HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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The legacy of Ortiz’s Yorubization of Lucumí: Translation as transculturation
No full textThe contemporary retranslation and circulation of Lucumí songs for the orishas (deities) among devotees and scholars in Cuba inadvertently reproduces both the sources and methods of Ortiz’s earliest linguistic ventures and reinforces his enduring influence on popular understandings of Santería’s utterances. This article draws on research in Cuba in 2018 in partnership with a Nigerian priestess, which revealed the processes, aspirations, and mixed results of contemporary Lucumí song translation efforts. As many Cuban priests granted her religious authority largely on the basis of her Yoruba language knowledge, the hierarchies of translation revealed themselves within a changing global setting. While Ortiz’s theory of transculturation recognized the agency of subaltern groups in stimulating cultural change, this article demonstrates that translation is an intrinsically asymmetrical intercultural communication. The linguistic processes of contemporary Nigerian-Cuban priestly encounters resemble Ortiz’s philological speculations, yet may also engender change and sustained religious influence
The lexicographic studies of Fernando Ortiz Fernández
No full textThis article analyzes the lexicographical studies undertaken by the distinguished Cuban anthropologist and ethnologist Fernando Ortiz Fernández concerning the Spanish spoken in Cuba. It begins with a brief exposition of the factors conducive to the rise of the Cuban modality of Spanish and of those scholars who dedicated themselves to its description before Ortiz’s efforts. It then examines Ortiz’s own work, especially concerning Africanisms in Cuban dialect. The article notes the repercussions in Ortiz’s thought of his youthful experience in Menorca, and calls attention to an entire series of linguistic works by Ortiz published in various Cuban journals that blazed a trail for those who, up to the present, have continued to study and describe the Spanish spoken in Cuba
Minhoto counterpoints: On metaphysical pluralism and social emergence
No full textIn his classic work Contrapunteo cubano, Fernando Ortiz shows how two different plants and the products they yield can be at the base of two distinct forms of life. The fascinating revelation in his essay is how these two products (tobacco and sugar), which are central elements in the emergence of consumer society at the global level, give rise in their local mode of occurrence in Cuba to distinct social environments. In this article I ask, beyond its empirical relevance, what methodological and analytical lessons can we take from his essay? In reinterpreting Ortiz’s essay in the light of the forms of life that I studied in Alto Minho (northwest Portugal) in the later 1970s, I hope to draw lessons that can illuminate our own present take on the still momentous matters of social emergence and metaphysical pluralism
Preface: An anthropologist of the contemporary
No full textThis Festschrift presents essays from a symposium organized in honor of Paul Rabinow. Our hope is that, collectively, the essays offer a sense of the evolution and range of the topics and problems Rabinow investigated, and the diverse projects of anthropological inquiry that have been built in conversation with Rabinow and his work. But most importantly, they bring into focus an audacious proposal, formulated over a remarkable career, for an anthropology of the contemporary world
Natural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism: On the making of a philosophical anthropologist
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Strategies of dealing with the other: Coexistence and exclusion
No full textThe specific character of Ortiz’s theory of transculturation is dependent on the Cuban context in which, and for which, it was elaborated. This article, opening with a sketch of Ortiz’s place of upbringing, Menorca, as a site of brutal struggles for identity hegemony over centuries, looks at the Mediterranean context of intercommunal mixing and antagonism, arguing that rather than an ajiaco (stew) it is a field of contest wherein the coexistence of pre-existing identities depend on fragile strategies of accommodation and “making way” but where often contact with alterity results in antagonistic struggles to neutralize the impact of the other
Witnessing environments
No full textThis article offers a conceptual and historical introduction to the significance of witnessing in relationship to environmental questions for the Hau special section “Witnessing Environments.” The articles in this special section take as their focus the often fragmented ways in which witnessing gains traction—as both practice and ethos—across environmental interventions. They also chart the ways that the pairing of “witnessing” and “environment” reconfigures both terms, with environmental questions, their politics, and their mediatization at once challenging and providing emergent spaces of creativity and experiment in relation to witnessing
We’ve never seen anything like it: Witnessing coral death and resurrection
No full textThe last “global coral bleaching event” lasted three years (2014–2017), solidifying the plight of the world’s coral reefs as a defining problem of the Anthropocene. The catastrophe inspired countless media stories, becoming common knowledge in parts of the world far from any coastline. Despite the urgency of this latest discovery of coral mass mortality, it is likely that coral decline would never have become the widely recognized crisis that it is today without the visual witnessing technologies that made bleaching so sensationally obvious. And now some proposed solutions to the problem of coral decline, such as large-scale, privately funded coral reef restoration projects, have become reliant on such witnessing tools to mediate public relations and engage many forms of social support. This article presents examples from coral visualizations and materializations in The Bahamas and Indonesia in order to explore the highly uneven politics of witnessing coral life and death