Graham M. Jones

I am a cultural and linguistic anthropologist who explores how people use language and other media to enact expertise in practice, performance, and interaction. After finishing my PhD at NYU, I was a postdoctoral member of the Princeton Society of Fellows before joining the Anthropology program at MIT. My two monographs constitute a diptych:  Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician's Craft (California, 2011) describes day-to-day life and everyday talk within the insular subculture of contemporary French illusionists; Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy (Chicago, 2017) examines the meaning of magic in Western modernity, shuttling between the intellectual history of anthropology and the cultural history of popular entertainment. Alongside these books, I have a third set of projects, emerging from a longstanding collaboration with Bambi Schieffelin, investigating how language and culture shape, and are in turn shaped by, the way people use digital communications. At MIT, I teach classes on a range of subjects, including: magic, science, and religion; education; play and games; communications technologies; and ethnographic methods.