HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Not a member yet
1288 research outputs found
Sort by
The giving palm: Valuing generosity and status through human-plant relations in Omani sung poetry
No full textOmani poets theorize the value of generosity by distinguishing between two nominally similar events—two instances of men watering trees. Analyzing Omani oral poetry shows how this distinction is justified by graded equivalencies that metaphorically justify a status hierarchy and invest it with behavioral expectations of generosity. To understand how generosity and status relate, Omanis distinguish between reciprocity (iconized in date palm agriculture), the divergent capacities of the rich, who are obliged to give generously, and the poor, who cannot give at all. When a rich political leader pours water on a dying plant, he demonstrates an exceptional sense of his commitment to generosity and confirms the central—but graded—value of giving. When the poor pour likewise, they underline the necessary link between generosity and capacity that they fail to achieve
In correspondence with an ever-expanding heaven: Subject formation and spiritual labor among the Syrian-Catholic nuns of Kerala
No full textThis article illustrates the religious formation and subjectivation of a nun through her everyday life inside the convent. It explains how her experience of calling, structured through institutional subject formation, leads to the fashioning of an ethical subjectivity. A close analysis of a nun’s calling, religious formation, and everyday life, structured through prayer routines, forms of discipline, and, crucially, what is here termed her “spiritual labor” for God are important in understanding the formation of a nun as a religious and ethical subject even where the ethical sometimes deviates from the religious. Combining archival and ethnographic data, the article shows that the quality of “constant awareness” is central in understanding a Catholic nun’s subject formation
On fuzziness
No full textThis article is a consideration of the conceptual power of Verdery’s concept of “fuzzy property.” “Fuzzy property” has helped me understand the phenomenon of lupiaje in Guanajuato, Mexico—where men enter silver-gold mines at night to extract ore—by following Verdery’s advice to “inquire … into, rather than assum[e], the nature of property conceptions.” Fuzziness has a new life in Juno Parreñas’s 2023 article “Ethnography after anthropology: Become moles, not mining corporations,” in which she extols “the synesthesia of fuzziness.” While this isn’t quite what Verdery had in mind, it does help us think about one of her greatest works, the astounding My life as a spy
Islam L.A. style: Talking back to America through Islamic discourses
No full textIn this article, I explore distinct ways in which Iranian American mosque-goers in Southern California understand and define Islam. I argue that rather than relying on authoritative Islamic sources and discourses, Iranian Angelenos primarily characterize Islam to counter Islamophobic perceptions of their religion propagated in American media and political discourse. Based on ethnographic research, I present four modalities of Islam that I call Aryan Islam, Unitarian Islam, Individual and interpretive Islam, and Jurisprudential/Sectarian Islam, and discuss how they are produced in response to harmful discourses against Muslims, especially Muslim Iranian Americans, in the United States
Seeing otherwise: Landscape change and sensory experience in the West African savannah
No full textSeeing landscapes change seems to be an inevitable and ubiquitous experience in times of global warming. Yet, landscape change is often underestimated, depending on how that change is perceived, experienced, and articulated over time. Like other agriculturalists in the West African savannah, Senufo farmers of Côte d’Ivoire have a pragmatic relationship to land as the existential ground of their lifeworld. Their experience of landscapes is based on the entire human sensorium and deeply embedded in bodily practices. Moving and walking are closely intertwined with seeing and aesthetic experience. Sedimented over many years, such bodily practices engender a subtle, immanent, but rarely articulated understanding of landscape and its changes. Landscape change becomes an issue of conscious, discursive articulation when the farmers as social actors refer to it through the medium of photographs taken over the past four decades, allowing them to assess the difference between now and then. Photos isolate acts of seeing from other bodily senses and the broader experience that constitutes landscapes for Senufo farmers. They instigate processes that re-embed past and present landscapes in another, monosensory experiential and propositional framework. Recognizing landscape change and experiential aspect change are two sides of the same process