Eitan Wilf
Cultural and Semiotic Anthropology
PUBLICATIONS
Single-Authored Books
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2023 The Inspiration Machine: Computational Creativity in Poetry and Jazz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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2019 Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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2014 School for Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Edited Books
2021 Designs and Anthropologies: Frictions and Affinities. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Forthcoming. (ed. with Keith Murphy)
Journal Articles
2023 “I randomize, therefore I think”: Computational Indeterminacy and the Tensions of Liberal Subjectivity among Writers of Computer-generated Poetry in the United-States. American Ethnologist 50(1):90-102.
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2022 Creative or Coercive?: Cities, Workspaces, and Business Anthropology in the Near Aftermath of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Journal of Business Anthropology 11(1):55-75.
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2022 Phaticity as Technical Mystique: The Genred, Multi-Sited Mediation of the Innovation Architect’s Expertise. Journal of Cultural Economy 15(6):782-798.
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2020 To Go with the Free Information Flow: Problems and Contradictions in Macro-Level Neoliberal Theories and Their Translation to Micro-Level Business Innovation Strategies. Social Anthropology 28(4):897-913.
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2020 "The Closed World Principle": Corporations and the Metaculture of Newness via Oldness. Journal of Business Anthropology 9(1):1-18.
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2019 Separating Noise from Signal: The Ethnomethodological Uncanny as Aesthetic Pleasure in Human-Machine Interaction in the United States. American Ethnologist 46(2):202-213.
2016 The Post-it Note Economy: Understanding Post-Fordist Business Innovation through One of Its Key Semiotic Technologies. Current Anthropology 57(6):732-760 [with commentaries].
2015 Routinized Business Innovation: An Undertheorized Engine of Cultural Evolution. American Anthropologist 117(4):679-692.
2015 Ritual Semiosis in the Business Corporation: Recruitment to Routinized Innovation. Signs and Society 3(S1):S13-S40.
2015 Modernity, Cultural Anesthesia, and Sensory Agency: Technologies of the Listening Self in a U.S. Collegiate Jazz Music Program. Ethnos 80(1):1-22.
2014 Semiotic Dimensions of Creativity. Annual Review of Anthropology 43:397-412.
2013 Toward an Anthropology of Computer-Mediated, Algorithmic Forms of Sociality. Current Anthropology 54(6):716-739 [with commentaries].
2013 Streamlining the Muse: Creative Agency and the Reconfiguration of Charismatic Education as Professional Training in Israeli Poetry-Writing Workshops. Ethos 41(2):127- 149.
2013 Sociable Robots, Jazz Music, and Divination: Contingency as a Cultural Resource for Negotiating Problems of Intentionality. American Ethnologist 40(4):605-618.
2013 From Media Technologies that Reproduce Seconds to Media Technologies that Reproduce Thirds: A Peircean Perspective on Stylistic Fidelity and Style- Reproducing Computerized Algorithms. Signs and Society 2(1):185-211.
2012 Rituals of Creativity: Tradition, Modernity, and the ‘Acoustic Unconscious’ in an American Collegiate Jazz Music Program. American Anthropologist 114(1):32-44.
2011 Sincerity versus Self-Expression: Modern Creative Agency and the Materiality of Semiotic Forms. Cultural Anthropology 26(3):462-484.
2010 Swinging within the Iron Cage: Modernity, Creativity, and Embodied Practice in American Postsecondary Jazz Education. American Ethnologist 37(3):563-582.
2010 Listening to Modernity: Creativity and Cultural Reproduction in American Postsecondary Jazz Education. Anthropology News 51(9):7.
2008 Dynamic Branding: The Case of Oprah Winfrey. Women and Performance 18(1):71-84. (with Eva Illouz)
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2008 Introduction: Oprah Winfrey and the Co-production of Market and Morality. Women and Performance 18(1):1-7. (with Eva Illouz)
2004 Hearts or Wombs? A Cultural Critique of Radical Feminist Critiques of Love. Theory and Criticism 25(1):205-234. (with Eva Illouz; in Hebrew)
- 2009 Translated into English and reprinted in Hopkins, D., J. Kleres, H. Flam, and H. Kuzmics (Eds.) Theorizing Emotions: Sociological Explorations and Applications. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag (distributed by University of Chicago Press).
- 2009 Translated into German and reprinted in Hammer, H. and D. Guth (Eds.) ‘Love me or Leave Me’: Liebeskonstrukte in der Populärkultur. Wien: Campus Verlag.
Book Chapters
2021 The Wrong Means to Misguided Ends: Corporate-Based Design, Streamlined Insights, and Anthropologists’ “Desire for Relevance.” In Designs and Anthropologies: Frictions and Affinities, eds. Keith M. Murphy and Eitan Y. Wilf, pp. 35-49. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
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2021 Introduction: Of Three Configurations. In Designs and Anthropologies: Frictions and Affinities, eds. Keith M. Murphy and Eitan Y. Wilf, pp. 1-16. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. (with Keith Murphy)
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2019 'Creative China' and Its Potential to Problematize Modern-Western-Romantic Ideologies of Creativity. In Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitization in the Time of Creative China, eds. J de Kloet, C. Y. Fai, and L Scheen, pp. 39-50. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
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2018 Modernity. In International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. H. Callan. New York: Wiley.
2018 Jazz. In International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. H. Callan. New York: Wiley.
2017 Crafting the Playing Body as an Infrastructure of "Immediate" and "Mediate" Embodied Music Cognition in an Academic Jazz Program. In Routledge Companion to Embodied Music Interaction, eds. M. Lesaffre, M. Leman, and P. Jan Maes, pp. 241-248. London: Routledge.
2017 Contingency and the Semiotic Mediation of Distributed Agency. In Distributed Agency: The Sharing of Intention, Cause, and Accountability, eds. N. Enfield and P. Kockelman, pp. 199-209. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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2015 The 'Cool' Organization Man: Incorporating Uncertainty from Jazz Music into the Business World. In Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases, eds. L. Samimian-Darash and P. Rabinow, pp. 29-45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Edited Journal Special Issues
2008 Oprah Winfrey and Civil Society (Special Issue Guest Editor with Eva Illouz). Women and Performance 18(1).
Article and Book Reviews
2021 Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture, by Andrew Orta. Anthropological Quarterly 93(4):789-792.
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2019 Anthropology through Levinas (Further Reflections): On Humanity, Being, Culture, Violation, Sociality, and Morality, by Nigel Rapport. Current Anthropology 60(1):85-86.
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2017 Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation, by Anand Pandian. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23(1):195-196.
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2015 The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story, by Ian Condry. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(4):935-936.
2015 Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, by Carolyn L. Kane. Public Books, April 15.
2013 Literature and Agency in English Fiction Reading: A Study of the Henry Williamson Society, by Adam Reed. Social Anthropology 21(2):270-272.
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