HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Talking culture: New boundaries, new rhetorics of exclusion in Europe
No full textIn the contemporary debate concerning European integration and the “problem” of Third World immigration no less than in developments in anthropology in the past decade, the boundedness of cultures and cultural difference have gained new prominence. Anthropology needs not only to explore how globalization affects the discipline’s classical subjects but also to pay more attention to the new ways in which cultural differences and cleavages are conceptualized at its source. In effect, the political right in Europe has in the past decade developed a political rhetoric of exclusion in which Third World immigrants, who proceed in part from its ex-colonies, are construed as posing a threat to the national unity of the “host” countries because they are culturally different. This rhetoric of exclusion has generally been identified as a new form of racism. I argue, instead, that, rather than asserting different endowments of human races, it postulates a propensity in human nature to reject strangers. This assumption underlies a radical opposition between nationals and immigrants as foreigners informed by a reified notion of bounded and distinct, localized national-cultural identity and heritage that is employed to rationalize the call for restrictive immigration policies. Following a systematic comparison of the contrasting conceptual structures of the two doctrines, I conclude that the contemporary cultural fundamentalism of the political right is, with respect to traditional racism, both old and new. It is old in that it draws for its argumentative force on the unresolved contradiction in the modern conception of the nation-state between an organicist and a voluntarist idea of belonging. It is new in that, because racism has become discredited politically, it attributes the alleged incompatibility between different cultures to an incapacity of different cultures to communicate that is inherent in human nature
Border dialectics and the border multiple: A view from the northern Caribbean
No full textQuestions related to hybridity, creolization, and the porosity of cultural forms have long concerned anthropologists. More often than not, these issues have been explored at sites within the boundaries of national cultural spaces even when those sites are multiplied to achieve a transnational scope that spills over nation-state borders. Looking at the clash of American migrant interdiction agents and Haitian smugglers in the northern Caribbean, this article shifts focus away from the insides of territorial units and aims to illuminate the entanglements that emerge in the often hyperregimented spaces of the sovereign border itself—as distinguishable from the more amorphous spaces of the borderlands. In these interstitial seams of the global system of nation-states, one finds an ontological multiplicity but also an oppositional dynamism that sheds light on the possibility of emergent formations within this and other sites of highly contentious border confrontations
When we were modern
No full textThis essay situates Paul Rabinow’s work on modernist planning relative to the discipline of anthropology at the end of the 1980s, recalling the significance of treating modernity as an ethos
Liberate yourself by examining and analyzing
No full textThis essay explores touchstones in the thought and teaching of Paul Rabinow, connecting his work on biosociality and modernizing practices to deeper commitments. The theme of “experiments in form” is explored and the question of the value of a life of inquiry is touched on
Towards a collaborative ethos
No full textCollaboration is a key thread in the wide-ranging experimental work of Paul Rabinow. This experimental work of giving form to a collaborative ethics of anthropology can be seen in the crucible of experience and experimentation (foyer d’expérience) known as the Labinar. Beginning with Rabinow’s own declaration that his collaborative anthropological experimentation has been oriented to an ethical end, I explore two ethical parameters in Rabinow’s work that are central to what I am calling a collaborative ethos. These parameters are crucial to any stance that affords one the capacity for collaboration and not merely cooperation
Acting counter to our time
No full textThis essay poses the question of the timeliness of anthropological knowledge. Paul Rabinow’s writings suggest that anthropological research has a particular relationship to the demands of the present day. The role of the anthropologist is neither that of the technical expert who can provide an instrumental solution to a given problem, nor that of an authoritative commentator who delivers a rapid assessment of the significance of an unfolding event. The essay explores a period of Rabinow’s work in which he articulated a distinctive form of anthropological engagement with present developments in the life sciences. In this work, Rabinow argued that the anthropology of the contemporary should not focus on contests over meaning and value, which tend to remain relatively stable, but instead should seek out transformations of forms, which “can provoke astonishment or arouse hatred.” The concept of assemblage, he suggested, could equip an observer to recognize such form-events as “the curious and potent singularities that they are.
Decolonizing ethnographies
No full textFor this Currents section, we have called upon anthropologists across the global South and North in the attempt to mainstream the long overdue issue of decolonizing ethnographies. On the one hand, movements for ethnic/racial equality across the world have made this task more and more pressing. On the other, reactionary forces have tried to suppress such moves alongside critical race theorization—an integral part of decolonizing—as unnecessary and even racist. Based in Brazil, Kenya, India, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States, contributors consider the decolonizing of ethnographies in terms of three overlapping areas: (i) ontologies and epistemologies that redress metanarratives and the history of ethnoracial occlusions and exclusions; (ii) social positions, approaches, and methods in terms of how we engage with other researchers, research participants, and students; and (iii) theoretical developments, representations, and effects in terms of how we present ethnographic research and to what ends