HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Should Uyghurs be considered an Indigenous people?
No full textThis article asks whether Uyghurs should be considered an Indigenous people. In doing so, it highlights the contested issues this question raises and seeks to initiate a more comprehensive debate on the question among Uyghurs themselves, who ultimately decide the appropriateness of such identification. The Chinese state is implementing an intense campaign against Uyghurs that bears striking resemblance to those historically waged by other settler-colonial regimes against the Indigenous peoples they displaced. Embracing indigeneity could serve as a useful strategy for at least contextualizing Uyghurs’ present repression and dispossession, but Uyghurs in the diaspora are ambivalent about the concept. The article examines both why Uyghurs can be considered an Indigenous people under UN criteria and why they are reticent to embrace this status. While Uyghurs’ ultimate acceptance of indigeneity as a means of self-identification would require the participation of all Uyghurs, including those living in the PRC who are currently unable to engage in such discussions, we argue that even a limited debate on the relevance of indigeneity to their identity among Uyghurs in exile would widen the possibilities of responses to the acts of repression, erasure, and dispossession carried out against their people inside China
The song of power: A fugue of dystopia and racial regeneration
No full textIn this paper I take the form of the fugue in music to query a contemporary dynamic. It is one where hopefulness entwines with worrisome, oppressive realities that pervade biosocial trends concerning race. Genetic ancestry testing, forensic uses of DNA, and President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative are all examined as aspects of this cultural moment where biosociality must be engaged for its potential contradictory outcomes, which I argue are regenerative in form, yet often dystopian
Witnessing from within: Hyperobjects and climate activism in Poland
No full textThis article explores practices of witnessing global warming developed in recent years by climate movements in Poland. Timothy Morton’s concept of the “hyperobject” acts as a starting point for a discussion of the ontological assumptions that underlie theories and practices of witnessing, and for the development of an expanded concept of witnessing that includes the future, collectivity, and nonhumans. These considerations are followed by a description of three practices that are interpreted as practices of witnessing global warming: climate demonstrations organized in Warsaw, a blockade of an open-pit coal mine in central Poland, and the Mszak ritual performed by the Interspecies Community religious group in the Botanical Garden in Warsaw. The descriptions of these cases allow a further deepening and nuancing of the concept of witnessing
The reluctant native: Or, decolonial ontologies and epistemic disobedience
No full textAnthropologists, in regular intervals, tend to ask a cardinal question: How do we know what we know? Storms about ethnography and theory, epistemology and representation rage, and in their wake the debris of epistemic inequities, philosophical villainy, and more, scatter. What do these issues imply for those practicing the discipline outside the power centers where these issues circulate? In this essay, arguments built from the ground up will map the political economy of issues such as: what lies beneath the epistemological positions we occupy (funding, institutional structures, publishing); what are the pragmatics of the knowledge we produce or are obliged to produce (local, “area/region” knowledge); and, what slots do we occupy now (“native,” postcolonial anthropologists)? From that map, I articulate what ethnographic and epistemological potential or constraint is created by those ontologies. This leads me to transpose the cardinal anthropological question to: What can we know from where we are
Caribbean and Mediterranean counterpoints and transculturations
No full textProbing the possibilities for transregional anthropological scholarship in light of the Cuban polymath Fernando Ortiz’s prolific work, this introduction surveys the development of Mediterraneanist and Caribbeanist anthropology, situates Ortiz’s intellectual trajectory within its Balearic and Cuban biographical contexts, and discusses the contributors’ attempts to harness Ortiz’s conceptual vocabulary to issues such as Hispanophone intellectual network-building, the globalization of Spiritist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the phenomenology of the US-Haitian water border, patterns of intersectarian coexistence and exclusion at Mediterranean shrines and walled border zones, Ortiz’s changing views of Afro-Cuban cultural forms, his lexicographical contributions and their afterlife in Afro-Cuban ritual praxis, as well as ethnographies probing the promise of Ortiz’s contrapuntal approach and concept of transculturation in relation to the conjunction between the global aluminum industry and Ndyuka Maroon ritual praxis in Suriname, the transformation of northern Portugal’s Alto Minho region in light of theories of cultural emergence, and the proliferation of images of the deity María Lionza in Venezuela, Barcelona and on the web. The overarching argument is that a return to Ortiz’s signature contributions to rethinking ethnoracial difference, and nonhierarchical conceptions of cultural heterogeneity may serve us well in our contemporary endeavors to understand not just the Caribbean and Mediterranean regions, but global processes, such as the turn towards vocabularies of cultural incompatibility that serve as novel, seemingly “post-racial” technologies of exclusion
Behind the “racism” of the 2019 Hong Kong protests
No full textScholars, intellectuals, and left-wing activists have recently come to reflect on the hostility and exclusion of Hong Kong protesters against mainland Chinese in the city’s democratic movement. This article is a response to the critical voice. Borrowing from Wing Sang Law’s (2008) conceptualization of colonial power as a network of relations, I argue that the power relationship between Hongkongers and mainlanders has been changing amid China’s rapid economic growth and extending cultural influence. The Hong Kong identity is no longer necessarily privileged over the mainland one. Individual mainland Chinese are not entirely neutral apolitical subjects, but inevitably placed in the grids of the power network of Chinese colonialism over Hong Kong. As such, the relevant questions for a truly liberating prospect for the movement concern to what extent and in what ways we can effectively differentiate “Chinese” from “China” in present Hong Kong amid evolving coloniality
Introduction: “Overseas ethnography” and the audiences of academic anthropology in China
No full textThis essay introduces the translations of two articles by Gao Bingzhong on the topic of “overseas ethnography” in China. In these essays, Gao attempts to create more space for Chinese anthropologists to do ethnographic research outside of China, rather than focusing on research in their own country. Gao provides a liberal defense of the anthropological enterprise while contributing to the literature on world ethnographies. His essays also illuminate the conditions of writing in the official spaces of Chinese academia, and, hence, its problematic distance from other spaces of world anthropology
True brujos and imitators: A reading of Fernando Ortiz’s Los negros brujos (1906)
No full textThis article offers a reading of Ortiz’s first book, Los negros brujos (). By following the theme of “duplicity” that structures the loose notes that compose the volume, an argument emerges in which reality and copy, credulity and hypocrisy, “true brujo” and brujo criollo, state and fetish, temple and museum, etc., play against each other. This argument resonates not only with how similar pairs emerged in the study of African culture but also with how anthropologists invent their object of study. By giving relevance to the verse by Cuban poet De Heredia that opens Ortiz’s book, the article highlights Ortiz’s intention to disenchant, which paradoxically leads him into a misrepresentation of Afro-Cuban ritual. Despite denouncing the lack of cultural intimacy, this article may help assess the extent to which Ortiz’s later theory of “transculturation” was signalled in Los negros brujos’s views on “communicating vessels” and “allotropy.
Born again, again: Witchcraft, Pentecostal conversions, and spiritual rebirth in the Trobriand Islands
No full textIn the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), yoyowa (consistently translated as “witches” by English-speaking Trobrianders) are a constant threat, causing illness and death to those who arouse their envy or ire. While some women are widely known to be yoyowa, accusations are never made publicly, and there are no reprisals. People exercise caution when dealing with known or potential yoyowa, and always try to “make them happy,” in a common phrase. Recently, however, with the arrival of Pentecostal Christianity and a broader Revival movement, some Trobriand women who undergo spiritual rebirth have publicly acknowledged their previous status as yoyowa. In this paper, I examine the parallels and paradoxes, as well as the broader implications, of being born again in Trobriand cosmology—first, to become a yoyowa, and later, to reject such a status in favor of being reborn as a true believer in Christ