Michael Herzfeld, who is currently conducting research on competition and cooperation among this particular group of artisans, will explore the complex implications of familial metaphors and seemingly contradictory assessments of trustworthiness as a path to understanding how they negotiate the embarrassments of human weakness amid a social ideology that places high value on craft, tradition, and a pious attitude of detachment from materiality.  He will then reflect on comparisons with his earlier work among Cretan artisans and on recent attempts to identify “communities of practice” as spaces in which social attitudes and practical techniques are rehearsed, standardized, and creatively deformed.  He will conclude by offering some thoughts on how a recognition of the principles of “social poetics” might be used to bring social-anthropological and archaeological insights into a common frame.

Michael Herzfeld (Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University; former and founding Director (2014-180, Thai Studies Program, Asia Center, Harvard University); and Senior Advisor on Critical Heritage Studies to the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, and Visiting Professor at Leiden University. He is also Chiang Jang Scholar and Visiting Professor at Shanghai International University, and holds honorary appointments at Thammasat University, Bangkok, and the University of Rome I (La Sapienza).  Michael Herzfeld is the author of eleven books (most recently Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok, 2016) and Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Institutions, and Societies, 2016), and is the producer of two films about Rome and currently working on two films about Bangkok. Herzfeld – who has conducted field research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand – currently specializes in nationalism, bureaucracy, craft production and apprenticeship, knowledge politics, the management of the past, and the social impact of heritage conservation and gentrification.