Sherry B. Ortner

Sherry B. Ortner
University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA

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97
Publications
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11,988
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Publications

Publications (97)
Chapter
The central point of this chapter is that patriarchy is not simply about male dominance over women but is an inherently racial formation. This point is developed through bringing together scholarship produced by Black feminist theorists, other feminist scholars, and research on racialized police brutality. Using Mary Douglas’s classic theory of pur...
Article
Investment broker Bernie Madoff ran what is still considered the largest Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding thousands of investors over a 20-year period of more than $20 billion. He worked his game almost entirely through kinship connections—relatives, friends of relatives, and relatives of friends. The relationship between kinship and capitalism...
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Full-text available
p>En este artículo considero varias tendencias emergentes en la antropología desde los 80, en el contexto de ascenso del neoliberalismo en tanto formación económica y gubernamental. Considero primero el giro hacia lo que llamo “antropología oscura”, es decir, la antropología que se enfoca en las dimensiones difíciles de la vida social (poder, domin...
Article
Dans cet article, je m’intéresse à plusieurs courants émergents en anthropologie depuis les années 1980. Ceux-ci sont concurrents à la montée des formes économique et gouvernementale du néolibéralisme. Je présente d’abord le tournant vers ce que j’appelle l’« anthropologie sombre » ( dark anthropology ), c’est-à-dire une anthropologie qui se concen...
Article
Many filmmakers and producers hope to create some kind of social or political impact with their films. This is the case with a Los Angeles–based production company that seeks to bring about social change through its films and related “social action” campaigns. Despite its good intentions, however, its efforts often fail. In this respect, the compan...
Article
Response to HAU Debate on Ortner, Sherry. 2016. “Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73.
Chapter
This chapter looks at the independent film world of the late twentieth, early twenty-first centuries as a cultural movement, that is, as an idealistic attempt to produce a particular kind of cultural goods that would in some sense “change the culture”. There are a number of important stylistic and substantive commonalities across independent films....
Article
In this article I consider several emergent trends in anthropology since the 1980s against a backdrop of the rise of neoliberalism as both an economic and a governmental formation. I consider first the turn to what I call “dark anthropology,” that is, anthropology that focuses on the harsh dimensions of social life (power, domination, inequality, a...
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Full-text available
In this paper, I seek to bring “patriarchy” back into focus in ways that make sense to a twenty-first century American audience. In the first part of the paper, I discuss the ways in which “feminism” has fallen, or is being pushed, off the contemporary political agenda, leaving a political vacuum with respect to, among other things, patriarchy as a...
Article
There is a long-standing distinction in Hollywood between “entertainment” and everything else. The “everything else” includes among other things any direct address of political subjects, which are assumed to turn American audiences off. This article presents both an ethnographic account of this Hollywood ideology and an examination of several recen...
Article
In the late 1980s, American independent film broke out of the tiny “art houses” (specialty theaters) of a few major American cities and became a much stronger presence in American public culture. Independent filmmakers see themselves as challenging the hegemony of Hollywood, eschewing entertainment—fantasy, pleasure, happy endings—and offering inst...
Article
In the late 1980s, American independent film broke out of the tiny "art houses" (specialty theaters) of a few major American cities and became a much stronger presence in American public culture. Independent filmmakers see themselves as challenging the hegemony of Hollywood, eschewing entertainment - fantasy, pleasure, happy endings - and offering...
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Full-text available
This is an article about the difficulties of doing ethnography in relatively enclosed and secretive communities, based on my experience of trying to launch an ethnographic study of Hollywood. I consider (separately) the problems of doing participant observation in ‘inside’ locations, and the problems of gaining access to industry insiders for inter...
Article
The Future of Anthropology: Its Relevance to the Contemporary World. Akbar Ahmed and CRIS SHORE, eds. London: Athlone Press, 1995. ix ‐i‐ 291 pp., contributors, notes, references, Index. Grasping the Changing World: Anthropological Concepts In the Postmodern Era. Vaclav Hubinger. ed. New York: Routledge Press, 1996. ‐i‐129 pp., contributors, index....
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Resumo: Nos muitos trabalhos que tentam resgatar "o ator" em algum sentido, existe uma tendência a evitar questões de subjetividade, ou seja, "estruturas de sentimento" complexas (na expressão de Raymond Williams). Este artigo retorna ao trabalho de Max Weber e Clifford Geertz para considerar várias questões de subjetividade, incluindo tanto ansied...
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Also CSST Working Paper #1. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51112/1/344.pdf
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Also CSST Working Paper #23. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51154/1/386.pdf
