HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Uyghur suffering, uncertainty, and academic interpretation
No full textScholars of life in Xinjiang have faced unprecedented stakes and uncertainty in recent years. Access to the region and its people is curtailed, and the information coming out of it is limited both by state efforts to obfuscate the details of conditions there and by the need for researchers to protect their informants. Despite these impediments to research, however, anthropology and anthropologists have played a uniquely important role in revealing and interpreting the details of the recent crisis. Here, I outline both the importance of anthropological approaches to making sense of the Xinjiang crisis, and the implications of the discipline’s engagement with it for debates on professional ethics and the role of anthropologists in the face of human suffering
Contemporary Shuar beliefs: The indigenous use of a vexed anthropological concept in post-conversion Amazonia
No full textThe critique of belief as an analytical tool in anthropology has overshadowed belief as an ethnographic reality. This article short-circuits these debates over the politics of belief by elaborating ethnographically the indigenous use of the concept—literally the Spanish “creer” and “creencia”—in Shuar territory in post-conversion Amazonia. It shows that contemporary Shuar “belief” supersedes assumptions about belief as an epistemic commitment. The Shuar concept combines the Christian emphasis on conversion with a relatively stable ancestral notion about the meaning and social significance of knowledge, one that emphasizes its instrumentality, as opposed to the ideology of the truth-seeking cogito striving to make accurate representations of the world. These arguments are advanced by presenting ethnographic material from two distinct sites in Shuar territory in southeastern Ecuador: one in which most people claim to “believe” in shamanic healing and ancestral visionary practices, and one in which they do not
“Bureaucratic shiyuzheng”: Silence, affect, and the politics of voice in China
No full textIn the Chinese bureaucracy, where political imperatives for maintaining harmony require people to restrain negative affects, officials often express anger and aggression through silence, apathy, and other flat affects. Other times, overly positive speech that conforms to dominant party ideologies overrides negative affects, flattening officials’ emotions and stifling their own voices. Drawing on ethnographic research in a city of Shandong province, this article studies both responses as “bureaucratic shiyuzheng.” I resist linking shiyuzheng primarily to biomedical explanations, or to the stress and depression triggered by anti-corruption campaigns, and instead treat this phenomenon as an embodied and affective practice that generates space for discourse, psychosocial imagination, and quiet critique. I demonstrate that bureaucratic shiyuzheng is the effect of double silencing, partly imposed by binding bureaucratic structures and the government’s increasing constraints on speech/voice, partly emerging from officials themselves, who seek self-preservation and optimization of resources. Rather than direct resistance to such silencing conditions, people cultivate shiyuzheng as an important mode of social critique
Between speaking and enduring: The ineffable life of bitterness among rural migrants in Shanghai
No full textIn the Maoist period, the Chinese socialist state encouraged the genre of “speaking bitterness” in order to give expression to past sufferings and cultivate a class consciousness. In the post-Mao era, scholars have noted how marginalized figures express discontent through public displays of bitterness and how state agents use “speaking bitterness” as a governing strategy for diffusing class antagonism and ensuring stability. The communication of bitterness, however, does not necessarily have an intrinsic or performative relationship with political action; it has a social life beyond political governance. Based on my ethnographic research with rural-urban migrants in Shanghai, this article explores the communication of bitterness as an affective and ethical force situated between speaking and enduring. The ineffable gap between speaking and enduring does not mark passivity, but decenters the speaking subject and opens up a social space for criticism, recognition and hope for a different future
Strategic commodification: The object biography of Tibetan thangka paintings in contemporary China
No full textThis article focuses on Tibetan thangka and thangka painters in Amdo Rebgong (Qinghai, China), who are caught between a state-fostered tourist market promoting Tibetan thangkas as folk art and an intermediate market where clients pursue the religious authenticity and efficacy of thangka paintings. My study rejects any simple dichotomy of sacred object and commodity and views the object biography of Tibetan thangkas as contingent on the sites of thangka within the complex structure of the art market, the context of the actual exchanges, and the specific relationships forged between painters and their clients, an important narrative that has been missing in previous studies of Rebgong thangka art and its commodification. I argue that commodification should be understood as a strategic process where some Rebgong painters tactically participate in the market in order to authenticate their religious identity, preserve a cultural tradition, or establish artistic authority within and beyond Tibetan communities
The nonanimistic worldview of Fritz Krause
No full textIn the acknowledgments to the English translation of “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism,” Eduardo Vivieros de Castro (: 484) cryptically states that “After this article has reached its present form, I read an essay by Fritz Krause … which advances ideas strikingly similar to some developed here.” In this introduction to the first English translation of Krause’s “Mask and ancestral figure: The motif of the skin and the principle of form,” I sketch what some of these ideas may be and trace how they were addressed in Viveiros de Castro’s later writings. I conclude with a brief survey of some other engagements with Krause’s work in Amazonian ethnology and suggest why this article has remained largely ignored in the discipline
Religion in action: How Marian apparitions may become true
No full textAccording to Latour, religion and science have nothing in common. The two are successful (or failing) in quite different ways. Religiousness is not aimed at fact-making, but at presence-making, he says. To critically reconsider these ideas, I discuss the case study of Marian apparitions in Litmanová, Slovakia. The study suggests a more complicated picture by not focusing on pure and ready-made religion, but rather on religion in the making, a kind of “almost-religion.” It shows how the reality of apparitions, initially of quite unclear status, was becoming more and more religious. Fact-making and fact-checking clearly belonged to this trajectory and have never stopped being relevant. Nonetheless, together with how the apparition was progressively becoming truly religious (or religiously true), Latourian presence-making was gaining in importance
The folds of the world: An essay on Mesoamerican textile topology
No full textThis article explores a Mesoamerican topology based on the figure of the fold. It argues that the operation of folding represents a crucial concept for understanding indigenous cosmology and ontology. The fold is what allows the separation and articulation of the two domains into which the indigenous cosmos is divided: the solar state, extensive and discrete, which humans and other ordinary beings inhabit, and the intensive, virtual sphere, where spirits dwell. In turn, the fold refers to textiles, which likely represent a basic model for invention and transformation in Mesoamerican cultures. The article examines certain classical themes in Mesoamerican anthropology in light of this topology: a human being’s make-up, ritual operations, folding of the body, the sacred bundles, and the substance of time. At a more general level, this work is an attempt to contribute to what could be called an Amerindian transformational topology, a kind of imagination where certain “forms” or “figures” reappear in different domains of the world as transformations one of another
Shameless modernity: Reflexivity and social class in Chinese personal growth groups
No full textCritical scholars suggest that self-help psychology discourages political activism and encourages entrepreneurship by promoting a “positive” attitude. This article complicates this finding, arguing that for Chinese youth, self-help groups reproduce class distinctions, expressed through leisure and perceived modernity, and that these groups mobilize negative affects, particularly shame. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the article shows how Chinese youth recount shameful experiences in personal growth groups, reflecting on their perceived failures and committing to redefine themselves. Their shame induces reflexivity, or self-awareness; this reflexivity helps Chinese youth to position themselves in a highly stratified society. Furthermore, reflexive self-definition indexes social class and personal fulfillment. Youth use self-help groups as spaces in which to align their personal identity with local moral registers championing urban consumer lifestyles and modern values. Therefore, self-help practices channel negative affects into reproducing social class and into constructing an imagined national modernity