HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Dreaming the path: Ontological shifts in a Sufi order in Afghanistan
No full textThis article examines dream practices among a Sufi community in present-day Afghanistan. The main argument revolves around the question of how preparing for, expecting, and communally negotiating the veracity of dreams stands in a process of individual and communal becoming that braids divine presence into the lives of Sufi disciples. The article is based on ethnographic field research among a community whose worldview is anchored in the cosmology of Ibn Arabi, during a time when the community is intent on deciding on a new leader through dreams. Their communication about dreams opens up a space of interaction, both within their ontological status of the barzakh [lit: barrier; isthmus between life and death; in-between; intermediary realm] as well as in the communal negotiation about who can have a dream and what the dream comes to mean in this social configuration. Rather than spontaneous events, dreams are a practice with multiple activities, processes, and ensuing states
“Deaths by guns will never outnumber magic”: New oracles among the Azande
No full textBenge, the famous chicken poison oracle that Evans-Pritchard vividly described in his classic ethnography, subsequently disappeared from Zande lore. While contemporary Azande still talk about the vanished benge sorrowfully, the society turned to a neighboring ethnic group’s oracle, the dabaya. The dabaya, or slaughtering, also uses chickens to arrive at an answer to questions. The dabaya operator cuts the throat of the chicken and, unlike the effect of the poison during benge, the location of the death and the positioning of the carcass gives the verdict. Using deep ethnographic description, oral history interviews, archival and historical sources, this article argues that the need for powerful oracles to determine the validity of public witchcraft accusations grows in times of turbulence and social upheaval, while in relatively calm times witchcraft and magic withdraws to the private sphere. In the last section, the article offers an analysis of the politicization of the new oracle and how chiefs are using bureaucratic measures to control dabaya and extend their judicial control over their subjects
Home in exile: Palestinianness as moral subjunctive destination
No full textThis article explores the polyvocal and inherently contested arena of Palestinianness as a moral place of belonging, for which I suggest the term “home” as an anthropological category denoting affective places of belonging for a given social group. This minimalistic definition is intended as a heuristic site from which to explore modes of inhabiting a moral destination. The ways in which Palestinianness is conceived and negotiated among refugees and other Palestinian communities living outside of today’s Palestinian territories are thus understood as processes of home-making. In this respect, the article considers the definition of a “homeland” in relation to Palestinian experiences and expressions of displacement and discusses to what extent the terms diaspora and exile characterize the Palestinian dispersion. It suggests that these experiences and expressions highlight the importance of affect and problematize a fitting subjunctive definition of home as an anthropological category
Voicing God’s presence: Qurʾānic recitation, Sufi ontologies, and the theatro-graphic experience
No full textThis article examines Qurʾānic recitation as a modality of divine presence among Bā ʿAlawī Sufis in Tarīm (Yemen) and Jakarta (Indonesia). It engages with Sufi ontologies that have shaped Bā ʿAlawīs’ understanding of Qurʾānic recitation as capable of engendering a theatro-graphic experience of divine presence marked at once by scriptural distance and stability, and theatrical immediacy and instability. The article complicates some of the basic presuppositions that have shaped existing works on religion as mediation, particularly the conceptualizations of transcendence as distance, of medium as exterior to what it mediates, and of mediation/immediacy as an antithesis. If reliance on sensational forms to produce divine presence is often described as engendering anxieties regarding the possibility of immediacy, for Bā ʿAlawī Sufis the epistemic and practical problem lies in maintaining the productive tension between re-presentational mediation and existential immediacy without privileging one over the other
Flows
No full textThe socialist systems relied on particular flows of information, goods, and connections that not only enabled them to function, at least for a few decades, but also became intrinsic to the ways people living in these societies envisioned and experienced life and community. Drawing on long-term ethnography and original theoretical insight, Katherine Verdery revealed how such flows—of information, resources, and people—were mechanisms that transformed real existing socialism from an ideology into a complex social system
Urban anthropology or anthropology in the city Does Lefebvre hold the key to escape this cul-de-sac?
No full textUrban anthropology is a discipline that emerged only with great difficulty. Its origin in the Chicago school of sociology made the discipline dependent upon urban sociology. The ethnographic focus of the Chicago school was short-lived, overtaken by a statistical, quantitative sociology that came to long dominate the field. For their part, anthropologists were late in dealing with cities, arriving only in the 1960s. Since then, they have vacillated between doing anthropology in the city and doing urban anthropology. Given this problem, the urban philosopher Henri Lefebvre may provide us with some fresh insights. In this article, I propose an anthropological rereading of some Lefebvrian concepts, such as “lived space” and “everyday life,” emphasizing their socially transformative character. I offer a series of epistemological reflections relevant to our discipline and, by drawing on examples from my ethnographic research, seek to contribute to the methodological formulation of a critical perspective on urban ethnography