Photo credits:
Danish Saroee
Ilana F. Silber
Guest of the Principal, SCAS.
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University,
Ramat Gan
Ilana Silber’s main fields of interest are the sociology of gift processes, charity and philanthropy, to which
she also adds a cross-cutting interest in sociological theory, interpretative cultural analysis and macro-
comparative historical sociology.
She obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has been a visiting fellow
at Harvard University, Princeton University and Yale University. Since 2014, she is a Faculty Fellow of the
Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, and since 1998, a member of the M.A.U.S.S (Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste
dans les Sciences Sociales).
Silber’s publications include "The Cultural Worth of Economies of Worth: French Pragmatic Sociology from
a Cultural Sociological Perspective" (2016); “Luc Boltanski and the Gift: Beyond Love, Beyond Suspicion...?”
(2014); “Neither Mauss nor Veyne? Peter Brown’s Interpretative Path to the Gift” (2013); "Emotions as
Regime of Justification? The Case of Philanthropic Civic Anger" (2011); "Mauss, Weber et les trajectoires
historiques du don" (2010); "Bourdieu’s Gift to Gift Theory: An Unacknowledged Trajectory" (2009); “Prag-
matic Sociology as Cultural Sociology: Beyond Repertoire Theory?”(2003); “Modern Philanthropy: Reassessing
the Viability of a Maussian Perspective” (1998); and Virtuosity, Charisma and Social Order: A Comparative
Sociological Study of Monasticism in Theravada Buddhism and Medieval Catholicism (Cambridge University
Press; 1995).
While at SCAS she will be working at completing a book arguing the benefits of a mutual encounter between
the legacy of Max Weber and Marcel Mauss, as well as various strands of contemporary cultural and pragmatic
sociology for a better comparative understanding of gift processes in general, and of assymetric forms of public
giving in past and present contexts.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2018-19.