HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Tools for an efficient witness: Deskilling science and devaluing labor at an agro-environmental research institute
No full textExpectations that research should not only generate real-world impacts but do so in a way that provides “value-for-money” pervade academia and the contemporary knowledge economy. In agricultural research for development, this imperative has spawned “tools” that promise rapidly scalable scientific knowledge on everything from gender inequality to environmental degradation. This promise of speed and scale relies on formal protocols that attempt to deskill data collection so that it can be done by anyone. Drawing ethnography of an agro-environmental research institute in southwest China into conversation with the idea of the scientist as “modest witness,” I show that as well as marginalizing qualitative research, imperatives for efficiency suffocate space for the unspoken informal practices that undergird the ostensibly formal methods of agricultural and environmental scientists. I demonstrate, moreover, how efficient research extends hierarchies of epistemological worth that undermine the contributions of administrative and nonfaculty staff to universities and the sciences
Situated inconveniences and short-term temporalities: Experiences of living close to a waste facility site
No full textThis article investigates people’s experiences of residing close to a municipal waste facility site. Its focus is on perceived dilemmas, including odors, noises, loose garbage, and stray animals, but also on how these dilemmas were overshadowed by other factors or largely framed to concern what I will refer to as situated inconveniences. The findings show that the participants’ framing of their perceived dilemmas as situated inconveniences did allow them to adopt different strategies of management such that they were able to act upon them. At the same time, the participants’ framing opened up only a restricted range of experiences and forms of knowledge
Annihilating the “savage slot” from anthropology: Materializing reflexive practices
No full textCalls to “decolonize” the social sciences have reverberated in academia since at least the 1950s. Anthropology, in particular, has been marked as the “child of colonialism” and “handmaiden of imperialism” (Gough ). Over the course of eight decades now, critics have highlighted the unequal power structures which have framed ethnographic practices and anthropological knowledge production. Yet, anthropology’s “savage slot” (and its manifestation in newer iterations) along with its epistemological and political logic have yet to be dislodged, persisting in contemporary disciplinary practices. This short essay argues for the need to address this crucial gap between anthropological theory and disciplinary practices, to act urgently to acknowledge and then resoundingly reject the haunting legacy of anthropology’s “savage/primitive/native slot.” Given that decolonization is ultimately about dismantling global hierarchies, I suggest that this can only be achieved through materializing progressive and deeply reflexive practices in the work of doing, writing, and teaching ethnography
Are the things really burnt?
No full textBy looking at the vestiges of the scientific archive destroyed by the fire that reduced Brazil’s National Museum to ruins in September 2018, this essay seeks to explore what Isabelle Stengers () described as “another look” at artifacts and the histories of science and their archives. By avoiding the “traps” of separating the scientific evidence contained in these archives from the uses they might have “outside,” I localize minor inscriptions about other people and things in the institution’s day-to-day life. I accompany the first National Museum’s official reports, a history produced within the archives, and seek to track inscriptions about nineteenth-century scientific practice otherwise neglected or rendered invisible: the presence of enslaved Africans. I speculate on what might be an alternative, decolonial, critical, and creative way of talking about the archive of science when this presence is taken into account
The mediation of emotions: On aspects of dispute settlement and violence in Hagen
No full textThis account dates from 1985, originally a companion piece to “Discovering ‘social control’” (1985), but not published in this form then. The ethnographic milieu is Hagen, in Papua New Guinea, under the colonial regime of the 1960s and 70s, and the Australian version of an “imposition of law.” In an attempt to get out from under then current presuppositions over the nature of law in relation to constructs of society, it embarks on describing the two modes of Hagen sociality that were to figure in The gender of the gift (1988). Two circuits in the circulation and reception of emotions channel the way in which people deal with conflict; while they are irreducibly distinct, they are asymmetrical in their influence on general social life, such that affairs conducted through one circuit may damage those of the other. One consequence is quite a blunt description of certain aspects of power relations