HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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A moral community between Lebanon and Brazil: Entrepreneurship and piety in multilayered encounters
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To speak as another: Hacking, ghost-writing and the dark side of kinship on Indian social media
No full textThis paper investigates the use of digital impersonations on Facebook and WhatsApp among young people in Ghaziabad, India. It conceptualizes these borrowed identities as “avatars” that allow people to use digital media without claiming authorship. This paper shows how people seamlessly operate multiple digital IDs—their own, their siblings’, parents’, and girlfriends’—masking behind the IDs of their kin and friends by hacking into their accounts or ghost-writing chats with them. These forms of social media use go beyond self-presentation and digital identity formation to show how people misidentify themselves to excavate the feelings and thoughts of intimate others. Such discoveries enable them to register and calibrate their own responses to their intimates’ lives at a time of immense anxiety about growing estrangements from families. The paper shows how digital impersonations help people overcome the anxieties of doubleness and loss sparked by social media
Payment ecologies: From pathways in a jungle of currencies to vectors of community money
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Ritual persistence, ideology, and renewal of social categories: The case of Javanese kanuragan initiation
No full textThe kanuragan initiation rite is readapted in the course of a social opportunism alternatively developed by organized groups: nobility of blood and of dress, traditionalist or progressive Islam, nationalists, military, civil society. These groups rely on preconceived value systems and rework the existing cultural, conceptual, technical, and organizational elements. The ritual perspective splits by adapting its form and its object. The social structure which underlies it is conjuncturally exceeded by the analogical, anthropomorphic, Muslim, nationalist, and ultra-secular referents in question. The competition that opposes these different collectives follows a logic of distinctive ideological accumulation that comes to produce a form of uncontrolled and uncontrollable ideological saturation
Seeking antassu: The making of a Muslim barber in South India
No full textDefined as work undertaken by the body on oneself or others, bodywork has been understood as a key aspect of the service economy today. Since it involves encountering strange bodies, dealing with intimate parts and their waste products, such workers are looked down upon. Global inequality in terms of race, caste, and class structures the relationships between bodyworkers and their clients. Despite such iniquitous social relations, I suggest, bodyworkers construct antassu (dignity) for their work and themselves. I conceptualize Muslim barbers’ work in South India as dignified labor—labor as mediated by ideas of independence, autonomy, and integrity, achieved through the ownership of labor and their means. I suggest that we need to look at such stories as well, rather than attending only to narratives of inequality and suffering