Dr. Scott MacLochlainn, 2018-2021

Scott MacLochlainn was a Post-doctoral Fellow with the Department of Religion, where he was also a Research Affiliate with the Max Planck-Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy, and Social Change. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, having completed his undergraduate studies in anthropology and history at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. With a particular interest in language and semiotics, his research examined media, legal, and religious transformation in the Philippines. His first book, The Copy Generic (University of Chicago Press), describes the increasing importance of cultural replication and reproduction. Everywhere and nowhere, discarded as the copy, the knock-off, the old and over-generalized, this book argues that the generic is instead remarkably neglected as a cornerstone of contemporary media, language, and ethical formations. Ethnographically and historically situated in the Philippines and across Southeast Asia, this book moves between a number of spaces, including those of colonial urban planning, sign language, branding and copyright law, Christianity, and the politics of indigeneity. He is currently undertaking a Wenner-Gren and Max Planck Institute funded research project on how the logistics and adjudication of death have emerged as critical sites of ethical transformation in the Philippines. He has convened the EASA Network for Ethnographic Theory and runs the WriteLab Workshop at the Max Planck Institute.

Research projects

• Rituals of evidence: media, faith, and death in the Philippines (completed)
• Smaller Gods: the divine lives of corporations in the Philippines (completed)
• The copy generic (completed)