HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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One year later: Reflections on the farmers’ protest in India
No full textBeginning November 2020, over two hundred thousand farmers have gathered in a prolonged sit-in on the borders of New Delhi. The immediate impetus for the protests was the passage of three laws that ease the entry of agribusiness into the agricultural sector. The farmers’ protests began eight months after mass protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, enacted in December 2019. This amendment to India’s Citizenship Act disbars Muslims from neighboring countries from seeking citizenship on the grounds of religious persecution. In this essay I explore some themes as they resonate across these two movements as they relate to a fundamental crisis of postcolonial nationhood. I argue that these protests have interrupted Hindu nationalism’s narrative by forging a new kind of caring crowd in which embodied acts of care create an ethical vision of citizenship. Popular politics materialized in these movements may be viewed as ongoing plebiscites on the neoliberal consensus in contemporary India
Twilight states: Comparing case studies of hysteria and spirit possession
No full textThis article compares two case studies: that of Anna O., whose hysteria helped found psychoanalysis, with that of possessed Wolof priestess Khady Fall. Questioning the psychic separation of the modern subject, I contend that cultures with a spirit idiom are potentially more sensitive to complexities of interpersonal relationships. In both cases, the paternal influence wreaks havoc, but where ritual, myth, and magic empower Khady to become a healer herself, Anna O. is not so lucky. The poverty of the scientific viewpoint is overrun by a phantasmic excess that it fails to explain, unable to admit that the analyst too is implicated in this numinous morass of unacted desires. The internalization of spirit worlds into the subject, and their consequent reduction and confinement to the category of “hallucination,” blinds us to the affective intensities of interpersonal phantasy upon whose exclusion our sense of reality is founded
The intensive image: Transculturation, creativity and presence in the cult of María Lionza
No full textThe cult of María Lionza is an Afro-Latin American religion native to Venezuela which usually involves episodes of spirit possession. Its most notable figure is María Lionza, a plural goddess imagined and represented in different ways (as an Indian, White, Mestizo, and, although rarely, Black woman), and constantly reinvented. In this article, I propose to define the image of María Lionza as an intensive image, that is, as a multiple and ever-changing image, permanently open to a process of differentiation. My main argument is that this image may function as a medium—thus facilitating contact between “believers” and the “spiritual entities” themselves—insofar as it is constantly reinvented through acts of visual creativity. I also discuss the affinities between the concept of “intensity” and that of “transculturation,” a term initially coined by Fernando Ortiz
Humbling anthropology: Ego reflexivus and White ignorance
No full textIn this essay, I propose a process of humbling anthropology in order to counter the (re)production of White ignorance. I argue that anthropology’s epistemological foundation, in its contemporary liberal guise of an ego reflexivus, remains firmly rooted in the discipline’s colonial past. By drawing from my own experiences of confronting racism and Whiteness in the academy and the discipline, I trace my process of humbling and relate it to the anthropological ego and its (flawed) engagements with racism, Whiteness, and its colonial complicity, despite antiracist efforts by individual anthropologists, past and present. Moreover, I will reflect on what it is like to do an ethnography on White ignorance at elite universities in the global North, and what perceptual and conceptual steps of humbling are needed to counteract White ignorance, as well as its limits in order to forge an antiracist approach
Listening to disrupt ethnographic representations
No full textConvinced that ethnography still provides a critical tool for studying and understanding our ever-changing and complex world, I present here a case for approaching ethnographic work through “listening.” I extend the notion of listening to include reading as a form of listening and writing as a form of talking or storytelling. Following Stephen William Foster’s notion of listening as conviviality, I share examples of reading and rereading texts, images, and interactions to find how we can understand some of the mishaps that occur in ethnographic representations. I am guided in this by a number of related questions: What happens when listening becomes a distortion of lived experiences and what we hear and end up recording becomes problematic? What if what we hear is mediated through another person’s interpretation? What happens when what we capture from our listening gets challenged by the very people we represent in our ethnographies
Fernando Ortiz (and the spiritists?) in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia
No full textThis article explores the social framework of spiritism in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia during the time Fernando Ortiz lived there, and the connections of active spiritists with the pedagogical environment of the Cuban thinker. I reconstruct the wide field of (possible?) spiritist connections in which Ortiz found himself enmeshed, so as to trace his (possible?) encounters with spiritism across places, people, dates, and publications. Spiritism constituted itself as an integral conceptual system that responded to the systematization of mediumship in the West after the middle of the nineteenth century. Therefore, my goal is to present some general considerations about trance and spiritism and to search for the connections between different social, geographic, and temporal contexts (in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia) in which to locate Ortiz’s first awareness that something called spiritism existed, beyond his own autobiographical account of the issue
Witness to a passing: The silent death of local water management and the quiet hand of government
No full textWater stories told in Kilimanjaro Region, such as Mami Wata narratives conveyed across Africa and the Atlantic, give horrific insights into morally problematic forms of wealth acquisition through environmental destruction. This paper approaches farmers’ stories of water spirits and water management practices as indices of farmers’ witness to their own social displacement by government-backed agribusinesses. Analysis shows that farmers are drawn to, and are already part of, a system that waits and watches for their death. As perverse as many forms of necropolitics can be, this form of social devivification, duplicitously advanced in the name of environmental conservation and sustainability, is all too familiar and ordinary. This article unveils agro-industrial conceits about water management and contrasts these conceits to farmers’ life-sustaining practices
