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Books by Rane Willerslev
What would the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac look like through the value magnitude o... more What would the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac look like through the value magnitude of Chukchi sacrifice, and vice versa? Drawing on the Dumontian idea that a dominant value contains its contrary within, I show that what counts as the dominant value in each of the two sacrificial traditions is so deeply co-implicated that trickery (Chukchi) becomes the shadow of faith (Abraham), and vice versa. At certain moments, one dominant value or the other is captured by its own shadow and flips into its contrary. This reversibility takes place against a " paramount value " shared by both traditions: the necessary hierarchical distance between humanity and divinity. All of this allows us to reconsider Abraham's trial in a manner that is precisely contrary to most prevailing interpretations—namely, as an act in which God is put on trial by Abraham.
This article describes in detail a mortuary ritual among the Chukchi of Northern Kamchatka and po... more This article describes in detail a mortuary ritual among the Chukchi of Northern Kamchatka and points to its remarkable affinity with an ideal-typical reindeer sacrifice. We argue that this connection between human cremation and sacrifice plays a key role in the people's attempt to maintain and ensure continuation of their particular kind of life in a cosmos that is replete with numerous other, mostly hostile, life forms. The article describes all stages of the ritual and contextualizes the ritual in the literature on sacrifice. We argue that seeing Chukchi mortuary rituals as a way of transforming any death into a blood sacrifice calls into question well-established understandings of sacrifice as a means of diverting human violence. We suggest that ritual blood sacrifice may instead be seen as a way of protecting the sacrificial victim against violent forces and in doing so, securing the well-being of the community as a whole.
How do we take indigenous animism seriously in the sense proposed by Viveiros de Castro? In this ... more How do we take indigenous animism seriously in the sense proposed by Viveiros de Castro? In this article, I pose this challenge to all the major theories of animism, stretching from Tylor and Durkheim, over Lévi-Strauss to Ingold. I then go on to draw a comparison between Žižek's depiction of the cynical milieu of advanced capitalism in which ideology as " false consciousness " has lost force and the Siberian Yukaghirs for whom ridiculing the spirits is integral to their game of hunting. Both know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still they go along with it; both are ironically self-conscious about not taking the ruling ethos at face value. is makes me suggest an alternative: perhaps it is time for anthropology not to take indigenous animism too seriously.
If I had let myself be ruled by reason alone, I would surely be lying dead somewhere or another i... more If I had let myself be ruled by reason alone, I would surely be lying dead somewhere or another in the Siberian frost.
The Siberian taiga: a massive forest region of roughly 4.5 million square miles, stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Bering Sea, breathtakingly beautiful and the coldest inhabited region in the world. Winter temperatures plummet to a bitter 97 degrees below zero, and beneath the permafrost lie the fossilized remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and other ice age giants. For the Yukaghir, an indigenous people of the taiga, hunting sable is both an economic necessity and a spiritual experience—where trusting dreams and omens is as necessary as following animal tracks. Since the fall of Communism, a corrupt regional corporation has monopolized the fur trade, forcing the Yukaghir hunters into impoverished servitude.
Enter Rane Willerslev, a young Danish anthropologist who ventures into this frozen land on an idealistic mission to organize a fair-trade fur cooperative with the hunters. From the outset, things go terribly wrong. The regional fur company, with ties to corrupt public officials, proves it will stop at nothing to maintain its monopoly: one of Willerslev’s Yukaghir business partners is arrested on spurious charges of poaching and illegal trading; another drowns mysteriously. When police are sent to arrest him, Willerslev fears for his life, and he and a local hunter flee to a remote hunting lodge even deeper in the icy wilderness. Their situation turns even more desperate right away: they manage to kill a moose but lose the meat to predators and begin to starve, frostbitten and isolated in the frozen taiga.
