Marius Ion Benta

This work is a critical introduction to Alfred Schutz’s sociology of the multiple reality and an enterprise that seeks to reassess and reconstruct the Schutzian project. In the first part of the study, I inquire into Schutz’s biographical con- text that surrounds the germination of this conception and I analyse the main texts of Schutz where he has dealt directly with ‘finite provinces of meaning.’ On the basis of this analysis, I suggest and discuss, in Part II, several solutions to the shortcomings of the theoretical system that Schutz drew upon the sociological problem of multiple reality. Specifically, I discuss problems related to the struc- ture, the dynamics, and the interrelationing of finite provinces of meaning as well as the way they relate to the questions of narrativity, experience, space, time, and identity.

This book offers a theoretical investigation into the general problem of reality as a multiplicity of ‘finite provinces of meaning’, as developed in the work of Alfred Schutz. A critical introduction to Schutz’s sociology of multiple realities as well as a sympathetic re-reading and reconstruction of his project, Experiencing Multiple Realities traces the genesis and implications of this concept in Schutz’s writings before presenting an analysis of various ways in which it can shed light on major sociological problems, such as social action, social time, social space, identity, or narrativity.

The problem of trickster leadership is discussed in this chapter in the context of the Romanian experience of modernity. This experience has emerged as a Post-Byzantine condition; it was strongly marked by the forty years of communist regimes and was loaded with a high amount of duplicity and ambivalence. The chapter argues that the communist type of trickster leadership in Romania was the outcome of a clash between two types of corruption: a domestic one and a global one. The idea of ‘forms without substance’, coined in 1868 by the historian Titu Maiorescu, is shown to be indicative of the exilic condition in which Romanians remained caught even after their country became independent. The description of this paradoxical condition is followed by a review of the main eras of Romania as a modern state, arguing that this condition has led to an accumulation of disharmony and the absurd in the social fabric of the people.

In an era of digital revolution, artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality, technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality. Some of the most basic human capacities are increasingly being outsourced to machines and we increasingly experience and interpret the world through digital interfaces, with machines becoming ever more ‘social’ beings. Social interaction and human perception are being reshaped in unprecedented ways. This book explores this technologisation of the social and the attendant penetration of permanent liminality into those aspects of the lifeworld where individuals had previously sought some kind of stability and meaning. Through a historical and anthropological examination of this phenomenon, it problematises the underlying logic of limitless technological expansion and our increasing inability to imagine either ourselves or our world in other than technological terms. Drawing on a variety of concepts from political anthropology, including liminality, the trickster, imitation, schismogenesis, participation, and the void, it interrogates the contemporary technological revolution in a manner that will be of interest to sociologists, social and anthropological theorists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the digital transformation of social life. Table of Contents Introduction: The Technologisation of the Social: A 21st-Century Megamachine? Paul O’Connor 1. Communication as Theatricalisation: Self-Presentation in the Digital Age Arpad Szakolczai 2. Parasites of the Social: Digital Disruptions of the Labour Market Tom Boland 3. Possessed by Technology: The Metastasis of Absence Agnes Horvath 4. Technologisation of the Social: Symbiosis, Parasitism, or Predation? Daniel Gati 5. J'accuse Zéro: The Technology of Zero and the Making of a Personal Void Ray Griffin 6. Digital Affordances and the Liminal Stephen Turner 7. The Smart Womb: Digital Technologies and the Maze of Trickster Politics Marius Ion Benta 8. Brave New Industry? The Dark Side of Dematerialisation and Industry 4.0 Thomas S.J. Smith 9. ‘What Have You Caught?’: Nannycams and Hidden Cameras as Normalised Surveillance of the Intimate Janos Mark Szakolczai 10. Coercive Visibility: Discipline in the Digital Public Arena Paul O’Connor Conclusion: Is There a Way Out of the Technologisation of the Social? Marius Ion Benta

This paper is an exploration of the multiple meanings that the invention of the brick – this simple artefact that has permitted the raising of complex and durable buildings – has brought to civilisation and to humans in their relationship with the world. I suggest that bricks may have brought a number of novel experiences to society, whose meanings are important for the understanding of the modern condition and its emphasis on rationalism, replicability, precision, standardisation and modularity among other principles. I also point out that bricks, along with rectangular types of packaging, are eminently liminal objects that entail a peculiar form of violence.

