HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Data witnessing: Making sense of urban air in Copenhagen, Denmark
No full textTaking air pollution in Copenhagen as a case of environmental change, this article discusses the different ways that data are employed in processes of witnessing this change. We distinguish between three different modes of “data witnessing”—modest, imperial, and guerrilla—in order to clarify how different scientific, corporate, or civil society actors are engaged in producing and analyzing data about air pollution from different vantage points and with different interests. Their respective data work, as well as their joint participation in collaboration and confrontation over the interpretation of data, is a crucial component in making sense of air pollution in Copenhagen, which is predominantly out of reach to the human senses. Witnessing air pollution in Copenhagen is made possible by critical data designs under circumstances where neither data, nor subjective witnessing, in itself is enough
The burden of choice and the triumph of the event: Freedom in the Yemeni revolution
No full textIn the anthropology of ethics there has been a growing interest in the concept of freedom, defined as the tool of consciousness that enables people to reflect on themselves and their circumstances, and make decisions about what they ought to do. The benefit of understanding freedom as a grounded ethical practice is that it allows us to appreciate how people constitute themselves through the choices they make. What this obscures, however, is an understanding of how freedom figures in situations where people no longer feel the need to consider what they ought to do and where choice becomes redundant. Through an exploration of nonviolent action in the 2011 Yemeni revolution, this essay proposes a notion of freedom as liberation from moral choice, where choice is a burden. It concludes by reconsidering the extent to which ethical thought can adequately account for the varieties of human freedom in different ethnographic contexts
Darwin’s hug: Ideologies of gesture in the science of human exceptionalism
No full textThis article reviews accounts of “hugging” across evolutionary paradigms to expose how understandings of gesture are shaped by scientific theorizations of the ways humans and animals differ. The divergent roles assigned to gesture in human communication by Vygotskian and Chomskyan researchers can be traced to research on human exceptionalism during key historical periods in the Soviet Union and United States. When Vygotsky introduced his sociocultural theory of cognitive development during the early Soviet period, human exceptionalism was tested through reproductive crossbreeding. When Chomsky hypothesized a language acquisition device for the human brain during the Civil Rights era, human exceptionalism was tested through interspecies communication. These scientific histories inspired critically different approaches to gestural meaning. Taking a fresh look at the great ape language debates of the 1970s, the article attributes the dismissal of ethnography in late twentieth-century human language study to a developing experimental protocol that required gesture’s eviction
Noise viscerality: Navigating relations in a sonic climate
No full textBy hearing and identifying a noise problem, residents in Taiwan transmute the visceral experience of noise in relation to neighbors, the state, and others. In the countryside, in the city, and in the ocean, the challenges of negotiating noise speak to the apprehension of a sonic climate that mediates the limits of a shared, human experience, as well as the possibilities for living with others in spite of those limitations. In these cases, noise acts as a metanarrative device through which social anxieties, technocratic protocols, environmental change, and visceral forms of sensing are brought together to anticipate and enact socialities around sound. An ethic of relating emerges through the efforts of diverse individuals to create a shared sense of community despite differences in embodied experience
Adjacency and secession
No full textWhat matters is not what we know but how we learn. This principle of inquiry shapes Paul Rabinow’s life work. It is also an ethics, an aspiration. This principle sustains the practice of problematization, or the delineation of zones of inquiry in terms of the conceptual interconnection of problems. In contrast to anthropological practice that is defined by the perpetual critique of existing relations, Rabinow assumes a mode of adjacency so as to consider the ways that we give form to objects of inquiry and to intelligible concepts. Adjacency is a commitment to actualize a differential—not to reproduce perpetual critique, but to practice inquiry as a mode of form-giving. And it entails secession, or a movement towards experimentation in diverse media. The secessionist move doesn’t revert to the authority of theory or ontology. It is a commitment to new forms, new futures, confidence in the future
What would it mean to decolonize Detroit? How does anthropology figure?
No full textWith Detroit as its principal site, this essay examines the possibility and the hope for developing a decolonial practice as part of the research in and of a “Black” city. What can we learn from Detroit and what needs to change about ethnography in order for this kind of learning to take place? Can ethnography become a decolonial form or must it be undone and re-emerge as a different kind of intervention in order to effectively contribute to a decolonizing practice? Who should be the interlocutors? Who should be the authors? To what extent must we reimagine the audience? How must ethnography’s practitioners reconfigure processes of collaboration in order to effectively change the form