HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Troubling emotions in China’s psy-boom
No full textThe rise of psychological counseling, 心理咨询, as part of China’s unfolding psy-boom has brought with it a new discourse of distress. In particular, this article will look at the concept of 心理困扰/困惑, which I translate as “psychological troubles.” By identifying psychological troubles the psy-boom is providing a discursive space for people in China to discuss issues that distress them which sits in between the medicalized realm of DSM-category illnesses like depression and the language of activism and social justice. This ethnography shows how psychological troubles are understood by some therapists as “blockages” to freely flowing emotions. Drawing on the scholarship of affective contagion, a link is drawn between the unsticking of emotions within persons and the inability of freely flowing emotions to “stick” to wider social issues due to the constraints placed on civil society and free speech by the Chinese Communist Party. The apolitical and nonmedicalized language of the psy-boom is, therefore, a reflection of the social function of this particular form of therapeutic care
The conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture: A reply to Philip Swift
No full textThis piece is a response to Philip Swift’s article in this issue, where he critiques issues concerning ethnographic theory raised in my book World: An anthropological examination. Inspired by the work of Donald Davidson, I argue that indeterminacy and underdetermination are conditions for all communication and that, in light of that, a position of metaphysical pluralism provides us with a better account of the conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture than the kind of ontological pluralism that Swift espouses
The affective life of the Nanjing Massacre: Reactivating historical trauma in governing contemporary China
No full textUnder the current Xi administration, China has marked December 13 as the national public Memorial Day for the Nanjing Massacre’s victims. The reaffirmation of this historical trauma under Xi continues the official narrative of the rejuvenation of a humiliated Chinese nation promoted in patriotic education of the 1990s. Simultaneously, there have been widespread state-promoted campaigns of “positivity,” with frequent announcements that China has entered “a New Era.” This article traces the representations of the Nanjing Massacre in different “contact zones” to reveal how certain negative emotions associated with the trauma are deliberately activated to serve instrumental purposes in China’s contemporary governance. It shows the party-state’s time-tested strategy of encouraging the public to internalize positive feelings of living in a great new era through comparison with past misery. It also demonstrates the extension of the party-state’s disciplinary power in the affective realm to inspire unity and legitimize its rule
Emotivity and excess of spirits in the Andes
No full textIn the Quechua community of Coipasi (Bolivia) relations between the living and the dead (almas—souls) swing between excess and containment, remembrance and distancing. The aim of this article is to show that the emotivity of the spirits plays a fundamental role in these relations. Like all matters pertaining to the nature of spirits, this emotivity is excessive but also, and most importantly, it appears to the extent that the souls of the dead feel alienated from family and community social practices. This is reflected in the local notion of “nonremembrance” (mana yuyacunchu). I therefore suggest that an ethnography of the emotivity of spirits offers a better understanding of such common concepts in the anthropology of the Andes as commensality, excess, and the very notion of the soul
Burning translations
No full textThis essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translation beyond a reference to an anthropological self. What I recognize as “burning translations” responds to the abolitionist call for “letting anthropology burn” by developing the urgency of translation amid histories of racialization. In contrast to foreignizing translation as the self-reflexive hermeneutics of the other, burning translations are speculative approximations of exigent situations that precede and exceed anthropological debates and liberal modes of public reason more generally. Burning translations are risky not because they invent new classificatory concepts and therefore confront the discipline’s intellectual and institutional resistance, but because they redirect anthropological terms and categories outside anthropological debates without attempting to add to these debates, offer a corrective, and thereby expiating what Michel-Rolph Trouillot identified as the guilty conscience of postcolonial anthropology. Burning translations test the limit of our concepts as “concepts,” and not as “ours.
Speculative relations in Lima: Encounters with the limits of fog capture and ethnography
No full textThis article draws on two examples of encounters with the limits of fog capture in Lima to frame limitations as creative resources for ethnographic inquiry. In both examples, fog capture rendered speculatively conceivable previously backgrounded urban and ecological (dis)connections to residents on the city’s periphery, including the possibility to envisage certain relational reconfigurations. By analogously framing these experimental effects as one potential outcome of ethnographic practice, the article locates the kernel of such outcomes in the inescapability of limitations. This not only acknowledges the many obstructions and exclusions inherent to anthropological research, but taps into them as that which might allow for fieldwork encounters to properly bear on theory and analysis. Rather than things to avoid or overcome, I argue that limits by and of themselves have the capacity to suspend and modify abstractions and the course of events
Goddess in disguise: Transsociality and the aesthetics of living
No full textRosie used to say that there was nobody else like her. Her idiosyncratic way of living was an aesthetic recreation of the social that was partly informed by normative sociality while transgressing many aspects of it. She was an eccentric street fashion artist of Vilnius whose world and home were populated by animals and beautiful things. She spent a lot of time on the road. I introduce the concept of transsociality to analyze an idiosyncratic way of living that extended beyond normalized and institutionalized sociality. Discussion of transsociality allows us to revisit theories on sociality and reflect on the boundaries of the social. This article also makes a methodological contribution by illustrating how the interlocutor’s “voice” emerged in a material aesthetic—her fashion style—rather than through narrative stories. Strolling Vilnius for over forty years, Rosie was an icon across generations. Some people thought she was a goddess in disguise
Agitation at the margins: War, reportage, and their contradiction in Iraq
No full textThe confusions, intimacies, and distress of war are common to the experience of journalists reporting from war zones, yet the professional conventions of war reportage erase these experiences from the commodity journalists produce. Journalists are left struggling with a twinned burden: the violence that saturates journalistic life, and the demands of an authoritative narrative genre. Based on two years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, this article tracks what the news must expel, assessing a tension between journalist and journalism as the pressures of war and its commodification bear down. Contrary to scholarship emphasizing the separation of experience from output, I show how the production of war news is precipitated by what is occluded from that news, finding in journalists’ dreams, jokes, and traumas an archive that both transgresses and perpetuates the reality represented in journalism. Experience and output, I argue, form a relationship essential to the practice of war reportage, and to the production of a social fantasy of what war is. What disturbs this dominant fantasy is displaced by war reportage but never disappeared
Chinese social media sources leave no room for denial: Documenting human rights violations in Xinjiang
No full textThis article draws almost exclusively from Chinese-language social media sites with connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to present the grim reality faced by Uyghurs and Kazakhs. Applying a “research search” approach to digital ethnography, this essay presents a comprehensive picture of state violence in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that is not filtered by Western media, taken hostage by geopolitics, or simply dismissed as fabrication by the Chinese party-state. Focusing on mass incarcerations and their devasting impacts on the region’s Turkic communities, I demonstrate how county-level social media accounts and cadre blogs describe how the party-state detained Uyghurs and Kazakhs without due process, held them in inhumane conditions, separated scores of children from their parents, and imposed policies to destroy ethno-religious identities. These sources present irrefutable evidence of gross human rights violations in Xinjiang