HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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“Our sacrifices were in vain”: Zero-COVID and the betrayal of trust
No full textFor the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, most urban Chinese displayed a high level of “willing compliance” with strict pandemic control measures. This willing compliance, however, collapsed in late 2022, as the state’s promises of personal safety and financial well-being became harder to keep, and prolonged interruptions to everyday life due to pandemic control continued through a third year. People’s trust in the competence and good intentions of the state quickly faded and was replaced by a sense of hopelessness for a life filled with uncertainty, as well as doubt in the state’s abilities and legitimacy in managing the pandemic and an overarching sense of betrayal. These collective experiences of discontent, which resulted in nationwide online and offline protests, have resulted in important discussions and debates about power, authority, class, and the legitimacy of the state
The tone of justice: Voicing the perpetrator-as-victim in sexual assault cases
No full textSocial and legal disputes around sexual violence commonly involve a pattern in which those alleged to have committed violence instead portray themselves as victims, often successfully so. As part of the Forum on evidence and ambiguity in the Big Mouth film project, this article explores the process of legal and everyday persuasion involved in reinforcing this narrative of victimhood. In the events in Big Mouth, the survivor and her advocates film, broadcast, argue, and plead to convince others of the harm done to her, while the perpetrator repeatedly claims his own injury, including through a retaliatory lawsuit against the journalist Moussa Yéro Bah. Focusing on the perpetrator’s assertion of his own victimhood, I consider how such claims are voiced and how they interact with existing ways of listening, to perpetrators and to survivors. I draw attention to sound and listening to examine the performance of claims and the strategies by which parties in a dispute are rendered varyingly audible or inaudible to the law and the public at large
Is subversion just another version of state aversion? Notes on Herzfeld’s Subversive archaism
No full textDó ăyèi! Dó ăyèi! Reclaiming political agency in Burma’s democracy era
No full textPeople marching in the streets in Burma in 1988, infuriated by twenty-six years of military dictatorship, demanded the return of democracy. What they meant by the term reflected a hierarchical understanding of politics: elections would enable them to replace a hated and rapacious superordinate, General Ne Win, with a morally admirable one, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Rather than envision the messy business of conflict and compromise pursued in the name of a common good, democracy’s proponents, including Aung San Suu Kyi herself, spoke only of the need for Buddhist ethical clarity and indomitable unity. Thus they appeared to instantiate efforts to reclaim agency, as observers impressed by Foucault’s take on power would expect, while demonstrating a desire to subordinate themselves to a charismatic leader, ceding that very agency at the same time
Not “multiple ontologies” but ontic capaciousness: Radical alterity after the ontological turn
No full textThis essay articulates a framework for understanding radical alterity in the aftermath of the abandonment of strong claims about ontological pluralism in recent works by key figures in anthropology’s Ontological Turn. Arguing that both ontological anthropologists and their critics have overemphasized the ideational at the expense of material practice, it builds on the insights of STS-influenced work on ontology to develop a materialist case for the continued relevance of radical alterity to the anthropological endeavor. In so doing it advocates replacing a crypto-Protestant emphasis on “strange beliefs” with an attention to the materio-cultural precipitates of successful practical action in the world. In service of this goal, it elaborates a notion of “ontic capaciousness” that attends centrally to practice in a single, yet multiple, world in which multiple modes of successful practical engagement with the unknowable really Real result in the working up of disparate relatively durable and incommensurable actionable reals
The logic of magic: Reading Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer’s The golden bough
No full textThis article centers on a close reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s The golden bough, showing how Wittgenstein’s Remarks offer a prescient view of anthropology. More than a critique of Frazerian evolutionism, the Remarks sit on the vertiginous edge of anthropological and philosophical interest, opening onto questions like: “what are the limits of thought?” and “how do we learn something new?” This article deepens an understanding of the Remarks by examining moments at which they reconsider Wittgenstein’s own prior work, namely the Tractatus logico-philosophicus. By contextualizing the Remarks in a broader movement of thought—one that spans, fissures, and connects what are conventionally isolated as Wittgenstein’s “early” and “late” work—it explores an isomorphism suggested by the Remarks between what Wittgenstein calls “philosophical” and anthropological “problems.” In doing so this article presents, and enacts, a version of Wittgenstein’s thought that might serve as a compelling, albeit mercurial, exemplar for anthropological inquiry
From reasons of state to individual interest: Morality, power and the political category
No full textThis article argues that political anthropology has never had a version of the substantivist/formalist debate that shaped economic anthropology. Instead, political anthropology tends to rely rather unselfconsciously on Western notions of power and individual interests in formulating its most influential theoretical programs (e.g., practice theory, various forms of marxist thinking, and studies of resistance). In the Western tradition from which these theories draw, morality and politics are often construed as opposed social domains. After tracing the genealogy of this split, I consider some of the key political concepts at the heart of Melanesian traditions of big-manship, suggesting they link morality and politics in ways that escape the reach of much of political anthropology. I illustrate this point with material from my fieldwork with the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. By making this argument, I aim to contribute to this collection’s goal of establishing a wide-ranging comparative anthropology of politics
From identity to ID card: Becoming a woman (and) Indigenous in Bolivia
No full textI met Brigida in 2015. At the time, she presented herself as a young gay man, somewhat androgynous, and identified herself as culturally mixed-race (Mestizo). Today, in 2023, her identity card is that of an Indigenous woman, a Chola. This took place in the context of the Indigenization of Bolivian citizenship and the passing in 2016 of a law that allows people to change their gender at the civil registry office simply by making a declaration. Brigida’s double transition (of gender and ethnicity) is an opportunity to think together about the regimes of belonging and authentication of gender and ethnicity that are co-constructed in her trajectory
A dissonant lockdown of a post-danwei neighborhood in a third-tier city
No full textThis article offers a case study of six-day lockdown experiences in a post-danwei (work unit) neighborhood in Mianyang, a third-tier city in southwest China. It argues that implementing lockdown, no matter how brief it was, allows local governments of small cities and towns to avoid out-of-control situations and incorporate the locales’ time and space into the party-state’s grand narrative of “dynamic zero-COVID” and successful mobilization. It also reveals how long-standing controversies over land, finance, and administration between danwei, property management companies, and communities—the state-sponsored grassroots organizations—have complicated and often undermined lockdown management and daily governing practices. During the lockdown, jaded community cadres were frustrated by failures in controlling residents’ movements and securing coordination. They sealed the entrances of whole neighborhoods instead of supervising each residential compound, which turned the process more to averting the “pollution” of social disorder than to preventing the spread of the COVID-Omicron virus
