I quite like Leviathan also (I especially like the image of its skin stretched out over the multitudes like a canopy), although it also evokes for me (but maybe not for everyone) a valence of threat (also Hobbesian?)–the leviathan also *swallows* people. (See Book of Job 3:8, ‘May those who curse days curse that day, those who are ready to rouse leviathan.’) So I suppose this works depending on the valence you want to give your actor-units.

I would also like to second ‘conglomerate’, which would offer, as Crystal points out, a rich geological metaphor (while also alluding to business/economy). A conglomerate, for example, is a composite substance amassed and united in an aqueous solution; an agglomerate, its interesting counterpart, is such a substance united by heat (like volcanic rock). This might go some way towards incorporating notions of heterogeneity and multiplicity (if that’s what you want to do).

A final question: must you find a single/singular term and use it throughout? This makes sense, I think, if you’re interested in theory-building; but if you’re looking merely to find a way to refer to these entities, why rely on a single term that runs that risk of being blown out of proportion?

But I’ll send it again.

I appreciate your concern that people not just throw ideas around randomly. Although that said, I think what we may be doing here is arguing about what exactly the appropriate level of persnickitiness ought to be. While anthropologists have always been suckers for detail, we will probably never please the philologists, and that may be due less to my own ignorance (which I agree is certainly one explanation) and more to do with disciplinary preferences in re: persnickitiness.

What you’re doing in connecting Old Babylonian Mari to exilic Israel to Hobbes is crucial, but requires you be very explicit and thoughtful about how you contextualize. I have confidence you’ll do it. However the downside is potentially lots worse than if claimed to be ‘perfectly familiar’ with PNG if I knew that during the modern period there were colonialists, lots of languages, and mines. But the upside looks pretty great.

Big problem here–the Leviathan doesn’t just come from the Psalms, and was most certainly neither created nor configured by the “Psalmist” (an authorial concept almost as incoherent as “the emailer”). Discourse about the Leviathan as a monster that threatens to overwhelm the world or prevent its beginning appears in a few Psalms (Pss. 74 and 89 are the best examples) but also Isaiah 51, Habbakkuk, Job, and others. It’s a whole discourse in the Hebrew Bible and Revelation. The single best thing on this is still probably Gunkel’s Schoepfung und Chaos, which has finally appeared convenientaly as Creation and Chaos.

As you and I both noticed, there is a huge shift whereby the creature that the king’s patron god must defeat to enthrone the king (and here Psalm 89 has a West Semitic genealogy that goes back over 1000 years, to the Mari texts of 1800 BCE–happy to provide references) BECOMES the state.

I imagine you’re ahead of me here, but was Hobbes’ reconfiguration of the idea as radical as it seems at first glance, or is there a step-by-step transformation?

http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/publications/humans/part8.htm

PLEASE do an analysis of the use of the term ‘stakeholders’ in this local people and big corporations interacting work of yours.

The dissertation is focused basically on two ‘corporate actors’ — ‘The Ipili’ as an ethnic group and ‘the Porgera gold mine’, a huge open cut operation which operates on (some of their) land. The punchline is that ‘the Ipili’ seems problematic — who are the ‘real leaders’ and the ‘true landowners’ who really speaks ‘for the clan’ in negotiations. Meanwhile the transnational company operating the mine with thousands of employees and logistics spread out all over the world seems unproblematically to be ‘the mine’.

So the irony is that it is the more-or-less locally bounded group with ties of kinship and affinity that people think is problematic, whereas the huge organization held together by wages rather than a depth of face to face shared experience is somehow seen as obviously ‘existing’.

So, to answer Ken’s question, _yes_ the goal is to do a symmetrical analysis and decompose the taken for granted actor back into its component networks. I just need a name for what I’m decomposing, and I’m betting that ‘retro’ is fashion forward and the Psalmist is the new Ong and Collier 🙂

Oh and Hal, thanks for your comment — I’m familiar with your work, both in PNG and NZ.