Dominic Boyer

Over the past ten years, my research and teaching interests have moved between, on the one hand, anthropological engagement with intellectuals, expertise, professionalism, and knowledge, and, on the other, the study of media, journalism, public culture, and modes of social belonging. These interests intersected in the manuscript for my first book, Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Spirit and System is an effort to understand the sociological and phenomenological dimensions of dialectical knowledge in modern German intellectual culture ranging from everyday intersubjective acts and encounters to the formal and technical languages of philosophy and theory.  A second short book, Understanding Media: A popular philosophy (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007) followed my growing interest in the entanglement of media and knowledge by reflecting on common attentional habits of understanding media and mediation and by suggesting ways in which these habits could diversify and improve.

I currently am engaged in three more or less parallel research projects.  The first focuses on digital media and the transformation of news journalism in Europe and the United States.  I am pursuing field research with German and American news journalists in newspapers, radio stations, press agencies, and online news departments, guided by an interest in how journalistic practices and understandings are being rescaled and transformed through the contemporary fast-time production and multimedial dissemination of news.  I am particularly interested in exploring how the digital media ecology of contemporary news journalism is influencing journalists’ understanding of their vocation and of the relationship of professional newsmakers to audiences/clients/publics.

My second project is a collaborative venture with Alexei Yurchak that examines what the study of late socialist aesthetics and practices of parody can teach us about late liberal political culture and subjectivity.  We focus on the recent proliferation of popular and avant-garde modes of parodic overidentification in the West (eg, The Colbert Report, The Yes Men) and explore their kinship to late socialist modes of parody, revealing a parallel overformalization of authoritative discourse and political performance in both contexts.

My third project is a longer-term collaborative project (currently in its developmental phase) with Cymene Howe that investigates the constitution and politics of knowledge concerning alternative energy in the United States, Latin America, and Europe.  The first phase of our project concerns the institutionalization of wind energy in West Texas, Mexico, and Venezuela, tracing North-South and late liberal/neosocialist variants of developmental and ecological knowledge.  Our analytical interest is in exploring energopolitics as an alternative genealogy of modern state formation and extension to recent philosophical and anthropological reflections on biopolitics.

Courses

Media, Culture and Society

Experts and Cultures of Expertise

Classical Social Theory and its Ecologies

Proseminar in Anthropology

Publications 

Books, volumes, pamphlets

Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 (323p.)

Understanding Media: A popular philosophy. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007 (103p.)

The Life Informatic: Digital practice and digital reason in news journalism (and anthropology). Research and writing in progress.

Journal articles (peer-reviewed, single and co-authored)

“Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts.” Anthropology in Action, 15(2):38-46, 2008.

“Conspiracy, History, and Therapy at a Berlin Stammtisch.” American Ethnologist, 33(3):327-39, 2006. ( pdf )

“Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany.” Public Culture, 18(2):361-381, 2006.

“Turner’s Anthropology of Media and Its Legacies.” Critique of Anthropology, 26(1):47-60, 2006.

“Gender and the Solvency of Professionalism: Eastern German Journalism before and after 1989.” East European Politics and Society, 20(1):152-179, 2006.

(with Ulf Hannerz) “Introduction: Worlds of Journalism.” Ethnography, 7(1):5-17, 2006. ( pdf )

(with Steve Sangren) “Introduction to Turner Special Issue.” Critique of Anthropology, 26(1):5-13, 2006.

“Visiting Knowledge in Anthropology: An Introduction.” Ethnos 70(2):141-148, 2005. ( pdf )

“The Corporeality of Expertise.” Ethnos 70(2):243-266, 2005. ( pdf )

 (with Claudio Lomnitz) “Intellectuals and Nationalism: Anthropological Engagements.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34:105-120, 2005. ( pdf )

“Censorship as a Vocation: The Institutions, Practices, and Cultural Logic of Media Control in the German Democratic Republic.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45(3):511-545, 2003. ( pdf )

“Foucault in the Bush. The Social Life of Post-Structuralist Theory in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg.” Ethnos 66(2):207-236, 2001. ( pdf )

“Media Markets, Mediating Labors, and the Branding of East German Culture at ‘Super Illu.” Social Text 68(Fall):9-33, 2001.

“Yellow sand of Berlin.” Ethnography 2(3):421-439, 2001. ( pdf )

“On the Sedimentation and Accreditation of Social Knowledges of Difference: Mass Media, Journalism, and the Reproduction of East/West Alterities in Unified Germany.” Cultural Anthropology 15(4):459-491, 2000.

“Digital Expertise in Online Journalism (and Anthropology).” In press, Anthropological Quarterly.

“On the ethics and practice of contemporary social theory: from crisis talk to multiattentional method.” Under review, Dialectical Anthropology.

(with Alexei Yurchak) “American Stiob: Or, what late socialist aesthetics of parody teach us about contemporary political culture in the West” In preparation for Cultural Anthropology.

Journal issues edited or co-edited (peer-reviewed)

Special issue of Ethnography (7:1) “Worlds of Journalism” (with Ulf Hannerz), 2006.

Special issue of Critique of Anthropology (26:1) “For a Critique of Pure Culture: Essays in Honour of Terence Turner” (with Steve Sangren), 2006.

Special issue of Ethnos (70:2) “Revisiting the Anthropology of Knowledge,” 2005.

Journal articles (non-peer-reviewed) and book chapters

“Beyond Algos and Mania: The Politics of the Future in Postsocialist Eastern Europe.” In Postcommunist Nostalgia, M Todorova and Z Gille (eds.) Berghahn, 2009.

“Making (sense of) News in the Era of Digital Information.” In The Anthropology of News and Journalism: Global Perspectives, L Bird (ed.) Indiana University Press, 2009.

“Of Dialectical Germans and Dialectical Ethnographers: notes from an engagement with philosophy.” In Ways of Knowing, M Harris (ed.), Berghahn, 2007.

“Ostalgie – oder die Politik der Zukunft in Ostdeutschland,” transl. O Hall. Deutschland Archiv 39(4):690-703, 2006.

“The Medium of Foucault in Anthropology.” The Minnesota Review 58-60:265-272, 2003.

“The African Crisis in Context: Comparative Encounters with Educational Rationalization.” African Studies Review 45(2):205-218, 2002.

“The Impact and Embodiment of Western Expertise in the Restructuring of the Eastern German Media after 1990.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 19(1):77-84, 2001.

Commentaries and reviews

“Postsocialist Studies, Cultures of Parody and American Stiob.” (with Alexei Yurchak) Anthropology News November:8-9, 2008.

“There are Still Thinkers in Germany” in My Idea of the Land of Ideas: How the World Sees Germany, ed T Sommer, pp.44-50. Munich: Droemer Verlag, 2006.

“Do the Humanities Have to be Useful?” in Do the Humanities Have To Be Useful?, eds. GP Lepage, C Martin, and M Mostafavi, pp.1-6. Ithaca: Cornell University Office of Publications, 2006.

“Welcome to the New Europe.” American Ethnologist 32(4):521-523, 2005.

“Vitaler Stau.” Zeitschrift für KulturAustausch 55(3+4):89-91, 2005.

Review of Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police by Andreas Glaeser. Chicago: U Chicago Press, 2000. Ethnography 4(4):556-560, 2003.

Review of Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism by Douglas R. Holmes. American Ethnologist 29(4):1034-5, 2002.

Review of Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman. Malden, MA: Polity, 2000. Modernism/Modernity 9(2):354-6, 2002.