HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Embodying and fashioning headship: A day in the life of a village headman in the center of Myanmar
No full textThis article proposes an analysis of local politics through an ethnographic exploration of headship. It approaches the experience and enactment of politics by describing a day in the life of a headman in rural lowland Myanmar to show how an individual embodies and fashions headship through successive social settings. More specifically, this ethnographic device is a way to analyze what a headman, as a situated figure and a political institution embedded in a local society, mediates in context. The paper discusses how a headman composes with multiple layers of responsibilities and chains of relationships, delineating uncertain boundaries between the personal, the political, and the government domains that partly organize local politics. While updating the literature on Bamar lowland society after more than half a century of dictatorship, the paper suggests a position from which we might reconsider the village headman as an ethnographic starting point for an anthropology concerned with history
Virtual embodiment in physical realities: Brand buzzers and disciplined bodies in an Indonesian cyberscape
No full textDiscussions of embodiment in the virtual world mostly focus on online games and virtual reality technologies. By taking the case of Indonesian buzzers—persons employed to propagate opinions on certain issues or products—we argue that social media platforms also allow for virtual embodiment occurring within a Twitter cyberplace. This article theorizes virtual bodies by examining Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach. We also work with Boelstorff’s conception of chora and virtual bodies to argue that virtual bodies can be seen as a practical extension of physical bodies: a cyborg body. Intertwined within marketing relations, we then attempt to see how this amalgam of physical and virtual bodies is disciplined by panopticism, while briefly considering local Javanese particularities in shaping this discipline. Thus, through this examination of an Indonesian case, we bring up wider theoretical issues on social media, technologies of governance, and subjectivity
“Where it was, I must come into being”
No full textThis article considers the problem of translation and radical interpretation from a post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspective, and challenges the notion of concept, language, and difference being mobilized by Philip Swift
Virtue’s cosmos: Enaction as an anthropology of eschatology
No full textAs youngsters in a Pakistani megacity participate in a reading group to discuss the end of time by looking at the eschatological prophecies in Islamic religious sources, they come to relate apparently trivial political actions such as wall-painting, placard-holding, and pamphlet-distributing to the question of justice. We suggest in this article that this complex phenomenon can be best understood through the concept of enaction, as ethical actions are seen to enact a context suffused with political and cosmological considerations. Accordingly, our discussion positions itself against those works in the anthropology of ethics that primarily view such ethical actions in terms of self-cultivation
Uywasiña in Aymara cosmopraxis: Ontogenesis and attentionality
No full textThis article revolves around the theoretical and ethnographic experiences of an ongoing anthropological study with contemporary Aymara families about how “education by attention” is produced throughout their cosmopraxis. At the same time, it explores how an anthropology of life and in particular Tim Ingold’s fight for a recalibration of anthropology in a biosocially integrated sense are of intrinsically political-ethical interest, considering the messy and misaligned times we humans have worked ourselves into. Beyond romantic interpretations and essentialist representations, a committed inquiry into indigenous practices that habilitate people for ecological-cultural “correspondence” and affective reciprocity—uywasiña—enables the exploration of important educational attitudes and habits that can lead to necessary realignments of human relations with the world/earth. I discuss these enskilling practices through a conversation with theorizations of attentionality, agencement (the “doing-undergoing” of habit, in Ingold’s terms), and affectionality
The social life of pathways: Walking, giving, and building in Shimshal Valley, Pakistan
No full textTheories of the gift agree that social relations are (re)generated through gift-giving between groups and individuals. Landscape studies have also shown how people weave relations between humans, nonhumans, and their environment through walking. This article argues that these two important dynamics intersect in the building of infrastructure by locals. It explores what Wakhi herders and farmers of northern Pakistan call nomus: a pooling of gifts through which they build structures that they name after a deceased or loved person. The living and the deceased (re)generate their relations through the circulation of gifts, but also through the building of collective infrastructure that will enable them to circulate. This ethnographic reality calls for articulating the anthropology of the gift with the anthropology of the environment to show how the motivations to give are experienced not by beings detached from the world but within an ontological relationship with this world
Testimonies and the Uyghur genocide metanarrative: Some reflections from the field
No full textThis paper seeks to explore the epistemic role of testimonies in the ongoing Uyghur crisis, as well as their development in patterns and focus. It first unfolds the metanarrative of the Uyghur genocide and shows how it has increasingly shaped individual stories, based on examples from my fieldwork in the Uyghur diaspora in Europe in 2018 and 2019 and observations of videorecorded testimonies I contributed to broadcasts on online platforms from 2019 to 2021. My main argument is that the Uyghur genocide metanarrative can empower Uyghurs, especially women, by telling stories they wouldn’t tell in other contexts, but can also obscure our understanding of a complex situation by limiting individual narratives to serve a larger collective cause
Alternative me? Anthropology and self-alteration
No full textContemporary life across the globe is awash with enterprises, programs, and practices that purport to foster self-alteration. Developing the self; self-care; transcending the self; self-actualization; expressing the self; empowering it: the myriad of terms testifies to myriad actions of the self on the self, facilitated by activities in a huge number of social domains. Anthropology as a discipline has an intense interest in the way that different societies constitute personhood or selves. Yet in itself the self has been of more central interest for certain other disciplines than it has been for anthropology. This essay sketches out an anthropological prolegomenon to the theme and practice of self-alteration. It concludes that the study of self-alteration should begin not with cultural models of the self but with the revealing of its new structures caused by modes of alteration themselves