HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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A drum that speaks
No full textThis photographic essay presents material and findings from a documentation project on the gugu (slit drum) carried out in Western Equatoria State of South Sudan between 2021 and 2023. These wooden drums, which can stand up to five feet high, are often carved into elaborate zoomorphic designs. They are used in dances, as a means of communication and increasingly in Christian worship. They embody the social center of many Zande communities. Their production takes several months to complete and requires a hardwood tree and specialist knowledge of several traditional carving implements. We commissioned a carver, Elia Magas Mboriundo, to make a gugu and allow us to film its process of creation from start to finish. As part of gathering information, we also interviewed elders about their knowledge of the gugu and the changes they had observed in their lifetimes. We wanted to explore the impact of war and displacement on the material knowledge of the gugu over the last hundred years
Triangulation: An imperial power device
No full textDrawing on Katherine Verdery’s Transylvanian villagers and fieldwork in Latvia, this article discusses triangulation as an imperial power device whereby one actor makes an alliance with another to influence a third. The social and political field within which triangulation is deployed is not a flat world of nation-states or networks, but a three-dimensional social and political field. The actors involved are not of the same kind (e.g., ethnic groups or nation-states), nor are they arranged in binary pairs (e.g., colonizer and the colonized). Most importantly, triangulation is not a power device deployed solely by the empire’s agents. It is also used by subjects of empire to pursue their own ends
Desiring home: A long-term ethnography of a mosque in Lisbon
No full textThe recent literature on home has focused on the importance of imagination and performativity in the making of places. In this article, I bring together the imagined and the material dimensions of home-making, to show how people (re)attach themselves to multiple places and, in the process, project idealized moral orders. These arguments draw on an ethnography of a mosque in Lisbon, established in 2000 by a group of Portuguese-Bangladeshi entrepreneurs, who have been negotiating with the municipality for a space to accommodate its growing congregation. In 2012, the city hall announced the construction a new square in Lisbon, the “Moorish square,” a development project that would include several multifunctional spaces, some of which will be used to relocate this mosque. This article examines these negotiations as part of making a sense of home by my interlocutors from Bangladesh and, simultaneously, reveals the anxieties over the regulation and the place of Islam and Muslims in the city
Katherine Verdery at Hopkins 1977–1997
No full textThe article describes Katherine Verdery’s intellectual contributions and interactions with her colleagues at the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University from 1977–1997
