HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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The sacred unbound: Insufficient rituals, excess life, and divine agency in rural Tamil Nadu
No full textDissonances between human expectations and actual experiences of sacred presence and actions—as materialized in unexplained deaths, diseases, deadly possessions, and repudiated rituals—are sites where insubstantial sacralities are not only made real but also agentic. Refusing human attempts to relate to it through choreographed rituals and voluntary offerings, this sacred asserts its own agenda. To make inscrutable sacralities ethnographically accessible, I propose the twin pivots of (1) insatiability and (2) excess—attributes of presence, appetite, and attitude—which embody a repudiation of anthropocentric signification. Decentering human intentions and actions allows for the excavation of an uncanniness intrinsic to the sacred. This forces a confrontation with the limits of anthropological epistemologies, language, and authority. Privileging instances when the sacred eludes epistemological capture to assert its own irrepressible and enigmatic vitality, this article strives to—not explain away radical ontological differences but—make room for an uncanny metaphysics amid ethnographic theorizing
Deflecting responsibility: Spirits in Southeast Asia and “systems” in Western modernity
No full textWhile studies of responsibility have been concerned with the ways responsibility is traced to accountable human persons or institutions, the deflection of responsibility to nonhumans that are not accountable has been neglected. Such deflections may follow at least two different procedures. The Rmeet in Laos sometimes opt to deflect responsibility for wrongdoing to spirits who temporarily obfuscate a person’s intentionality. People in modern contexts, in contrast, occasionally delegate responsibility to impersonal sets of rules and laws—the “system,” the “market,” “nature.” In both cases, concepts of personhood condition the shape of the nonhumans emerging from the distribution of agency. Persons appear as forms that differentiate between actions that can be integrated into them and those that cannot. The deflection of responsibility protects personal integrity from actions incoherent with a person’s form. In particular, deflection to nonhumans removes accountability from the sphere of human influence
Losing the plot: On method and meaning in traumatizing ethnographic work
No full textThis article takes up the question of “Russia’s influence in the world” by focusing on the impact of Russian state policy and military action on ethnographers working in Ukraine. Bringing foundational theories about psychological trauma into conversation with contemporary principles of ethnographic method, I recount, in epistolary form, my own experiences as an ethnographer of Ukraine during a period defined by Russian political and military aggression. I describe the specific challenges I have faced in producing ethnographic work out of these experiences and theorize how certain aspects of psychological trauma—at least as I have experienced them—inhibit the core emotional and narrative capacities that enable such work in the first place. I argue that intimate and insightful ethnography that illuminates the human element of pivotal historical happenings may be counted among the many losses that traumatizing events, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine, produce
Logic of myth and action: The Canela Messianic Movement of 1963
No full textThe first White man, so runs the Ramkokamekra Canela myth, was Aukê, a miraculous Indigenous boy who ends up killed by his kin. He reappears as a farmer and offers the Canela access to shotguns and proper dishware. Yet infelicitous choices made by the Indigenous people themselves deprive them from obtaining wealth and power. A messianic movement arising in 1963 was predicated on a promise to reverse this inequality. White people would end up having to hunt in the forest while all kinds of commodities would be imparted to the Canela. The article argues that, in order to achieve such reversal of fortune, the messianic movement followed a script that can be shown to be a structural inversion of the myth of the origin of the White man. Thus, historical events could be fashioned by myth
There was no future in the past: Time and the environment in rural Namibia
No full textTo explain how Namibian pastoralists envision the future of the climate and the environment, I develop a phenomenological framework that uses objects and events (e.g., their livestock, people, drought) as entry points. When pastoralism structured most of people’s lives, things approached as rhythmic reiterations of the past. Therefore, some pastoralists say, there was no future in the past. By contrast, in the increasingly important capitalist domain, the subject experiences itself as moving in time towards objects, albeit different objects, such as money and success. With climatic change and increasing involvement in the market economy, pastoralism and the environment become more unclear. This changes the perception of time in the environmental domain. I describe the emerging temporality as an ascending spiral in which rhythms lose importance while a linearity towards a more open future gains saliency. Whereas the new future-making awakens potentialities, it also implies insecurities and stress
In defense of the heart: An Amazonian politics of respect
No full textThe concept of defense-respect is elaborated here as a cornerstone of Urarina ethics and politics and an alternative to the concept of respect inherited from the Kantian tradition. While similarly expressing a kind of liberal and egalitarian ethos, it is founded on very different premises, for the worth of an individual has little to do with their inherent dignity or membership in a common humanity, and emerges instead from concrete, practical knowledge in the context of an ongoing relationship. Defense-respect demands a willingness to take on responsibility for another’s well-being and to abstain from certain forms of evaluation or judgment. It is not opposed to love or care, but as an art of diplomacy and civility and vehicle of moral power, proves crucial for the successful management of social distance
Failures of being: The Christian promise of acceptance in Sinja, Nepal
No full text“Being” can be a heavy burden to carry in Sinja, Nepal. The lack of a given self comparable to the Christian soul makes the struggle for being a potentially life-threatening affair, especially when circumstances impede the fulfillment of social expectations. Suicides that flow from the incapacity to embody what a person is socially expected to be illustrate the phenomenological dimension of what “social death” might really mean for people whose being is articulated in and through webs of social ties. Conversion to Christianity provides social misfits with a community of fellow believers that promises to guarantee them a full-fledged presence in the world vis-à-vis the potentially devastating outcomes of an utter failure of being, yet which also poses entirely new challenges. Ernesto de Martino’s concept of “presence” captures the existential stakes of conversion better than sweeping tropes about the in/dividuality of personhood, circumventing the impasse faced by long-standing debates in the anthropology of Christianity
Economy, emulation, and equality: Sociogenesis in the postsocialist capitalocene: Gudeman Lecture, University of Minnesota, March 21, 2022
No full textEconomy and emulation are freighted concepts. They draw attention to universal phenomena, the forms of which vary according to social organization, and in particular the dynamics of (in)equality. Socialist modernization, which is explored here in the context of successive transformations of rural economy in southern Hungary, was characterized by distinctive forms of enchantment and ritualized collective action. These have been lost in the course of postsocialist privatization and marketization. Convergence with capitalist forms of emulation and increasing inequalities are shown to have deleterious ecological as well as social consequences. Theoretical inspiration is drawn from Thorstein Veblen and Stephen Gudeman; these scholars have much in common, including close ties to Minnesota and deep suspicion of mainstream economics.