[[New School for Social Research]] ([[Masters of Arts|MA]],[[Doctor of Philosophy|PhD]])
[[Yale Law School]] ([[Juris Doctor|JD]])"},"thesis_title":{"wt":"Landslayt:Polish Jews in Paris"},"thesis_url":{"wt":"http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/219999605"},"thesis_year":{"wt":"1985"},"doctoral_advisor":{"wt":"[[Stanley Diamond]]"},"doctoral_students":{"wt":""},"notable_students":{"wt":""},"main_interests":{"wt":""},"workplaces":{"wt":"[[Cornell University]]
[[School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences|Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales]]
[[University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill]]
[[University of Kansas]]
[[Dartmouth College]]
[[The New School]]"},"notable_ideas":{"wt":"\"ethnography of reading\"{{cite journal|last1=Smith|first1=Jonathan Z.|title=Religion and Bible|journal=JBL|date=2009|volume=128|issue=1|page=11|url=https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/presidentialaddresses/JBL128_1_1Smith2008.pdf|access-date=4 March 2016}}"},"influences":{"wt":"[[Walter Benjamin]][http://as.cornell.edu/sites/as/files/Jonathan%20Boyarin.pdf Boyarin on Benjamin,Cornell Arts and Sciences] Retrieved:2015-03-07"},"influenced":{"wt":""},"awards":{"wt":""},"website":{"wt":"http://anthropology.cornell.edu/jonathan-boyarin"},"footnotes":{"wt":""}},"i":0}}]}" id="mwBA">.mw-parser-output .infobox-subbox{padding:0;border:none;margin:-3px;width:auto;min-width:100%;font-size:100%;clear:none;float:none;background-color:transparent}.mw-parser-output .infobox-3cols-child{margin:auto}.mw-parser-output .infobox .navbar{font-size:100%}body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-header,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-subheader,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-above,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-title,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-image,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-full-data,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-below{text-align:center}@media screen{html.skin-theme-clientpref-night .mw-parser-output .infobox-full-data:not(.notheme)>div:not(.notheme)[style]{background:#1f1f23!important;color:#f8f9fa}}@media screen and (prefers-color-scheme:dark){html.skin-theme-clientpref-os .mw-parser-output .infobox-full-data:not(.notheme) div:not(.notheme){background:#1f1f23!important;color:#f8f9fa}}@media(min-width:640px){body.skin--responsive .mw-parser-output .infobox-table{display:table!important}body.skin--responsive .mw-parser-output .infobox-table>caption{display:table-caption!important}body.skin--responsive .mw-parser-output .infobox-table>tbody{display:table-row-group}body.skin--responsive .mw-parser-output .infobox-table tr{display:table-row!important}body.skin--responsive .mw-parser-output .infobox-table th,body.skin--responsive .mw-parser-output .infobox-table td{padding-left:inherit;padding-right:inherit}}
Jonathan Aaron Boyarin | |
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![]() Jonathan Boyarin, May 2024 | |
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Anthropologist |
Title | Thomas and Diann Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Cornell University |
Academic background | |
Education | Reed College (BA) New School for Social Research (MA, PhD) Yale Law School (JD) |
Thesis | Landslayt: Polish Jews in Paris (1985) |
Doctoral advisor | Stanley Diamond |
Influences | Walter Benjamin [1] |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Anthropology,Jewish Studies |
Sub-discipline | Jewish ethnography,Yiddish culture,critical theory |
Institutions | Cornell University Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill University of Kansas Dartmouth College The New School |
Notable ideas | "ethnography of reading" [2] |
Website | http://anthropology.cornell.edu/jonathan-boyarin |
Jonathan Aaron Boyarin (Yiddish :יונתןאהרןבוירין;born September 16,1956) is an American anthropologist whose work centers on Jewish communities and on the dynamics of Jewish culture,memory and identity. [3] Born in Neptune,New Jersey,he is married and has two sons. [4] In 2013,he was appointed Thomas and Diann Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies,Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies,Cornell University.
His brother,Daniel Boyarin,is also a well-known scholar,and the two have written together.
