HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Free AccessNobodies and somebodies: Power, bureaucracy, and citizenship in a London rehousing hub
No full textThis article draws on ethnographic research to examine the bureaucratic matrix of temporal, material, and legal scales that come together to constitute the rehousing process for a group of rough sleepers seeking passage out of homelessness in contemporary London. Further, it explores the ways in which different bureaucratic technologies mediate the relations between the rehousing hub’s staff, its homeless clients, and local housing authorities, paying particular attention to the way these economies solidify the already asymmetrical power relations that existed between the homeless and those employed to manage them. For the homeless, this process is constituted by a spatiotemporality of confinement and seemingly endless waiting that shunts them into the margins of citizenship, caught between being a nobody and a somebody. Thinking through contemporary debates in political theory, this article approaches the rehousing process (or failure thereof) not as a linear pathway but as a constellation of disciplinary and bureaucratic procedures within which exceptional structures of sovereignty and neoliberal governmentality intersect. Applying these ideas anthropologically, I demonstrate how this intersectionality works to continually shape and reshape the existential realities, possibilities, and aspirations of the hub’s homeless clients
Seeing numbers: Interpretations of dream images and urban uncertainty
No full textThis article explores the interpretive and divinatory practices and strategies used in the South African street-based lottery game fafi. The game, run by the Chinese community in South Africa and played predominantly by low-income black South Africans, utilizes a set of images and divinatory practices, particularly dream interpretation. The article analyzes the practices and history of fafi, alongside the financial and interpretive stakes of the gambling game, to understand contemporary orientations towards the future and uncertainty. Dreaming—learning how to dream and how to interpret dream images—as a gambling skill is understood in relation to traditional healing and diagnostic practices in South Africa. In the context of shifting urban landscapes, the piece argues that “the future” has become an entity to get ahead of rather than a projected goal or destination one hopes for
Curt Nimuendajú’s correspondence with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Robert H. Lowie, 1936–1940
No full textReflecting on Hong Kong protests in 2019–2020
No full textMass protests erupted in June 2019 in Hong Kong due to widespread anger about a proposed amendment to the extradition law. As a global project, could the goal of pursuing democratization be narrowly confined to a single place such as Hong Kong? What can be learned from a leaderless democratic movement, by those who are concerned about the future of Hong Kong? Can we learn some lessons from the Hong Kong movement—from the nuanced actions, complex strategies of mobilization, and the huge number of movement participants—and reflect upon them? Radical refers not only to the escalation of physical force but also the alternative imagination and praxis of democratic visions that should be bigger than the movement at this stage. Hong Kong is a global city; it deserves a radical politics aimed at linking transnational social movements that could possibly transgress the localistic approach of social struggles
Believing the unbelieved: Reincarnation, cultural authority, and politics in the Trobriand Islands
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Malinowski as ancestor
No full textJarillo et al. present evidence showing that Trobrianders today do not espouse rebirth, contrary to Trobriand views as described by Malinowski. Closer attention to Malinowski, however, shows that Jarillo et al.’s reading of him does not take account of a suggestive theoretical and anthropological framework concerning ideological variability and susceptibility to change which he was attempting to develop
