HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Moral custodianship between friends: Girlhood, class, and Islamic education in Indonesia
No full textPeer monitoring is a common feature of homosocialization among girls in Indonesian Islamic boarding schools. This article examines the important ethical work that takes place in moments of sociability between peers in and beyond school grounds. Students take part in a “moral custodianship”—intersubjective ethical and affective relationships whereby they participate in and submit to moral monitoring from peers. These relationships provide key social support for young women as they navigate new social opportunities and leisure spaces for middle-class Indonesians. Understanding these relationships offers insight into processes of ethical subject formation beyond the individual
“They consider themselves very different”: Disparate dreams of Zande governance across the South Sudan-Central African Republic borderland
No full textThis article unpacks the different trajectories of a once-unified Zande people through a focus on their respective positions in the nation-states of South Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR). While the Zande people live at the margins of their states in both countries, South Sudan’s Azande are numerous enough to carry political clout. More importantly, South Sudan’s status as a newly independent state made it open to opposition and contest, inviting dreams of alternative forms of governance and authority. In the CAR, the state has mostly remained an elusive dream, hardly offering inspiration for governance alternatives that build on the heroic histories of the once powerful Zande kingdoms. Drawing on recent histories, we show how cross-border experience of violence by the Lord’s Resistance Army and subsequent military intervention briefly brought the Azande together again, but ultimately made difference more visible and acute
Unable to see the diagnosis: Harmed bodies and oil extraction in Peruvian Amazonia
No full textThis article discusses two distinct notions of harm, wakllichishka and oil harm, and two distinct ways of shaping bodies. Following postcolonial and decolonial insights, I develop an approach that deploys two Indigenous concepts—wakllichishka, and not being able to see the diagnosis—as valid tools of analysis. Kichwa people in northern Peruvian Amazonia use both to analyze the condition of being harmed, illness, and the possibility of recovering. While wakllichishka rests on understandings and practices that assume that bodies are transformable and the locus of human and more-than-human sociality and agency, not being able to see the diagnosis reveals how biomedical and toxicological practices enact bodies as indicators of unspecific conditions and environmental degradation, and as incurable. Using Kichwa analytics shows the situatedness of these practices and counteracts a common disposition to undertake a colonizing reduction that defines our own categories as the only ones adequate for analysis of the consequences of extractive capitalism
Migration, village sociality, and mistrust: An exploration
No full textThis article examines the phenomenon of migration in India’s villages. Drawing on research in Jharkhand and Maharashtra and selected village ethnographies it illustrates how migration shapes village histories, politics, and socialities. It presents a synoptic analysis of the dominant sociological and anthropological theories concerning the category “village” in India to reflect critically on the absence of a comprehensive framework that captures the intricacies of village life and sociality engendered by migration. Migration narratives enfold lived experiences of caste, class, kinship, and gender that betray the sense of community and assuredness associated with the category “village.” In this context, I propose “mistrust” as an appropriate concept to grasp the contemporariness of India’s villages
