huon Wardle, Jean La Fontaine, Joanna Overing, John McCreery, Lee Drummond, Martin Holbraad, Paloma Gay y Blasco, Philip Swift, Sidney Mintz and Thomas Sturm
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Books by Justin Shaffner
Editors, Justin Shaffner and Huon Wardle
Foreword by Keith Hart
1“Introduction: Cosmopolitics as a Way of Thinking,” by Huon Wardle and Justin Shaffner
2 "Cosmopolitics and Common Sense," by Huon Wardle
3 "What Did Kant Mean by and Why Did He Adopt a Cosmopolitan Point of View in History?," by Thomas Sturm
4 "Can the Thing Speak?," by Martin Holbraad
5 "Devouring Objects of Study Food and Fieldwork," by Sidney W. Mintz
6 "Cosmetic Cosmologies in Japan Notes Towards a Superficial Investigation," by Philip Swift
7 "Why do the gods look like that? Material Embodiments of Shifting Meanings," by John McCreery
8 "How Knowledge Grows An Anthropological Anamorphosis," by Alberto Corsín Jiménez
9 “An Amazonian Question of Ironies and the Grotesque,” by Joanna Overing
10 "Lance Armstrong: The Reality Show (A Cultural Analysis)," by Lee Drummond
11 "Ritual Murder?," by Jean La Fontaine
12 "An Extreme Reading of Facebook," by Daniel Miller
13 "Friendship, Anthropology," by Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco
Papers by Justin Shaffner
Drafts by Justin Shaffner
Cosmopolitics: Collected Papers of the OAC, Volume I
Editors, Justin Shaffner and Huon Wardle
1“Introduction: Cosmopolitics as a Way of Thinking,” by Huon Wardle and Justin Shaffner
2 "Cosmopolitics and Common Sense," by Huon Wardle
3 "What Did Kant Mean by and Why Did He Adopt a Cosmopolitan Point of View in History?," by Thomas Sturm
4 "Can the Thing Speak?," by Martin Holbraad
5 "Devouring Objects of Study Food and Fieldwork," by Sidney W. Mintz
6 "Cosmetic Cosmologies in Japan Notes Towards a Superficial Investigation," by Philip Swift
7 "Why do the gods look like that? Material Embodiments of Shifting Meanings," by John McCreery
8 "How Knowledge Grows An Anthropological Anamorphosis," by Alberto Corsín Jiménez
9 “An Amazonian Question of Ironies and the Grotesque,” by Joanna Overing
10 "Lance Armstrong: The Reality Show (A Cultural Analysis)," by Lee Drummond
11 "Ritual Murder?," by Jean La Fontaine
12 "An Extreme Reading of Facebook," by Daniel Miller
13 "Friendship, Anthropology," by Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco
Editors, Justin Shaffner and Huon Wardle
Foreword by Keith Hart
1“Introduction: Cosmopolitics as a Way of Thinking,” by Huon Wardle and Justin Shaffner
2 "Cosmopolitics and Common Sense," by Huon Wardle
3 "What Did Kant Mean by and Why Did He Adopt a Cosmopolitan Point of View in History?," by Thomas Sturm
4 "Can the Thing Speak?," by Martin Holbraad
5 "Devouring Objects of Study Food and Fieldwork," by Sidney W. Mintz
6 "Cosmetic Cosmologies in Japan Notes Towards a Superficial Investigation," by Philip Swift
7 "Why do the gods look like that? Material Embodiments of Shifting Meanings," by John McCreery
8 "How Knowledge Grows An Anthropological Anamorphosis," by Alberto Corsín Jiménez
9 “An Amazonian Question of Ironies and the Grotesque,” by Joanna Overing
10 "Lance Armstrong: The Reality Show (A Cultural Analysis)," by Lee Drummond
11 "Ritual Murder?," by Jean La Fontaine
12 "An Extreme Reading of Facebook," by Daniel Miller
13 "Friendship, Anthropology," by Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco
Cosmopolitics: Collected Papers of the OAC, Volume I
Editors, Justin Shaffner and Huon Wardle
1“Introduction: Cosmopolitics as a Way of Thinking,” by Huon Wardle and Justin Shaffner
2 "Cosmopolitics and Common Sense," by Huon Wardle
3 "What Did Kant Mean by and Why Did He Adopt a Cosmopolitan Point of View in History?," by Thomas Sturm
4 "Can the Thing Speak?," by Martin Holbraad
5 "Devouring Objects of Study Food and Fieldwork," by Sidney W. Mintz
6 "Cosmetic Cosmologies in Japan Notes Towards a Superficial Investigation," by Philip Swift
7 "Why do the gods look like that? Material Embodiments of Shifting Meanings," by John McCreery
8 "How Knowledge Grows An Anthropological Anamorphosis," by Alberto Corsín Jiménez
9 “An Amazonian Question of Ironies and the Grotesque,” by Joanna Overing
10 "Lance Armstrong: The Reality Show (A Cultural Analysis)," by Lee Drummond
11 "Ritual Murder?," by Jean La Fontaine
12 "An Extreme Reading of Facebook," by Daniel Miller
13 "Friendship, Anthropology," by Liria de la Cruz and Paloma Gay y Blasco