Jonathan Glasser
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Jonathan Glasser is Associate Professor of Anthropology at William & Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia. His research has asked questions about social memory, difference, and reproduction though attention to musical, poetic, and patrimonial practices in the Maghrib. He is currently completing a book about Muslim-Jewish intimacy in and around music in Algeria, and he is also drafting a book about the fate of the concept of evolution in anthropological thought. He has held research fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Paris, Fulbright-IIE, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and his first book received awards from the Tunisian Ministry of Cultural Affairs and from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies.
In December 2023, he joins the IAS for a one-month writing residency.
Research Interests
Anthropology, history, North African Studies
Rethinking Patrimony as Inalienability
Theories of the gift and of other forms of exchange continue to play a prominent role in anthropology and the wider social sciences and humanities a century after the seminal formulations of Marcel Mauss. This project seeks to synthesize and evaluate this considerable body of thought by revisiting a rare late twentieth-century critique of Mauss: anthropologist Annette Weiner’s theory of inalienable possessions, which she argued act against the impulse toward reciprocity that lies at the center of Mauss’s theory of the gift.
Weiner’s concept of inalienable possessions has been influential for students of the concept and practice of collective patrimony in nation-state contexts. However, such applications of the notion of inalienability tend to work with only a small part of Weiner’s thought. Engaging with it more fully, including by situating it within the bigger picture of gift exchange theory, reveals Weiner’s thought to be closer to Mauss’s in some crucial respects than first appears. At the same time, it shows her thought to open new avenues for thinking about collectivity, object relations, generational transmission, and social reproduction, including in ways that both complement and challenge aspects of the ontological turn of the past two decades. By applying an enlarged view of Weiner’s thought to a series of related patrimonial practices drawn mainly from the modern Maghrib, this project maps the aspects of exchange theory that continue to be generative precisely because they remain unsettled.
Key publications
The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
“Patrimony as Inalienability in Nineteenth-Century Algeria: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Destroying and the Promise of Comparison.” Hésperis-Tamuda, LV (4) (2020): 69-99. Special Issue on Anthropological Perspectives of the Maghreb, eds. Aomar Boum and Rahma Bourqia.
“More Than Friends: On Muslim-Jewish Musical Intimacy in Algeria and Beyond.” In Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures Between North Africa and France, ed. Samuel Sami Everett et Rebekah Vince. Pp. 43-60. Liverpool University Press, 2020.
 New session of the "Paris IAS Ideas" talk series, with the participation of Jonathan Glasser, William & Mary University, USA, Paris IAS Fellow |
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