HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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A home in the hicret: Morality, domestic space and belonging in a Turkish Muslim community in Brazil
No full textThis article focuses on home-making practices in a Turkish Muslim community in Brazil. Following their religious leader’s exhortations to make hicret (migration) to spread their worldview and expand their religious movement, committed Muslims decided to emigrate from Turkey to Brazil. Initially enjoying a privileged economic, social, and political situation inside and outside their homeland, community members built an institutional and domestic structure in Brazil, which allowed them to build an extensive and solid social network in the country. However, the July 2016 failed coup in Turkey and the ensuing government measures engendered critical changes in my interlocutors’ lives. This ethnographic account comprehends that period of crisis and shows how community members have articulated hicret to make sense of exile, enabling a less provisional home in Brazil. Building on a literature on home and house, this article analyzes the processual and performative dimensions of communal practices and demonstrates how these practices become home in the hicret
Katherine Verdery: Brushing aside the ideological curtain
No full textThis contribution highlights one of Katherine Verdery’s strengths as an anthropologist: her ability to recognize and penetrate foundational ideological formations to analyze the sociocultural dynamics at play. The ideological formations she has deciphered range from nationalism and ethnic identity, the intellectual pillars reinforcing the legitimacy of the Romanian Communist Party, the fantasy of get-rich schemes in capitalist imaginaries, to the illusions of neoliberal claims about property ownership and civil society. Examples illustrating her technique are drawn from four significant publications: Transylvanian villagers, National ideology under socialism, “Faith, hope, and caritas in the land of pyramids, Romania, 1990–1994,” and The vanishing hectare
Invention and grace: Taking turns in a streetcorner bureaucracy
No full textThis article analyzes the styles of work and conflict of a group of electrical contractors who congregate across the street from a power utility office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Drawing on a rich tradition of urban Africanist ethnography, as well as the work of Roy Wagner and Lars Spuybroek, it argues that their long-running streetcorner bureau is a “turn” that brings together the logics of entrepreneurial accumulation and bureaucratic legitimacy into generative counterpoint. Performed well, the effect of this turn is a kind of grace, characterized by increase and bounty, but also social recognition and dignity. Performed poorly, it is received as a parody of the logics it aims to transfigure. The “taking of turns,” in all of its contrapuntal difficulty, characterizes much of the social drama that unfolds daily
An appreciation of Katherine Verdery’s My life as a spy: Investigations in a secret police file
No full textAs a foreign anthropologist in Romania in the 1970s and ’80s, Katherine Verdery was under observation by the secret police. Later, having obtained her files, she put the secret police under her own ethnographic observation. Her analyses are examined in this article
Staying behind: Divine presence, virtuous emplacement, and sabr at the end of life among older Kyrgyz Muslims
No full textDrawing on fieldwork among older Kyrgyz people who become old in the absence of their relatives, this paper explores the afterlife as a horizon of possibility which intersects with the everyday in ways that collapse distinctions between the transcendent and the immanent. The ancestor spirits—who play a central role in many Kyrgyz peoples’ practice of Islam—often settle in peoples’ homes as connections with living others fade. They are seen as bridges to the afterlife—a life many of the older people long for—but they tend to encourage them to stay. I explore these moments as moments of divine presence which place people in the virtue of sabr, patience or perseverance, and argue that while Muslim virtues may be cultivated through active engagement with Islamic ideals and values, they may also be present in more spectral forms: in, for example, a vague sense that one’s existence—however unimportant it may seem—may matter and be virtuous
“A tradition from our ancestors”: Community and cultural continuity with The Thirty Boys
No full textThe staying power of Katherine Verdery’s insights on gender ideologies in Eastern Europe
No full textThe article examines the impact of Katherine Verdery’s work on gender under socialism as exemplified by her article “From parent-state to family patriarchs: Gender and nation in contemporary Eastern Europe.