HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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A network of networks: Fernando Ortiz, crossroad between cultures
No full textThis article analyzes the role that Fernando Ortiz played in the articulation of transatlantic intellectual and academic networks between different Latin American countries, and between these and Spain. The intellectual community formed in the first three decades of the twentieth century, as also did the circuits through which knowledge was transmitted; these circuits are studied here through Ortiz’s correspondence with other thinkers. Studying this correspondence between intellectuals often also reveals the origin of certain theories and their diffusion, which was, through the correspondence, sometimes faster than through the publication of articles or books. Letters have an added value to scholars and researchers as they are often the quickest way of transmitting ideas and weaving networks
Clay and earth: Excavating partialities and relations
No full textInspired by the idea of “transculturation,” formulated as a contrastive metaphor and concept by Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s, this article seeks to explore the making of clay balls called “Moengo pemba,” extracted from former bauxite excavation areas by Maroon Ndyuka men. With the establishment of the US bauxite industry in Moengo (Suriname) in the late 1910s, subsequent mining and lumbering activities had profound effects on the lives of Maroon families. The labor of Ndyuka men in tree-cutting and bauxite excavation, and women’s work in the gardens and markets, were affected by new moral and economic forces, punctuating diverse forms of circulation and consumption. The use of Moengo pemba has evoked existential effects connected to the Maroon person and body, their ancestors, and other nonhuman beings inhabiting the forest. The association between the clay, the healing powers of pemba, and its ontological effects on Ndyuka bodies in a landscape of environmental destruction is explored here through a contrapuntal dialogue
“I like you being here”: To understand and be understood through illustration
No full textIn this article, I establish some reasons why neurodivergent (ND) people are unlocatable in anthropology and examine a fundamental crisis of mis/under-representing being-ND-in-the-world. I begin with a critique of anthropological ethics at large, disentangling some ableist assumptions about informed consent with “vulnerable” groups. I go on to present “The Theory of ConSENt”: a SEN-based approach that can enable ND people to understand the research process with regards to ethics. SEN is a commonly used acronym for Special Educational Needs. I then argue there is untapped potential within Sensory Anthropology, as it offers a capacious opening to the research of ND people. I highlight a place for SENsory praxis, as a way of neurodiversifying existing methods to enable a full range of abilities to flourish in ethnography. This article makes a well overdue case against anthropological ableism, contributing to the ongoing work of decolonisation
The future
No full textIn the 1990s and early 2000s, Rabinow turned to the study of emergent assemblages, which are rooted in the recent past and possess an uncertain future. The turn to assemblages therefore brings a distinctive temporality into view. Attending to this temporality, this essay examines Rabinow’s interest in “the future” by proposing two observations. First, it argues that Rabinow’s handling of the future is shaped by his thorough rejection of nostalgia. Second, it suggests that Rabinow’s emphasis on the “near” future is a temporal counterpart to his more general interest in the semi-local and near-at-hand as ways of delimiting the scale of objects of inquiry. Together, these qualities give Rabinow’s scholarship a provisional openness to things yet to come, and the sensitivity to grasp the filaments of a possible future
We are unhousing people and so are obliged to rehouse them: The moral economy of squatting
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Smoke’s screens: Media, fire, and the politics of apprehension
No full textThis article analyzes the relationship between media, fire ecology, and Indigenous fire management in the context of Australia’s catastrophic fire events of 2020. How might ethnographic attention to fire’s mediatization allow us to apprehend the distinctive sociality of fire’s qualia? What kind of witness might fire offer in a moment when its capacities as a medium underwrite the science, politics, and aesthetics of its apprehension? As fire is produced, scaled, and animated for screens, social media platforms, and the columns of the daily press, as well as for the ledgers, satellite maps, and fiscal calculus of carbon exchange, it has also acquired distinctive properties that trouble its capacity to bear witness to a climate in transition
Paul Rabinow, midst anthropology’s problems
No full textPaul Rabinow’s essay “Midst anthropology’s problems,” published in Cultural Anthropology in 2001, is both a midpoint and a point of inflection in Rabinow’s intellectual trajectory. It offers a vantage on the sweep of his work as it is addressed by the contributors to this Festschrift, as well as a perspective on his crucial turn to an anthropology of the contemporary