Thus begins Willerslev’s extraordinary, chilling tale of one year living in exile among Yukaghir hunters in the stark Siberian taiga region. At turns shocking and quietly moving, On the Run in Siberia is a pulse-pounding tale of idealism, political corruption, starvation, and survival (with a timely assist from Vladimir Putin) as well as a striking portrait of the Yukaghirs’ shamanistic tradition and their threatened way of life, a drama unfolding daily in one of the world’s coldest, most enthralling landscapes.
This is an insightful, highly original ethnographic interpretation of the hunting life of the Yuk... more This is an insightful, highly original ethnographic interpretation of the hunting life of the Yukaghirs, a little-known group of indigenous people in the Upper Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia. Basing his study on firsthand experience with Yukaghir hunters, Rane Willerslev focuses on the practical implications of living in a "hall-of-mirrors" world--one inhabited by humans, animals, and spirits, all of whom are understood to be endless mimetic doubles of one another. In this world human beings inhabit a betwixt-and-between state in which their souls are both substance and nonsubstance, both body and soul, both their own individual selves and reincarnated others. Hunters are thus both human and the animals they imitate, which forces them to steer a complicated course between the ability to transcend difference and the necessity of maintaining identity.
Papers by Rane Willerslev
Abstract: This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the... more Abstract: This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to
assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate
empathy with the morally and socially “good”—with compassion, understanding,
cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality—ignores what we propose to call the
“dark side of empathy”: that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely
deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by means of vicariousness.
Two diverse ethnographic cases, of hunting in Siberia and political
violence in Indonesia, provide the empirical background for a discussion of the
complex relationship of empathy to mimesis, deception, violence, and sociality.
The Siberian Northeast shows striking parallels between the cosmologies of hunters and reindeer ... more The Siberian Northeast shows striking parallels between the cosmologies of hunters and reindeer
herders. What may this tell us about the transformation from hunting to pastoralism? This article
argues for a structural identity between hunting and sacrifice, and for the domestication of the
reindeer as the result of hunters’ efforts to use sacrifice to control the accidental variables of the
hunt. Hunters can practise their ethos of ‘trust’ with prey only through highly controlled ritual
enactments. We describe two: the famous bear festival of the Amur Gulf region and the consecrated
reindeer of the Eveny. Both express the same overall logic by which sacrifice functions as an ideal
hunt. The animal is involved in a relation not of domination but of trust, while also undergoing a
process of taming. We therefore suggest that the reindeer’s domestication may be based not only
on ecological or economic adaptations, but also on cosmology.
Berghahn Books, 2013
“This is an ambitious and ground-breaking volume which takes a thoroughly interdisciplinary persp... more “This is an ambitious and ground-breaking volume which takes a thoroughly interdisciplinary perspective on what the editors have branded as ‘transcultural montage.’ ...The total effect is a mesmerising and in many ways insightful comparative endeavour that will do much to consolidate montage as a theme that goes to the heart of contemporary social theory.” (Martin Holbraad, University College London)
“This is an important, innovative, and timely collection. Edited by two creative Scandinavian anthropologists, and with contributions from an impressive mix of established and up-coming names within performative anthropology, visual anthropology, and museum anthropology among other disciplinary subfields, the volume offers a significant contribution to this and cognate disciplines, and it is bound to have a great and lasting impact.” (Morten Axel Pedersen, University of Copenhagen)
“Transcultural Montage contains an abundance of fresh ideas in many sub-disciplines of anthropology such as medical anthropology, cognitive anthropology, cultural and economic anthropology, but also semantics, museology and knowledge production not to mention visual anthropology, the main sub-discipline to which this publication is dedicated. As one flips through the pages of this aesthetically striking edition (300 pages with more than 70 color illustrations) one stumbles upon beautiful, almost poetic accounts, photo images, self-ethnographies and descriptions of religious rituals. While reading the book one has the feeling of having a nice, handpicked collection of anthropological ideas in one’s hands.” (Maria Vivod, Somatosphere.net)
TRANSCULTURAL MONTAGE
The disruptive power of montage has often been regarded as a threat to scholarly representations of the social world. This volume asserts the opposite: that the destabilization of commonsense perception is the very precondition for transcending social and cultural categories. The contributors—anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and curators—explore the use of montage as a heuristic tool for comparative analysis in anthropological writing, film, and exhibition making. Exploring phenomena such as human perception, memory, visuality, ritual, time, and globalization, they apply montage to restructure our basic understanding of social reality. Furthermore, as George E. Marcus suggests in the afterword, the power of montage that this volume exposes lies in its ability to open the very “combustion chamber” of social theory by juxtaposing one’s claims to knowledge with the path undertaken to arrive at those claims.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Christian Suhr is a filmmaker and a post-doctoral research fellow in anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the co-director of the award-winning films Unity through Culture (DER, 2011), Ngat is Dead (DER, 2009), as well as Want a Camel, Yes? (Persona Film, 2005). He is author of the forthcoming ethnographic film monograph Descending with Angels about Islamic exorcism and Danish psychiatry and the article “Can Film Show the Invisible?” (with Rane Willerslev, Current Anthropology, 2012).
