HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Can we wash away love with bleach? Affect, gender, and agency in Western Amazonia
No full textAlthough some Kakataibo women say that their elders did not know romantic love and that they learned it only recently by going to the city, that romantic love is actually having a hard time taking root in Indigenous Amazonia. This article explores some aspects of affectivity based on Amazonian women’s discourses and experiences of love and conjugality. Using an analytical framework of the anthropology of affects, I argue that to understand Indigenous uneasiness about passionate love as a voluntary, sublimated, and symmetrical relationship, love needs to be approached in terms of control exerted by one person over another. The ethnography of sensible experiences related to love and desire, in which women often occupy the place of prey, sheds light not only on the relational dimension of the affect and on the feminine interpretation of a lived world permeated by power relations, but it also allows us to add some nuance to the Indigenous conception of gender and the underlying notion of agency
The vanishing villager: Three decades of political, economic and ethnic change in Bulgaria
No full textOne measure of a scholar’s work is how long it continues to be relevant and useful. This article shows how The vanishing hectare and Transylvanian villagers, books written by Katherine Verdery twenty and forty years ago, respectively, help us make sense of contemporary developments in a Bulgarian village. Specifically, the current size and makeup of the population can be understood by examining who has been able to find value in village property, while the shifting political economy has reshaped the ethnic profile of the village
Defetishizing money: Perspectives from economic anthropology: Gudeman Lecture, University of Minnesota, March 20, 2023
No full textFollowing up on Steve Gudeman’s insight that economic categories are fundamentally cultural, this lecture juxtaposes different perspectives on money that transcend the conventional society/nature divide. It considers money as a unique semiotic phenomenon that imperils life itself by accelerating the production of entropy. The “agency” of the money artifact extends beyond society into the physical metabolism of the biosphere. Money organizes and obscures asymmetric global transfers of biophysical resources, generating impoverishment as the flip side of accumulation. In attributing indexical value to money, the modern economy pivots on fetishism. To assume responsibility for the sign systems through which humans interact with the remainder of the biosphere, it would be theoretically possible to redesign money to create a “multicentric” economy that localizes social metabolism and mitigates global inequalities. The lecture briefly sketches a utopian vision of an economy that distributes a complementary currency for local use as a universal basic income
Diaspora as home: The global community of Ahmadiyya Muslims
No full textThe spiritual home of Ahmadiyya Muslims and physical home of their leader has moved from India to Pakistan to London in under a century. These relocations signal the communal dislocation and diasporic spread of Ahmadis. Some collective experiences of migration, encompassing memories and myths of the original homeland, persist; others, including the idea that the ancestral homeland is a place of return, require a more complicated historical explication. In Ahmadi eschatology, the eventual conversion of the Earth to Ahmadiyyat is the future. Therefore, no single place can be a homeland for return when the whole globe will become theirs in time. This will constitute the very negation of diaspora as everywhere will then be home