This article is a study on Paul’s mystical experiences using an interpretive framework that relies on multiple grounds: Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology of the “multiple realities” applied to the problem of religion, political anthropology and general scholarship on Paul. The aim of this study is also multiple: I seek to draw an interpretive insight into those mystical experiences that have been traditionally attributed to Paul by using a hermeneutic lens provided by Schutzian phenomenology, to clarify this hermeneutic method as such and explore its interpretive potential for the phenomenology of religion in general, and to interpret the results of this analysis from the reflexive-historical perspective of political anthropology.

This paper aims at capturing a paradoxical situation of modern Romanian nationalism that is both a symptom and a consequence of the country’s post-communist “liquid” modernity: the tension between the essentialist and the constructionist discourses related to nationalism and ethnic identity. Approaching this topic can be an important endeavor not only for a better understanding of the condition of an eminently liminal geography in Europe’s late modernity (East/West, democracy/totalitarianism, tradition/modernity), but also for addressing two questions of major importance to political anthropology: (1) which are the political consequences of exposing a certain community to the scientific discourse produced in the sphere of the social sciences about that very community? (2) how is it possible for modern national identity to be commodified and for citizenship to be contractualized?

Contemporary challenges related to walls, borders and encirclement, such as migration, integration, and endemic historical conflicts, can only be understood properly from a long-term perspective. This book seeks to go beyond conventional definitions of the long duréeby locating the social practice of walling and encirclement in the broadest context of human history, integrating insights from archaeology and anthropology. Such an approach, far from being simply academic, has crucial contemporary relevance, as its focus on origins helps to locate the essential dynamics of this practice, and provides a rare external position from which to view the phenomenon as a transformative exercise, with the area walled serving as an artificial womb or matrix. The modern world, with its ingrained ideas of borders, nation states and other entities, often makes it is very difficult to gain a critical distance and detachment to see beyond conventional perspectives. The unique approach of this book offers an antidote to this problem. Cases discussed in the book range from Palaeolithic caves, the ancient walls of Göbekli Tepe, Jericho, and Babylon, to the foundation of Rome, the Chinese Empire, medieval Europe and the Berlin Wall. The book also looks at contemporary developments such as the Palestinian wall, Eastern and Southern European examples, Trump's proposed Mexican wall, the use of Greece as a bulwark containing migration flows, and the transformative experience of voluntary work in a Calcutta hospice. In doing so, the book offers a political anthropology of one of the most fundamental yet perennially problematic human practices: the constructing of walls. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and political theory.

In this chapter, we address the problem of walling and its violence-related connotations in modernity following an interpretive path. We analyse and interpret the biblical version of the Babel myth, which we consider an archetypal story relevant for the primeval experiences of the passage from the nomadic to the settled way of life and from village to city. By drawing parallels between the Babel story and Mumford or other anthropological frameworks, we argue that the primeval hubris of arrogance a1nd ambition of building of a wall, a tower and a name was followed by a second form of hubris, which is specific to the modern world: the inversion of the practices of waling and practices of cohesion, which leads to a proliferation of permanently liminal spaces.

This chapter is an exploration, from the perspective of political anthropology and philosophical anthropology, of the new type of human condition that is currently taking shape with the advent of a wide sphere of smart technologies and artificial intelligence. Digital technologies of communication, transport, telepresence, interface, workflow optimisation etc. advance at high speed, and social scientists have little time to reflect upon, to discern and to analyse the fundamental ways in which such technologies alter, fracture and reshape our basic modes of being-in-the-world and of relating with each other. As coding and algorithms claim an ever increasing importance in the governance of our selves and our communities, I try to anticipate in this chapter some of the unintended consequences of this engineering fever, which is being highly encouraged and supported by many governments and transnational organisations in the Western world. I show that these technologies alter social action and the object/agent/subject relationships at a very deep level, giving rise to a shift in the political, economic and social structure of society. I explore the impact of smart technologies in the light of such notions as performance, commodity, fairground, mediality, surveillance, code-space and so on. I argue that this global attempt at “technologising the social” is part of the long-term march of modernity towards a trickster-inspired universe that is plunged into a state of permanent liminality.