HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Wind, wood, and the entangled life of disasters
No full textIn October 2018, the storm Vaia hit the Fiemme valley (Italy), causing extensive damage to its forests. As in other catastrophic events in the Anthropocene, this disaster was enhanced by the anthropogenic impact on wind patterns. It represents a strong correspondence between geophysical forces and capitalist offshoots in the atmosphere and woodland. The community of Fiemme sought to overcome its traumatic experience by establishing a kinship of winds, a cultural model that makes allowance for climate change underlying the linkage of several European wind storms. Caught in this entanglement, the root causes and the repercussions of Vaia are fractured into different temporal scales. With this, I propose a silvicultural turn where the forest might be seen as a parallel community with which to remodel the way of inhabiting the territory. Woods, in this sense, became embedded witnesses of climate change
Gridlock: Vigilance and early warning in the shadow of climate change
No full textThis article examines how Guyana’s storm early warning system shapes political imaginaries of climate adaptation. Specifically, it focuses on the reactions people have to the forms of gridlock that can make intense flooding, and climate change more generally, feel like an insurmountable problem. As I detail throughout this article, gridlock is an object of intervention in the development, maintenance, and operations of the storm early warning system. The management of gridlock is synonymous with aspirations to make more consistent institutional arrangements of vigilance. But Civil Defense Commission staff and village residents run into difficulties making enhancements because gridlock unfolds across multiple historical tenses. That is, as they implement the storm early warning system, gridlock reveals itself as a product of past and ongoing governmental practices that permeate the present in ways that shape uncertainty about the future. In this respect, this article extends conversations in anthropological scholarship on anticipation around the different configurations of political time within contexts of climate change/risk and governance
Fieldwork: Problems we are still required to think
No full textThis article re-engages with Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco, originally published in 1977, to consider the ways in which social inequalities frame the possibilities and outcomes of fieldwork. It also reflects on the ways in which both social inequalities and the possibilities of field research have changed from the 1980s to the present, requiring that anthropologists reproblematize the practice of fieldwork. These reflections are based on the author’s long-term research in the peripheries of São Paulo
Concept-work: In its passions and throes
No full textThis short essay is a brief account of my encounters with Paul Rabinow over some thirty years, forming a close relationship although we were never in the same place for any length of time
Caribbean–Mediterranean counterpoint
No full textThis afterword comments on the articles collected in this special issue dedicated to the counterpoint between the Mediterranean where Fernando Ortiz grew up, and the Caribbean where he lived most of his life. Under the influence of Lombroso, Ortiz began his career with now highly objectionable views of ritual practices of African origin in Cuba. By the early 1920s he had moved to the opposite position and begun to valorize retentions from Africa. He developed the idea of the ajiaco, a simmering stew, as a model for Cuban national formation through the mingling and absorption of diverse ethnic groups. He described this process as one of transculturation, the precise opposite of the xenophobia and cultural fundamentalism found in many European societies. That Mediterranean and Caribbean societies have affected one another for over five centuries encourages heuristic exploration of their intertwined pasts and presents. Ortiz’s ideas are a guide to this open-ended enterprise
Decolonizing anthropology at a distance: Some thoughts
No full textThrough the notions of distance, double critique, and colonial difference, this essay suggests a decolonization through a novel usage of colonial ethnographies. Analyzing the case of Morocco to reflect on the question of language(s) used in writing ethnography, specifically Arabic, French, and others, and unpacking the notion of colonial difference, the essay attempts to break away from the Western episteme. An “outside” to that episteme is found in the confrontation between knowledge accumulated in the written and the vernacular Arabic on the one hand, and Western knowledge (here, anthropological knowledge), on the other hand. This double critique aims at a reappropriation of colonial ethnography, and restructuring of the anthropological field, thus reframing the question of decolonization. The hope is that this reframing may have some general relevance
