HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Video footage and the grain of practice
No full textIn his essay on the cockfight, Clifford Geertz charted a now familiar course in anthropological argument. He showed how the minute details of a practice can dramatize cultural ideas about it. Many anthropologists since have been persuaded that “practice” matters, that carefully examining the conduct of events is bound to reveal something about the status of such events in cultural life. This article reflects on the role of video footage in this equation, arguing that footage is useful for, among other things, tempering assumptions that all practice is thick with reflexive meaning relevant to its overarching type. Through an extended example drawn from my research on gambling in Laos, I suggest that, when squinted at in the right way while writing and thinking, video footage can be a heuristic for countering the urge to reduce practice into a cultural gestalt, in which all interactional details carry the same meaningful architecture
In fear of spatiotemporal overlap: Coping with the infrastructure of zero-COVID
No full textThis paper draws attention to the ways in which the policy of zero covid disciplines spatiotemporal proximity to control the spread of coronavirus. The infrastructure of surveillance deployed for contact-tracing models degrees of spatiotemporal closeness—interpreted and measured by cellular signals from personal mobile phones—and generates health codes linked to the national identification system. The negative result of a nucleic acid test, usually obtained within the past 24 or 48 hours, also became a prerequisite for one to access hospitals, schools, train stations, highways, and most other institutions. To cope with the protocols, residents actively strategize daily activities by mapping out a changing geography of risk. Based on personal experience living through the partial lockdown of Suzhou, I examine the ways in which the protocol regulating spatiotemporal proximity exploits people’s capacity to cope with the threat of lockdowns and how it can be fatal for vulnerable groups
Food shortage and its discontents during the Shanghai lockdown
No full textDuring the Shanghai lockdown in the spring of 2022, over twenty-five million residents had difficulty securing staple food and fresh groceries for days and even weeks. This article draws on both in-depth interviews and social media content to explore how Shanghai residents coped with food shortages resulting from the hasty implementation of draconian zero-COVID policies through bottom-up initiatives and how they made sense of such experiences of deprivation. It calls attention to the creative ways they used food-centered images, stories, and other rhetorical devices on social media in efforts to record and share everyday suffering under tightened censorship. Such articulations of anxiety, anger, sarcasm, and despair amplify the discontent that challenged the biolegitimacy of zero-COVID policies and resist the affect sovereignty imposed by the authoritarian party-state
Troubling complicities The anthropologist as (im)moral subject?
No full textThis creative article seeks to trouble dominant modes of how anthropologists position themselves as moral subjects and grapple with their complicity with/in empire today: what we call “bearing witness” and “denunciation/confession.” In contrast to these models, we perform and theorize our own complicities by staying with the multiple social, relational, political, and epistemological entanglements that our fieldwork produces. Through a braided dialogue, we demonstrate the multiple responsibilities and relationalities that come with the positions we occupy as subjects, researchers, and narrators of empire. We define complicity as an active, transitive engagement with others as we are situated in multiple structures of power. Theorizing complicity helps us reveal what relations of knowledge and power we are responsible for making visible and how we can analytically respond to them. By pluralizing complicity, our aim is to stimulate much needed conversation on questions of anthropology’s relation to tentacles of empire
Introduction: Evidence, ambiguity, and expression in Big Mouth
No full textThis Forum brings together a group of interdisciplinary scholars who reflect with us about our film-in-progress, Big Mouth, about defamation, sexual violence, and advocacy in Guinea. In this introductory essay, we lay out the complex constellation of events, people, and questions that animate the film. We also introduce the central themes of justice claims and evidence that inspire and tie together our respective contributions to Hau. In this regard, we ask what role ethnography and filmmaking might serve. While video is increasingly used as a form of evidence in legal proceedings, what is its potential as a form of intervention outside of the courtroom? How can film resist the binary thinness of political discourse and legal practice by instead exploring the sensorial experiences of justice claims and aspirations? Collectively, we think beyond formal legal approaches to evidence and testimony and instead towards more expansive and everyday modes of witnessing and practices of testifying, naming, and shame
Comparisons and contradictions: The tactics of subversive archaism in anthropology and the nation-state
No full textThe clash of sovereignties: The Latvian subject and its Russian imperialism
No full textRussia’s invasion of Ukraine is occupying the minds of pundits, scholars, and politicians worldwide and across the political spectrum. In the midst of these discussions, Eastern European voices have mobilized around claims to sovereignty as the ability to make choices about which alliances to join and claims to knowledge about the nature of Russian imperialism. In this essay, I analyze the claims to sovereignty and knowledge from the perspective of one Eastern European subject, namely the Latvian subject. I conclude that the encounter between the Latvian subject and its very own Russian imperialism represents a clash of sovereignties rather than a clash of civilizations. If the Latvian subject strives for an international relations version of sovereignty that allows it to join existing alliances, the Russian state as a multinational federation—or an empire—strives for a geopolitical version of sovereignty that allows it to constitute—or reshape—orders