HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Home as a second skin: A contribution to a theory of magic (of tidying)
No full textIn this article, I describe a “magical” dimension in the work of home organizers (HOs) in Belgium. HOs, I argue, as professional organizers, not only help their clients to deal with the disorder and clutter of their homes but deliver a promise of magic: that “care” for the home interior produces “care” for the mind, the body, and even the earth. To do this, they rely on the one hand on knowledge based on an epistemology of analogy; on the other hand, they use specific technical know-hows, allowing them to participate in world transformation. In the course of their interventions, an order of things—both ideological and pragmatic—takes shape. From this double ordering stems a marvelous feeling. Indeed, the analogical principle (body-home-earth) that animates the process of home organizing and the incorporation of collective representations allows the act of tidying to be magical
“Again you will plant vineyards”: Prophecy, Jewish settlement, and temporal dissonance in the occupied West Bank
No full textStudies of prophecy in the context of Judaism have predominantly attended to how messianic sects react when prophecies fail to be fulfilled; they have drawn on the concept of cognitive dissonance to explain how such setbacks tend to bolster rather than weaken belief. Less attention has been paid to how subjects react to and live with the perceived fulfillment of prophecy. This article describes religious Jewish winemakers in West Bank settlements whose phenomenal experience of meta-historical time in the temporal frame of ge’ula, redemption, displaces the precarity and uncertainty of the contemporary settlement projects, renders the moral and political stakes of the occupation less disturbing, and fosters hope for a prosperous future. The temporal consequences of lived prophecy for the settlers can be understood as “temporal dissonance,” characterizing the disjuncture between the harsh reality of the political present and the prophesied idyllic future
Afterword: Pandemic governance in China
No full textThis article outlines China’s pandemic governance as an ever-changing assemblage of old and new techniques, material forms, and organizational structures over the course of three years. It zooms in on the ways in which the party-state drew on and (re)combined previous experiences of handling infectious diseases, the constantly renewed technique of mass mobilization, and the seemingly high-tech and yet labor-intense digital technologies that had already permeated everyday lives in the different stages of designing and enforcing pandemic restriction measures. These changing governing practices are essential to contextualize the voices documented in this Currents collection
Someone not exactly like the others: The animal’s status
No full textDebate about the status of animals has long impassioned theologians and philosophers. Are other animals “subjects” sharing the same rights as humans? Or are animals, as Descartes thought, mere machines? In many primitive societies but also in rural Europe, the question has been raised in quite different terms—less in order to decide whether or not animals have rights (whether or not they are “persons”), than to know how to deprive them of these rights when they are slaughtered (and thus transformed into “things”). Ethnology provides several examples of rites for ensuring this transformation (e.g., the Ainu bear ceremony, Melanesian pig feasts, and the criminalization of pigs in France). Even in the imagination of contemporary hunters, killing a prey apparently requires reevaluating its symbolic status. Though initially presented as a full-fledged partner, in the end the victim is always found to have committed crimes that justify its elimination
Media witnessing and the feminist labors of making survivors believable
No full textThis article examines the work survivors of sexual violence and abuse do to assert their credibility and the labor, in turn, that feminist journalists and activists do to help make victims and survivors believable. Drawing on a video clip made by the survivor that appears in Big Mouth and examples of survivor-based media witnessing in Canada, I analyze how survivors, anti-violence advocates, and feminist reporters build networks of media witnessing to address sexual abuse and assault, and provide the support and validation that survivors need. I approach their witnessing labor as affective and transmissible forms of movement work that carves out crucial spaces of informal justice for victims and survivors of gender violence and mobilizes forms of militant evidence that connect survivors to other survivors and social change intermediaries
Uncanny ethics: Locating the coordinates of the ethical in the COVID-19 pandemic
No full textThe recent anthropological focus on “ordinary ethics” emerges out of a concern to attend to the ethical aspect of social action that is intrinsic to the human condition. Ethnographic and theoretical contributions to this literature have drawn on a variety of philosophical approaches to the study of the “everyday” and the forms that ethical practice takes therein. However, a world affected by the COVID-19 pandemic is far from the “everyday” that is the domain of ordinary ethics and calls for a reconceptualization of the ethical, which could provide coordinates of meaningful interaction in the unfamiliar social. In this “uncanny” world, I seek to explore the layered meanings of care and its implications for an ethics of the uncanny. While the uncanny is an epistemological condition of modernity itself, the alteration brought about by the pandemic makes it ontologically uncanny too. Locked in a cyclical relationship, the uncanny and the everyday inexorably follow the other, making it imperative to conceptualize an ethics that can accommodate the singularities of both
Towards a critical ethnography of political concepts
No full textThis special section approaches “politics” from a specifically ethnographic point of view. It does this by privileging ethnographically derived political concepts rather than more familiar preestablished and supposedly universal categories of political analysis. This introduction offers a general theoretical framework for doing this, and establishes a shared language of analysis. It situates current developments in relation to the history of political anthropology and of the broader discipline, and proposes a definition of the domain of political anthropology through an emphasis on politics as collective ethics. It then reflects on the relationship between language and concepts, and the articulation of different “global” hierarchies of value