Rane Willerslev has his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2003) and is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the author of Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (University of California Press, 2007) and On the Run in Siberia (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). He is the co-editor of Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual (Ashgate Publishing, 2013). In addition, he has written extensively on topics related to vision, visuality, and filmmaking.
Current Anthropology, 2012
This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striv... more This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions—a position often associated with observational cinema—but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its invisible and irreducible otherness. This, however, is an argument not to dismiss the realism of much ethnographic filmmaking, but rather to demonstrate how montage can and must be used to break with the mimetic dogma of the “humanized” camera. The effective image, we argue, depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.
Bloomsbury Academic: "Experimental Film and Anthropology" edited by Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino, 2014
The medium of film has long been hailed for its capacity for producing shocks of an entertaining,... more The medium of film has long been hailed for its capacity for producing shocks of an entertaining, thought-provoking, or even politically emancipative nature. But what is a shock, how and when does it occur, how long does it last, and are there particular techniques for producing cinematic shocks? In this text we exchange personal experiences of cinematic shocks and ponder over these questions as related to wider theories on human trauma, emancipation, and enlightenment. In conclusion we argue for a revision of anthropological notions of validity in terms of the efficacy of the cinematic shock rather than the perceived correspondence between cinema and the real.
Published in: "Experimental Film and Anthropology," edited by Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino. 2014. London: Bloomsbury.
Journal for The Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2009
The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an ... more The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an anthropological theory of value. By way of a Socratic debate, two rather conflicting points of view emerge. On the one hand, it is argued that anthropology can
make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory. On the other hand, it is argued that anthropology, as an ethnographically driven discipline, produces an anti-theory of value. The two perspectives derive from two different visions for anthropology, which differ radically on how they see the relationship of the discipline to other disciplines and to the history of ideas more generally. Where these views converge, however, is on the aim of exploring the potential of value as theory. In both perspectives, value is seen as a powerful concept that can generate new ethnographic questions and
insights and can provide a crucial dimension to cultural critique.
Link to article:
http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/264/335
What would the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac look like through the value magnitude o... more What would the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac look like through the value magnitude of Chukchi sacrifice, and vice versa? Drawing on the Dumontian idea that a dominant value contains its contrary within, I show that what counts as the dominant value in each of the two sacrificial traditions is so deeply co-implicated that trickery (Chukchi) becomes the shadow of faith (Abraham), and vice versa. At certain moments, one dominant value or the other is captured by its own shadow and flips into its contrary. This reversibility takes place against a " paramount value " shared by both traditions: the necessary hierarchical distance between humanity and divinity. All of this allows us to reconsider Abraham's trial in a manner that is precisely contrary to most prevailing interpretations—namely, as an act in which God is put on trial by Abraham.
