Porous social orders

Abstract

Porous social orders A B S T R A C TMany cultural anthropologists today share a common theoretical commitment: to view the people they encounter during fieldwork as living among multiple social orders that are interconnected and contingent. When social orders are multiple, ethnographers are quickly faced with the question of how people construct the boundaries between these social orders to be both durable (enough) to keep social orders distinct and porous (enough) to allow people, objects, forms, and ideas to circulate across them in appropriate ways. What counts as appropriate is, not surprisingly, often hotly contested. Despite contemporary ethnographers' varied intellectual trajectories, a crosscutting set of theoretical assumptions unites their work and shapes how they approach familiar anthropological foci, such as

Uncertain Times: Linguistic Anthropology in 2019

“…Nor does it readily connect with point of view or with power relations” (see also Nakassis 2019, 88). Starting from similar critiques of the hypostatizing of concepts like “culture” and “society,” Gershon (2019, 405) suggests that what ethnographers have successfully done instead is show how people are given to multiple “porous social orders”—where the study of language has “long prefigured the tensions between heterogeneous and emergent patternings of social orders … [and] perduring communicative economies” (see also Goodwin 2018, 3).…”

Border dialectics and the border multiple

“…Although enclaved, they are porous, albeit in a way that locates them nearer to what would be a pole of impermeability if one were to imagine a broader spectrum of more or less closed "porous enclaves" (Harms 2015: 152) or porous bureaucratic orders (cf. Gershon 2019). At least this is the case insofar as the interactions and exchanges with the targets of their policing power are concerned.…”

The States of Law in Papua New Guinea

“…To start with, village court magistrate and komiti are not precisely the same role. One is recognised at the 'large scale' of the state, the other at the 'small scale' of the block; a person who holds both positions is one who is skilled at moving between the social orders of formal law and local relationships, itself a process of playing with scale to create effects either of unity or differentiation (Wastell 2001;Gershon 2019). And returning to Valverde's observations about the ability of cities to selfregulate, the komiti is not only a holdover from an earlier era, but a way that people in cities find specific solutions to specific problems of managing relations between persons and entities with different interests.…”