Rapport - Distortion: social processes beyond the structured and systemic

Distortion occurs between the intentions of actions and their outcomes. It can also occur between thoughts and actions; between words and how they are interpreted; between a statement of law and its enactment; between a vision and its artistic representation; and between a cultural tradition or habitus and its animation in contemporary contexts. Escaping the bounds of relationality, of structuration and of systemics, distortion is a form of complex connectedness that has seldom been addressed in the social sciences as a phenomenon in its own right.

This volume argues for the key importance of distortion as a concept in the social sciences, and attempts to refine it as a concept. Each chapter examines distortion in the context of an ethnographic case study, examining how its conceptualization can further comprehension of a particular ethnographic situation. It is contended that distortion is an account of the emergent or revolutionary nature of human life, an emergence that can be attached to particular antecedent conditions in a processual or temporal way yet is a transformation of the essential nature of those conditions.

Coming to terms with distortion adds significantly to the social-scientific appreciation of human activity and creativity, of conscious experience, of the nature of social interaction and exchange, and of the complexity of social milieu. Distortion should be essential reading on advanced undergraduate and postgraduate modules on social theory, contemporary issues and methodologies, communication, sociality, materiality, and intersectionality.

Nigel Rapport is Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK.

Routledge Studies in Anthropology

For a full list of titles in this series please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Anthropology/book-series/SE0724

Truth, Intentionality and Evidence

Anthropological Approaches to Crime

Edited by Yazid Ben Hounet and Deborah Puccio-Den

Meeting Ethnography

Meetings as Key Technologies of Contemporary Governance, Development, and Resistance

Edited by Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall

Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound

Edited by Christine Guillebaud

On Knowing Humanity

Insights from Theology for Anthropology

Edited by Eloise Meneses and David Bronkema

Everyday Faith in Sufi Senegal

Laura L. Cochrane

Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South

The Human Consequences of Piracy in China and Brazil

Rosana Pinheiro-Machado

Meaning and Significance in Human Engagement

A Cognitive Approach to Culture

David B. Kronenfeld

Distortion

Social Processes Beyond the Structured and Systemic

Edited by Nigel Rapport

The Greek Crisis

Critical Anthropological Explorations and Ethnographic Approaches

Edited by Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgos Agelopoulos

Social Processes Beyond the Structured and Systemic

Edited by
Nigel Rapport

First published 2018
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ISBN: 978-1-138-23065-1 (hbk)
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The best laid schemes o Mice an Men, Gang aft agley

Robert Burns, from To a Mouse

Conceptualizing the distortion of human social life
NIGEL RAPPORT

Contorted environments and distorted being
HENRIK VIGH

A blind mans problem: Distortion and non-responsiveness; or, the construction of non-futures in Danish bureaucracy
NINA HOLM VOHNSEN

Distortion and Stanley Spencers life in art
NIGEL RAPPORT

The politics of paradox: Kierkegaardian theology and national conservatism in Denmark
MORTEN AXEL PEDERSEN

Into the crack: Scottish agricultural revolutions and the art of moaning
MORTEN NIELSEN

Chains of distortion: Awkward relations and productive resistance in a Danish consulting company
LISE RJSKJR PEDERSEN

Hello, can you hear me better now? Mediatized acoustemologies and distortion on the radio
SANDRA LORI PETERSEN

Epi-pro-logue: An anthropological theory of distortion
MORTEN NIELSEN AND MORTEN AXEL PEDERSEN

Morten Nielsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has done fourteen years of ethnographic research in sub-Saharan Africa (Mozambique), Latin America (Brazil), and the UK (Scotland). Based on these extensive ethnographic studies, he has published on time and temporality, urban and national citizenship, urban politics, access to urban land, state formation, formal/informal governance, vernacular architecture, materiality and political cosmologies. He is currently coordinating an interdisciplinary research project on digressions, where his subproject focuses on the paradoxical non-linearity of stand-up comedy in New York, USA.

Lise Rjskjr Pedersen is a PhD Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her current research concerns the emergence of applied business anthropology and data economy primarily in Denmark but also in the US. She is particularly interested in, and has worked on, topics such as the fabrication of knowledge, the new economy, creativity, innovation, the anthropology of time, hope, evidence and truth, and lateral and collaborative ethnographic experiments in anthropology.

Morten Axel Pedersen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia (2011), which received honourable mention for the Bateson Prize; The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition