HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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If only there was a Department of Fieldwork in Philosophy
No full textFieldwork in philosophy amounts to a second-order philosophical anthropology. It examines contemporary forms of the human by attending to lower-level concepts and practices. It departs from Michel Foucault’s gray and meticulous approach to the history of the present, which understands the transformation of high-level organizing concepts such as “Man” or “the subject” through an inquiry into scientific discourses, clinical practices, disciplinary institutions, etc. However, fieldwork in philosophy doesn’t approach the present by writing its history but by conducting anthropological fieldwork. This essay reconstructs Paul Rabinow’s conception of fieldwork in philosophy as it inspired the author’s work on the perennial philosophy of the psychedelic renaissance, a case study of neurophilosophers in a sleep laboratory, as well as research on cultural primatologists who took the Enlightenment question of human nature to the African rainforest. The essay ends with a plea for reimagining anthropology as fieldwork in philosophy
Censorship, foreclosure, and the three deaths of Fengzhen
No full textThis article draws on Judith Butler’s distinction between censorship and foreclosure, and on Saidiya Hartman’s work about how to narrate the silences of the slave trade, to explore two photographs. The first is a dismembered and reassembled family photograph that suggests a distinction between present absences and totally absent ones. The second opens up the case of the three deaths of the goddess Fengzhen caused by China’s very rapid urbanization: first as a woman, then as a deity’s statue-body, and finally as the photographic center of a ritual. In both photographs the silences of censorship and foreclosure create forms of haunting that help reveal their different structures of power. The focus on the haunting power of the silenced also shows the importance of adding the nondiscursive world to the more discourse-centered analysis of Butler and Hartman. The discussion emphasizes the difficulties of writing about the silences of censorship and foreclosure without breaking them, and suggests some possibilities through invocation, evocation, and a bypassing of the “archive” through the continuing presence of the absent
Connectionwork: “Connection” in the practices and perspectives of Israeli neoforagers
No full textDespite their centrality to foundational conceptions of relations in anthropology and their casual use in contemporary discourse, “connections” are only rarely problematized and reflected upon. “Connection” is a key emic concept among neoforagers who engage in practices typically associated with forager lifeways for the purpose of cultivating “deep connection to nature.” Through an ethnography of Israeli neoforagers, this article describes how “connection” acquires different meanings in different contexts and levels of experience, and how it significantly shapes neoforager praxis, epistemology, ontology, and ethics. Neoforagers transpose connection-oriented perspectives and terminology commonplace in the digitally connected society onto more-than-human encounters and relations. The term “connectionwork” is proposed to describe both their connection-oriented ontology and the continuous effort to properly connect and disconnect in the world. It is suggested that an analytical consideration of connections and connectionwork may further illuminate more-than-human sociality and relations in general
Found again in translation? Standardizing the authenticity of guaraná among the Sateré-Mawé people (Brazilian Amazon)
No full textThis article analyzes a certification process undertaken by Sateré-Mawé indigenous people from the Brazilian Amazon, as part of a “global localization” strategy aimed to reappropriate a plant that is both cultivated and globalized. Through their attempt to establish that the guaraná they produce and sell is the original one, they seek to restore the plant’s central role in their social organization and epistemology, while pursuing broader goals of cultural, political, and territorial autonomy. Our analysis focuses on the knowledge politics and on the processes of translation at play in the negotiation of certification standards, in order to show how and to what extent the actors involved manage to understand each other’s ideas and practices, to negotiate shared values and goals, and to establish standards defining what is authentic. It also explores the “generative interfaces” between anthropology and law so as to produce situated ethnographies of how the global is constructed
The fetishes of Fernando Ortiz
No full textA materialistic way to account for the continuities and discontinuities of the extended work of Cuban researcher, writer, and politician Fernando Ortiz, is to follow the trajectory of his fetishes. From the fetishes of Italian and Spanish criminal anthropology, to the national and ethnic libraries and archives, going through tobacco, sugar, and Afro-Cuban drums, and objects—things always have a central place in the thought and writing of the Cuban polygraphist. I will review here some moments of the relationship between Ortiz and his fetishes to understand their ethnographic agencies and their importance to Ortiz’s exploration of Caribbean modernity. My reading will transit from the counter-fetishist politics of Los negros brujos (1906) to the organologic fetishization of Los instrumentos de la música afrocubana (1952–1955), going through the double fetishism of the transculturation of tobacco and sugar in the Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940)
Seeing water: Slow resistance and the material enigma of extractive effects on society and ecology
No full textThis article reflects on ten years of ethnographic work investigating concerns about mining industry-produced environmental and social change in hyperarid territories experiencing long-term drought. The ecological and social effects of groundwater extraction by the copper and lithium mining industry in the southern Salar de Atacama are not immediately detectable, since water, the saltpan, and the desert provide few clues, and the political and economic conditions of water in Chile render it fractured between surface and subsurface, fresh and salt. In public accounts, water belongs to a radical present: there are few environmental reports of water’s past before groundwater was profoundly subject to mining, and ecological impacts from aquifer extraction are apparent only after exhaustion has occurred. This article takes a narrative approach that reflects on what may be achieved by “slow resistance” and discerned from accumulated ethnographic witnessing
