HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Time and space in the work of Katherine Verdery
No full textKatherine Verdery is often thought of as a theorist of time and temporality. In “The ‘etatization’ of time in Ceauşescu’s Romania,” Verdery looked at how the socialist regime placed time itself in shortage. Yet, it is Verdery’s often critical geography and her attention to space—as well as time—that has allowed her to reconsider socialism, postsocialism, and capitalism. Although she often argues that property (her key concept) is not about the relations between people and things but the relations among persons, her foundational innovation, in fact, is to see property as a relation between people and space—or, more accurately, a relationship among persons forged spatially. In this article, I show how the way she has placed the social construction of spatial orders is at the heart of the problem of value
Avatar, personified: Split personhood on an ethical online support group
No full textStudies of digital life have theorized the heuristic value of theoretical and emic boundaries and/or the interconnectedness of online and offline selves, often with a focus on the curation of an online self whose distinctiveness must be methodologically interrogated offline. Through ethnographic analysis of a large group of globally dispersed women who meet online to learn ethical pedagogy in service of a curated, offline self, I argue this split self denotes a self/other distinction on a continuum, with the ethical work conducted in service of an eventual collapse of this dual corporeality. I explain this through a framework of perspectivism, ethics, and the partible person. In doing so, I underscore a theoretical position that posits that the “digital” does not always usher in a “new” way of being, bridging prior anthropological scholarship on Indigenous personhood with a personhood that I argue is similarly enacted within a digital world
God is everywhere: Islam, Christianity, and the immanence of transcendence
No full textThis article weaves together major lines of inquiry in the anthropology of Christianity and Islam to consider how to approach and think about transcendence within anthropology at large. It does so by exploring one particular kind of Muslim ontology and illustrating how it can contribute to these major anthropological debates. As a point of departure, the article takes the researcher’s reflection on his experiences of transcendence in and just after fieldwork. Though ephemeral, such occurrences raise both methodological and theoretical questions. Methodologically, they query the way the anthropologists’ faith and their interlocutors’ experiences of God have been bracketed off by a secular logic that has for long shaped anthropological thought. Theoretically, they call for an engagement with material approaches within the anthropology of Christianity, the ontological turn, and recent dialogues between anthropology and theology to shed light on how Muslim ontologies can help think of transcendence in a different, more immanent, way. In this light, the article proposes to take Muslim ontologies and related theologies seriously as sources for broadening anthropological theory and not just as an interpretative tool to better understand the anthropologist’s “religious” interlocutors
The kingdom, the witch, and the general
No full textIn Western Equatoria, South Sudan, witchcraft accusations enable a narrativization of the material processes of predation that undergird the state, in a sphere adjacent to that of formal politics. These accusations critique the political economy of the South Sudanese state, but only at the cost of domesticating and individualizing critique, such that it plays out in the intimate sphere, without reference to state forces. Witchcraft accusations offer the possibility of explaining uncertainty, but on the condition that contingency can only be resolved in relation to intimate social relations, and not to the structural conditions that produce it
“This kingdom will not be like the kingdom(s) in the era of Gbudue”: On the rebirth of the Azande Kingdom
No full textColonial rule in Sudan altered kingship and ended the kingdom among the Azande and neighboring groups. Yet the ruling clan, the Avongara, and the lineage of the precolonial Azande kings and chiefs continued. A century elapsed before a new institution, the Azande Kingdom, could be reborn with a new monarch at its head. This article draws on ethnographic research and interviews in Yambio, South Sudan, to show that the twenty-first-century Azande Kingdom, established in 2022, is a reinvented monarchy rather than a replica of its nineteenth-century predecessors. It concludes that the institution was formed through the amalgamation of four precolonial kingdoms in an invention that aimed to invoke the unification and traditions of the Azande within the confines of the modern nation-state of South Sudan. Unlike its predecessors, the Azande Kingdom is a modern creation modeled on modern governments with their ministers and departments
The invention of Inventing an African alphabet: Notes on the backstage of the production of anthropological knowledge
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Gendering morality and providing a feminized ethics of care: Welfare, crises, and tình cảm in contemporary Vietnam
No full textFocusing on welfare challenges and crises encountered by women in contemporary Vietnam, this article examines the gendering of morality and the ways in which a feminized ethics of care is entangled with women’s practice of the social capacity tình cảm (sentiments/feelings/emotions). Drawing on data from the Industrial Zones of northern Vietnam, the article highlights how low-income workers are rendered precarious in the Vietnamese semi-privatized welfare sector. The article shows how an inadequate public welfare system not only relies on, but even capitalizes on, a feminized ethics of care provided by women for kin and relatives in need of everyday support. Thus, shaped as an essentializing morality-defined female capacity, tình cảm is imposing pressure upon girls and women while also facilitating the building of social resilience with which they can mitigate and cope with care expectations, challenges, and crises