This article describes in detail a mortuary ritual among the Chukchi of Northern Kamchatka and po... more This article describes in detail a mortuary ritual among the Chukchi of Northern Kamchatka and points to its remarkable affinity with an ideal-typical reindeer sacrifice. We argue that this connection between human cremation and sacrifice plays a key role in the people's attempt to maintain and ensure continuation of their particular kind of life in a cosmos that is replete with numerous other, mostly hostile, life forms. The article describes all stages of the ritual and contextualizes the ritual in the literature on sacrifice. We argue that seeing Chukchi mortuary rituals as a way of transforming any death into a blood sacrifice calls into question well-established understandings of sacrifice as a means of diverting human violence. We suggest that ritual blood sacrifice may instead be seen as a way of protecting the sacrificial victim against violent forces and in doing so, securing the well-being of the community as a whole.
How do we take indigenous animism seriously in the sense proposed by Viveiros de Castro? In this ... more How do we take indigenous animism seriously in the sense proposed by Viveiros de Castro? In this article, I pose this challenge to all the major theories of animism, stretching from Tylor and Durkheim, over Lévi-Strauss to Ingold. I then go on to draw a comparison between Žižek's depiction of the cynical milieu of advanced capitalism in which ideology as " false consciousness " has lost force and the Siberian Yukaghirs for whom ridiculing the spirits is integral to their game of hunting. Both know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still they go along with it; both are ironically self-conscious about not taking the ruling ethos at face value. is makes me suggest an alternative: perhaps it is time for anthropology not to take indigenous animism too seriously.
If I had let myself be ruled by reason alone, I would surely be lying dead somewhere or another i... more If I had let myself be ruled by reason alone, I would surely be lying dead somewhere or another in the Siberian frost.
The Siberian taiga: a massive forest region of roughly 4.5 million square miles, stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Bering Sea, breathtakingly beautiful and the coldest inhabited region in the world. Winter temperatures plummet to a bitter 97 degrees below zero, and beneath the permafrost lie the fossilized remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and other ice age giants. For the Yukaghir, an indigenous people of the taiga, hunting sable is both an economic necessity and a spiritual experience—where trusting dreams and omens is as necessary as following animal tracks. Since the fall of Communism, a corrupt regional corporation has monopolized the fur trade, forcing the Yukaghir hunters into impoverished servitude.
Enter Rane Willerslev, a young Danish anthropologist who ventures into this frozen land on an idealistic mission to organize a fair-trade fur cooperative with the hunters. From the outset, things go terribly wrong. The regional fur company, with ties to corrupt public officials, proves it will stop at nothing to maintain its monopoly: one of Willerslev’s Yukaghir business partners is arrested on spurious charges of poaching and illegal trading; another drowns mysteriously. When police are sent to arrest him, Willerslev fears for his life, and he and a local hunter flee to a remote hunting lodge even deeper in the icy wilderness. Their situation turns even more desperate right away: they manage to kill a moose but lose the meat to predators and begin to starve, frostbitten and isolated in the frozen taiga.
Thus begins Willerslev’s extraordinary, chilling tale of one year living in exile among Yukaghir hunters in the stark Siberian taiga region. At turns shocking and quietly moving, On the Run in Siberia is a pulse-pounding tale of idealism, political corruption, starvation, and survival (with a timely assist from Vladimir Putin) as well as a striking portrait of the Yukaghirs’ shamanistic tradition and their threatened way of life, a drama unfolding daily in one of the world’s coldest, most enthralling landscapes.
This is an insightful, highly original ethnographic interpretation of the hunting life of the Yuk... more This is an insightful, highly original ethnographic interpretation of the hunting life of the Yukaghirs, a little-known group of indigenous people in the Upper Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia. Basing his study on firsthand experience with Yukaghir hunters, Rane Willerslev focuses on the practical implications of living in a "hall-of-mirrors" world--one inhabited by humans, animals, and spirits, all of whom are understood to be endless mimetic doubles of one another. In this world human beings inhabit a betwixt-and-between state in which their souls are both substance and nonsubstance, both body and soul, both their own individual selves and reincarnated others. Hunters are thus both human and the animals they imitate, which forces them to steer a complicated course between the ability to transcend difference and the necessity of maintaining identity.