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Full-text available
En 1972 Sherry Ortner escribió uno de los textos fundacionales de la antropología académica feminista. “¿Es la mujer al hombre lo que la naturaleza a la cultura?” se convirtió en uno de los artículos que más debate han provocado en nuestra disciplina. Tres décadas después de la publicación del artículo, la autora revisa sus planteamientos iniciales...
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Full-text available
This is a paper about the importance of the notion of subjectivity for a critical anthropology. 2 Although there is no necessary link between questions of subjectivity and questions of power and subordination, and indeed there is a great deal of work both inside and outside of anthropology that explores subjectivity as a relatively neutral arena of...
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This article is part of a larger ethnographic and ethnohistorical project on social class in the US, as tracked through the lives of my own high school graduating class, the Class of `58 of Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey. In this article I focus on the underlying logic of high school social/prestige categories, and on the durability of...
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This paper considers the workings of various kinds of 'capital' in the early lives of one cohort, the Class of '58 of a U.S. High School. Bourdieu's valuable concept of capital as both material and cultural/symbolic is augmented with the idea of 'psychological' capital, a concept meant to begin to fill a gap in Bourdieu's framework concerning the c...
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This article addresses the debate over whether or not the Of Revelation and Revolution (RR) project has, compared to earlier Comaroff ethnography, adequately addressed issues of Tswana 'agency.' I argue that the idea of agency encompasses several dimensions, that the RR project largely addresses one of them – cultural reworking of missionary ideas...
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Full-text available
My problem for the present article concerns the relationship between "public culture" on the one hand, and ethnographic inquiry on the other, in the contemporary United States. By "public culture" I mean all the bodies of images, claims, and representations created to speak to and about the actual people who live in the United States: all of the pr...
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In this article I question the basically classless notion of identities operating in contemporary politics, both out in the world and within contemporary social and cultural analysis. Instead I try to bring to light several aspects of what I call "the hidden life of class" in the United States.
Chapter
Series Blurb Oxford Readings in Feminism provide accessible, one-volume guides to the very best in contemporary feminist thinking, assessing its impact and importance in key areas of study. Collected together by scholars of outstanding reputation in their field, the articles chosen represent the most important work on feminist issues, and concise,...
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This article considers the place of fieldwork in the anthropology of the United States on several levels. First, it traces how I decided to use my high school graduating class in Newark, New Jersey as the ethnographic population for an ethnohistorical research project. The article considers the time/space trajectory of the group—that is, the fact t...
Article
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Article
An eminent anthropologist examines the foundings of the first celibate Buddhist monasteries among the Sherpas of Nepal in the early twentieth century--a religious development that was a major departure from "folk" or "popular" Buddhism. Sherry Ortner is the first to integrate social scientific and historical modes of analysis in a study of the Sher...
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Full-text available
Every year, around the time of the meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the New York Times asks a Big Name anthropologist to contribute an op-ed piece on the state of the field. These pieces tend to take a rather gloomy view. A few years ago, for example, Marvin Harris suggested that anthropology was being taken over by mystics, re...
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This paper reviews the use of the notion of “key symbol” in anthropological analysis. It analyzes phenomena which have been or might be accorded the status of key symbol in cultural analyses, categorizing them according to their primary modes of operating on thought and action.
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This paper explores the relationship between explicit cultural forms (“symbols”) and underlying cultural orientations. It assumes the position that the two are intimately interrelated, indeed inseparable, and further that it is the symbolic forms themselves which are the mechanisms linking underlying cultural orientations to observable modes of soc...
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Also CSST Working Paper #24. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51155/1/387.pdf
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Also CSST Working Paper #32. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51166/1/398.pdf
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Also CSST Working Paper #56. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51213/1/446.pdf
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Also CSST Working Paper #66. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51223/1/457.pdf
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Also CSST Working Paper #71. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51232/1/466.pdf

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