About

Marius Ion Bența

Marius Ion Bența, PhD

Books

On the sociology of “parallel universes”

Author of Experiencing Multiple Realities: Alfred Schutz’s Sociology of the Finite Provinces of Meaning, Routledge, 2018.

This book was based on my PhD thesis written under prof. Arpad Szakolczai’s supervision at University College Cork and defended in 2014. It draws on Schutz’s conception that the social world is not a unique and coherent reality but a multiplicity of “provinces” (e.g., everyday life, the world of fiction, the world of children’s play etc.), which are coherent in themselves yet incompatible with each other. It is, if you wish, a sort of sociology of the “metaverses” that humanity has experienced not only in the contemporary civilisation, but long before the invention of the digital virtual worlds.

The Technologisation of the Social

Co-editor (with P. O’Connor) of The Technologisation of the Social: A Political Anthropology of the Digital Machine, Routledge, 2021.

This is a collective volume that explores the way contemporary technology shapes, distorts and fractures our experience and our modes of being in the world. Particularly, authors investigate the deep and subtle changes that affect the fabric of society and the delicate balance of things that make us human.

Walling, Boundaries and Liminality

Co-editor (with A. Horvath and J. Davison) of Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations, Routledge, 2018.

This is a collective book that deals with walling, walls, frontiers and separators from the perspective of political anthropology. Walls become increasingly important and, as the 2020 medical crisis has shown it, belong to a particular mechanism of violence that various instances of political power make use against their citizens.

Publications

Find out more about my academic texts on these pages:

Other stuff

My videos

Contact

  • e-mail: bentza at gmail dot com
  • phone: +40 721 84 54 58

Portrait by Csibi László in a 2020 summer afternoon in Cluj city.
Many thanks, Csibi!