Abstract: This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to assign empathy the... more Abstract: This article challenges the tendency, both academic and popular, to
assign empathy the status of a virtue. The widespread inclination to associate
empathy with the morally and socially “good”—with compassion, understanding,
cultural bonding, and non-violent sociality—ignores what we propose to call the
“dark side of empathy”: that is, the multiple ways in which empathy is routinely
deployed to manipulate, seduce, deceive, and dehumanize others by means of vicariousness.
Two diverse ethnographic cases, of hunting in Siberia and political
violence in Indonesia, provide the empirical background for a discussion of the
complex relationship of empathy to mimesis, deception, violence, and sociality.
The Siberian Northeast shows striking parallels between the cosmologies of hunters and reindeer ... more The Siberian Northeast shows striking parallels between the cosmologies of hunters and reindeer
herders. What may this tell us about the transformation from hunting to pastoralism? This article
argues for a structural identity between hunting and sacrifice, and for the domestication of the
reindeer as the result of hunters’ efforts to use sacrifice to control the accidental variables of the
hunt. Hunters can practise their ethos of ‘trust’ with prey only through highly controlled ritual
enactments. We describe two: the famous bear festival of the Amur Gulf region and the consecrated
reindeer of the Eveny. Both express the same overall logic by which sacrifice functions as an ideal
hunt. The animal is involved in a relation not of domination but of trust, while also undergoing a
process of taming. We therefore suggest that the reindeer’s domestication may be based not only
on ecological or economic adaptations, but also on cosmology.
Berghahn Books, 2013
“This is an ambitious and ground-breaking volume which takes a thoroughly interdisciplinary persp... more “This is an ambitious and ground-breaking volume which takes a thoroughly interdisciplinary perspective on what the editors have branded as ‘transcultural montage.’ ...The total effect is a mesmerising and in many ways insightful comparative endeavour that will do much to consolidate montage as a theme that goes to the heart of contemporary social theory.” (Martin Holbraad, University College London)
“This is an important, innovative, and timely collection. Edited by two creative Scandinavian anthropologists, and with contributions from an impressive mix of established and up-coming names within performative anthropology, visual anthropology, and museum anthropology among other disciplinary subfields, the volume offers a significant contribution to this and cognate disciplines, and it is bound to have a great and lasting impact.” (Morten Axel Pedersen, University of Copenhagen)
“Transcultural Montage contains an abundance of fresh ideas in many sub-disciplines of anthropology such as medical anthropology, cognitive anthropology, cultural and economic anthropology, but also semantics, museology and knowledge production not to mention visual anthropology, the main sub-discipline to which this publication is dedicated. As one flips through the pages of this aesthetically striking edition (300 pages with more than 70 color illustrations) one stumbles upon beautiful, almost poetic accounts, photo images, self-ethnographies and descriptions of religious rituals. While reading the book one has the feeling of having a nice, handpicked collection of anthropological ideas in one’s hands.” (Maria Vivod, Somatosphere.net)
TRANSCULTURAL MONTAGE
The disruptive power of montage has often been regarded as a threat to scholarly representations of the social world. This volume asserts the opposite: that the destabilization of commonsense perception is the very precondition for transcending social and cultural categories. The contributors—anthropologists, filmmakers, photographers, and curators—explore the use of montage as a heuristic tool for comparative analysis in anthropological writing, film, and exhibition making. Exploring phenomena such as human perception, memory, visuality, ritual, time, and globalization, they apply montage to restructure our basic understanding of social reality. Furthermore, as George E. Marcus suggests in the afterword, the power of montage that this volume exposes lies in its ability to open the very “combustion chamber” of social theory by juxtaposing one’s claims to knowledge with the path undertaken to arrive at those claims.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Christian Suhr is a filmmaker and a post-doctoral research fellow in anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the co-director of the award-winning films Unity through Culture (DER, 2011), Ngat is Dead (DER, 2009), as well as Want a Camel, Yes? (Persona Film, 2005). He is author of the forthcoming ethnographic film monograph Descending with Angels about Islamic exorcism and Danish psychiatry and the article “Can Film Show the Invisible?” (with Rane Willerslev, Current Anthropology, 2012).
