HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Developing indifference: Youth, place-making and belonging in a transforming urban China
No full textThis article examines the social impacts of urban change among a generation of people for whom it is the norm: youth in Beijing, where decades of redevelopment have led to large-scale demolition of older neighborhoods and a perpetually changing cityscape. Studies have shown that redevelopment has led to the breakdown of traditional social bonds in China’s cities, and that citizens relocated from older to newer neighborhoods may feel both a heightened sense of privacy and a greatly diminished sense of attachment to their surroundings. Today’s urban youth, however, were born into such rapidly evolving and increasingly privatized environments. Drawing from twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the extent to which these youth, accustomed to privatized and digitalized home lifestyles, experience a lack of attachment to their urban environs, and illustrate how such feelings may be articulated. Ongoing urban redevelopment, taking place alongside shifts in social life facilitated by digital media, can, I argue, produce in young urban residents a sense of place characterized by learned indifference
Raw fear in Hong Kong
No full textThis article rethinks the politics of fear through the researcher’s ethnography in Hong Kong. Fear is often explored as a tool of manipulation that disempowers people. In contrast, the bodies, subjectivities, and actions of the fearful people are rarely examined. This article discusses Hong Kong society’s fear through the lens of anthropological and cultural studies of affect, especially through the concept of “raw fear” proposed by David Parkin. It also investigates how fear emerges in everyday life through the researcher’s self-reflections and his conversations with other people
Claiming the bodies of Kurdish women: Kurdish women’s funerals in Northern Kurdistan/Turkey
No full textThe Turkish state strictly bans funerals and other forms of public mourning for Kurdish guerrillas, considering them to be a threat to the sovereign state. Victims of honor crimes are also denied proper burials, as they are accused of “ruining” their family’s reputation. Since the 2000s, Kurdish women activists in Turkey have gone against the grain by holding funerals for both groups of women, as well as public protests against the necropolitics of the state and patriarchal powers which establish exceptions to control life and death. This paper analyzes the ways in which women activists take action by claiming these bodies and reimagining grief and mourning as affects of social justice
An exhibition in fieldwork form
No full textThis is an exhibition of fieldwork art adapted to the page. It is set out following the typical stages of an anthropological research project and presents works that were both made through fieldwork and exhibited as art. The strategy is one of “blending” and playful displacement by way of objects that highlight the dual identity and practice of the anthropologist/artist. Working with artworks that were made with spoken, written, or printed words and texts extends this approach of practical rapprochement between the fields to explore how decisions about genre and material are related to the variable configurations of the field of publics and of the two spheres of activity
Introduction: The politics of negative affects in post-Reform China
No full textIf there is such a thing as a dominant public sphere in post-reform China, its emotional tonality has often been described as overwhelmingly positive, as evidenced by the recent focus on “happiness” campaigns or state-promoted “positive energy.” This special section takes the prevalence of positivity as an invitation to investigate its opposites: what, in an authoritarian context, is the political work of negative affects such as bitterness, fear, shame, indifference, deflation, or trouble? Locating the articles within a broader literature on affect and emotion in anthropology and beyond, this introduction provides an overall framing for the collection. Based on the articles, it depicts the potential of negativity as both disruptive and generative, as affects work through their evaluative and propositional force which induces transformation while often evading repression
"Crimes against sovereignty": Foreign diplomacy, state propaganda, and the Uyghur crisis in Xinjiang
No full textBuilding on anthropological observations of the Chinese state’s specific strategies and practices in the field of international diplomacy and engagement with the media, this article describes how the Chinese state aims to influence and shape the international court of opinion about its measures in Xinjiang. As such, it examines changes in the international political climate and the framework of human rights in which the discussion of adversities in Xinjiang unfolds. In doing so, it draws attention to several important processes of Chinese statecraft and foreign diplomacy, and identifies the reasons why the Uyghur crisis is met with so much ambiguity and uncertainty by the international public
The historical contingency of religious normativity: Local practices in Malaysian Islamic banking
No full textRegional differences in religious opinions are a major issue in Islamic banking. The Islamic contract of bay’ al-‘inah (a sale and repurchase agreement), which was commonly practiced in Malaysia but unacceptable in the Middle East, represents these differences well. This study traces the process by which the legitimacy of bay’ al-‘inah was constituted in Malaysia and examines how actors related the local practice to Islamic tradition. Through interviews and archival research, this study reveals that first adopters of bay’ al-‘inah selected it as an exceptional means for house financing with some ambivalence; however, the choice consequently enabled this contract to prevail through a long-term reproduction process, which obscured the religious dilemma of the first adopters. This study demonstrates the usefulness of process-tracing analysis for anthropological studies of the institutional formation of local Islamic practices to identify their causal configuration and trace the changes of religious normativity and everyday practices
A short biography of Fritz Krause
No full textThis brief biography of the German ethnologist Fritz Krause (1881–1963) sketches his life story, some of the intellectual influences that impacted his work, and elucidates the scholarly context in which the article “Maske und Ahnenfigur: Das Motiv der Hülle und das Prinzip der Form” () was written and published