Boyarin was educated at Reed College,the New School for Social Research,and the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language,before earning his doctoral degree in anthropology at the New School for Social Research. In 1998,fourteen years after receiving his Ph.D.,Boyarin received his J.D. at Yale Law School. He has taught at Cornell University,Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill,University of Kansas,Dartmouth College,and The New School. [4] He is the founding co-editor of the journal Critical Research on Religion. [5] In 2016,Boyarin was elected a Fellow of the Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR). [6]
Boyarin has investigated Jewish culture in a range of ethnographic projects set in Paris,Jerusalem,and the Lower East Side of New York City. [7] Much of his work is in interdisciplinary critical theory,from the perspective of modern Jewish politics and experience. [3] He has extended these interests into comparative work on diaspora,the politics of time and space,and the ethnography of reading. [3]
As a student of modern Jewish experience and culture,he has investigated comparative and theoretical questions that help illuminate the lives of Jews and others. [8] He has conducted fieldwork in cities where those "Jews and others" live,including Paris,Jerusalem,and New York's Lower East Side. [8] Much of his work has also been in historical ethnography,primarily of nineteenth and twentieth-century Polish Jewish life. [8] He is also a Yiddish translator. [7]
In 2022 and 2023,Boyarin co-led workshops on "Jews and Black Theory" at Cornell University,precursors to a May 2024 academic conference by the same name at Harvard. [9] [10]
Boyarin edited an influential set of essays published in 1993 titled,The Ethnography of Reading, [11] exploring how people read and talk about reading. [12] In contrast to the older tendency to classify entire cultures as oral or literate,most of the essays explore the intermingling of silent reading,collective reading and commentary,recitations,and other text-related practices in a particular tradition or setting. [12] Overall,the volume is concerned with how "insiders" and anthropologists talk and write about reading. [12]
In his own essay,Boyarin describes collective reading practices in the New York City yeshiva where he studied Bible and Talmud. [11] He relates the multivocality of the texts to the "dialogic" speech events in which students intermingle mass culture and vocabulary with sacred speech as a way of negotiating their own relationship to these highly authoritative texts. [12] According to Brinkley M. Messick: [13]
The volume operates at a refreshing distance from the worn controversies of oral verses literate and from scientific slants of evolution and cognition. Its basic contribution...is to "expand the archive" of our knowledge of reading and other text-reception practices. ... For Boyarin,the study of reading challenges the "lingering anti-textual bias among practitioners of cultural anthropology." [14]
Boyarin writes that the work of Walter Benjamin helped him to "bridge the gap" between his interests in anthropology—German traditions of critical,interdisciplinary scholarship—and the preservation and transmission of East European Jewish culture. Boyarin writes: [1]
I learned Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History",written in 1939 as the storms of war were gathering,and never published during his lifetime. In that text,Benjamin analyzes the failure of the mid-1930s Popular Front to defeat the Nazis,and ascribes it at least in part to a philosophy of history that maintained a naïve faith in the ultimate inevitability of progress and the triumph of Reason. Instead of that philosophy of linear progress,Benjamin put forward a much more contingent notion of history and temporality,one in which at any moment a point or points from the past might be articulated with a present situation to reveal a Messianic opening "in the fight for the oppressed past." [15]
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity,concerned with human behavior,human biology,cultures,societies,and linguistics,in both the present and past,including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior,while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning,including norms and values. The term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology,which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
Franz Uri Boas was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was a Polish-British anthropologist and ethnologist whose writings on ethnography,social theory,and field research have exerted a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology.
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study,Princeton.
In the social sciences and related fields,a thick description is a description of human social action that describes not just physical behaviors,but their context as interpreted by the actors as well,so that it can be better understood by an outsider. A thick description typically adds a record of subjective explanations and meanings provided by the people engaged in the behaviors,making the collected data of greater value for studies by other social scientists.
Barbara Myerhoff was an American anthropologist,filmmaker,and founder of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Throughout her career as an anthropologist,Barbara Myerhoff contributed to major methodological trends which have since become standards of social cultural anthropology. These methods include reflexivity,narrative story telling,and anthropologists' positioning as social activists,commentaries,and critics whose work extends beyond the academy.
Paul Radin was an American cultural anthropologist and folklorist of the early twentieth century specializing in Native American languages and cultures. The noted legal scholar Max Radin was his older brother.
David Murray Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist,best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology.
Michael T. Taussig is an Australian anthropologist and professor at Columbia University. He is best known for his engagement with Marx's idea of commodity fetishism,especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin. Taussig has also published texts on medical anthropology.
Michael Silverstein was an American linguist who served as the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology,linguistics,and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication,the sociology of interaction,Russian formalist literary theory,linguistic pragmatics,sociolinguistics,early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory,together with his own theoretical contributions,yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture". Among other achievements,he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce,including especially the notion of indexicality,into the linguistic and anthropological literature;with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life;and with introducing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.
Daniel Boyarin is an Israeli–American academic and historian of religion. Born in New Jersey,he holds dual United States and Israeli citizenship. He is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California,Berkeley. He is married to Chava Boyarin,a lecturer in Hebrew at UC Berkeley. They have two sons. His brother,Jonathan Boyarin,is also a scholar,and the two have written together. He has defined himself as a "diasporic rabbinic Jew".
Gender and Jewish Studies is an emerging subfield at the intersection of gender studies,queer studies,and Jewish studies. Gender studies centers on interdisciplinary research on the phenomenon of gender. It focuses on cultural representations of gender and people's lived experience. Similarly,queer studies focuses on the cultural representations and lived experiences of queer identities to critique hetero-normative values of sex and sexuality. Jewish studies is a field that looks at Jews and Judaism,through such disciplines as history,anthropology,literary studies,linguistics,and sociology. As such,scholars of gender and Jewish studies are considering gender as the basis for understanding historical and contemporary Jewish societies. This field recognizes that much of recorded Jewish history and academic writing is told from the perspective of “the male Jew”and fails to accurately represent the diverse experiences of Jews with non-dominant gender identities.
Ward Hunt Goodenough II was an American anthropologist,who has made contributions to kinship studies,linguistic anthropology,cross-cultural studies,and cognitive anthropology.
Stanley Diamond was an American poet and anthropologist. As a young man,he identified as a poet,and his disdain for the fascism of the 1930s greatly influenced his thinking. Diamond was a professor at several universities,spending most of his career at The New School. He wrote several books and founded Dialectical Anthropology,a Marxist anthropology journal,in 1975.
Daniel Martin Varisco,is an American anthropologist and historian.
Smadar Lavie is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California Davis,and a Mizrahi anthropologist,author,and activist. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt,Israel and Palestine,emphasizing issues of race,gender and religion. She received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989).
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