Rane Willerslev has his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2003) and is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the author of Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (University of California Press, 2007) and On the Run in Siberia (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). He is the co-editor of Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual (Ashgate Publishing, 2013). In addition, he has written extensively on topics related to vision, visuality, and filmmaking.
Current Anthropology, 2012
This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striv... more This article suggests that film can evoke hidden dimensions of ethnographic reality, not by striving for ever more realistic depictions—a position often associated with observational cinema—but rather by exploiting the artificial means through which human vision can be transcended. Achieved particularly through the use of montage, such disruptions can multiply the perspectives from which filmic subject matter is perceived, thus conveying its invisible and irreducible otherness. This, however, is an argument not to dismiss the realism of much ethnographic filmmaking, but rather to demonstrate how montage can and must be used to break with the mimetic dogma of the “humanized” camera. The effective image, we argue, depends crucially on maintaining a tension between a strong sense of reality and its occasional, and therefore only then effective, disruption through montage.
Bloomsbury Academic: "Experimental Film and Anthropology" edited by Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino, 2014
The medium of film has long been hailed for its capacity for producing shocks of an entertaining,... more The medium of film has long been hailed for its capacity for producing shocks of an entertaining, thought-provoking, or even politically emancipative nature. But what is a shock, how and when does it occur, how long does it last, and are there particular techniques for producing cinematic shocks? In this text we exchange personal experiences of cinematic shocks and ponder over these questions as related to wider theories on human trauma, emancipation, and enlightenment. In conclusion we argue for a revision of anthropological notions of validity in terms of the efficacy of the cinematic shock rather than the perceived correspondence between cinema and the real.
Published in: "Experimental Film and Anthropology," edited by Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino. 2014. London: Bloomsbury.
Journal for The Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2009
The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an ... more The introduction addresses the question of whether it is useful or indeed possible to develop an anthropological theory of value. By way of a Socratic debate, two rather conflicting points of view emerge. On the one hand, it is argued that anthropology can
make a major and quite coherent contribution to the issue of value in social theory. On the other hand, it is argued that anthropology, as an ethnographically driven discipline, produces an anti-theory of value. The two perspectives derive from two different visions for anthropology, which differ radically on how they see the relationship of the discipline to other disciplines and to the history of ideas more generally. Where these views converge, however, is on the aim of exploring the potential of value as theory. In both perspectives, value is seen as a powerful concept that can generate new ethnographic questions and
insights and can provide a crucial dimension to cultural critique.
Link to article:
http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/264/335
This article attempts to sketch a new anthropological epistemology. It does so by revisiting the ... more This article attempts to sketch a new anthropological epistemology. It does so by revisiting the work that concepts do in economic models, and by suggesting an alternative ‘anthropological concept of the concept’ for the economy. The article looks to how concepts create their own limits of meaning and uses the very idea of limit to rethink how conceptual thought out-grows and transforms itself. We develop our epistemology by looking at the socio-economic practices and institutions of the Yukaghirs, a small group of indigenous hunters, living along the Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia. The Yukaghirs’ moment of creative possibilities is given through the reversibility of every one of their economic practices, informed by the work of a shadow force (ayibii) that aims for the limit.
We gain insights from this notion of reversibility to rethink the purchase of the ‘economic’ in our contemporary world, questioning the validity of such ‘conceptual’ descriptions as virtualism or the knowledge economy.
