HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Not a member yet
1288 research outputs found
Sort by
Gambling; or, The art of exploiting chance to nullify it
No full textFor Lévy-Bruhl, “primitive mentality” can shed light on the “passion” that drives the casino player, gambler, or financial speculator to continue at the risk of losing everything. He draws a parallel between the divinatory practices of “primitive” peoples to reconcile the “invisible forces” that are supposed to decide the outcome, on the one hand, and on the other, the various methods used by gamblers and speculators to “exert a kind of mysterious influence” on the “imponderables” on which success depends. I argue that, although Lévy-Bruhl remarks that everyone seeks to defy chance, he does not define the notion but gradually replaces it with the concepts of “fate,” “fortune,” and “magic.” Anthropology needs to question this set of notions and their family resemblances
Infrastructure and its discontent: Structures of feeling in the age of Hong Kong-China dis/connection
No full textThis essay reveals that infrastructure, both transit and legal, not only facilitates exchanges across distance and borders, but also creates public structures of feeling. By structures of feeling, I refer to Raymond Williams’s discussion of those emergent trajectories of emotions that prevail without being fully articulated in a particular time and space. I found the term structures of feeling useful to articulate those emergent forms of mistrust, repulsion, anger, and even apprehension among the population with regard to the subway and other border-crossing projects
Gambling and divining are not similar but “neighboring practices”
No full textIn a paper published in 1926, Lévy-Bruhl suggests a close affinity between the mentality of the gambler and the diviner, putting forward the role of the unseen. Such a comparison is made too quickly as gambling and divining are not that similar but subject to a great variation depending on the contexts. Techniques involved are many, and almost everywhere human beings but also plants and animals anticipate and influence future events in different ways. If some connections can be made between gambling and divining, lumping all divination practices leads nowhere. Moreover, nor the idea of a “mysterious power” nor the sense of superiority or depression of the gambler can be found in Inuit and Ibaloy divination. Deceased, spirits and other beings, including God, play a part that is acknowledged, and people never feel abandoned. Lévy-Bruhl is caught in a mysticism that is not empirically based
Flores de Mayo in Rehovot: Ritual and rhetorical strategies of Filipinos’ presence in Israel
No full textA Catholic Filipino community in Rehovot, Israel, celebrates the traditional feast of Flores de Mayo every year within a totally Jewish environment. Drawing on long-term ethnographic observation of the community, and based on several in-depth interviews, this article presents the rhetorical strategies involved in ritual performances, which position migrant workers within both Israeli and Filipino society. Through irony, synecdoche, and metaphor enacted in the Flores de Mayo ritual, the community makes its “presence” in the migration framework
Making MSM: Biopolitical subjects in Vietnam
No full textThis contribution explores the discursive and practical marking of gay males as targets of a biopolitical regime whose aim, ostensibly, was and is to secure the health and well-being of the Vietnamese population. I consider how the contemporary apparatus constructed to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Vietnam, one funded by the United States, operates by inducing adherence to a new regime that turns on subjectivation and risk calculation
Viktor Shklovsky, Bronislaw Malinowski, and the invention of a narrative device: Implications for a history of ethnographic theory
No full textThe advent of Malinowski’s ethnographic theory is inscribed in a wider modernist environment, which set the ground for the emergence of new epistemological projects. Viktor Shklovsky’s attempt to inaugurate a scientific study of literature was one of these. The article juxtaposes Shklovsky’s early works (“Art as device” and Resurrecting the word), where he interprets the descriptive style of Lev Tolstoy, with Malinowski’s experiments with storytelling and narrative technique (in Argonauts, but also in his letters to James Frazer). These two intellectual projects have common ancestors (folklore studies and comparativism), arose in the same modernist age, and came into contact again when, later on, structuralist theory redefined both linguistics and anthropology. The likeness between the respective scientific endeavors posits an immediate question: why is Russian formalism left out when anthropologists reconstruct their disciplinary kinship diagram? Not merely an attempt to spot non-Western European traces in the history of social anthropology, the paper considers Shklovsky’s contribution to contemporary debates on ethnographic writing
Shaheen Bagh and the hermeneutics of Muslim identity in South Asia
No full textThis article locates the unique discursive contribution of women’s protests against India’s Citizen Amendment Act in 2019–2020 in the history of Muslim identity formation in South Asia. It does this by reviewing the relationship between religious reform and identity politics since colonial times and contrasts it with arguments and practices of the women involved in the protests at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi. It contextualizes the hermeneutical arguments anchored around the idea of community and nation in colonial and postcolonial governance in South Asia. And it compares them to the women’s methods and experiences of protest that privilege a relation to blood and soil to demonstrate the significance of experience as an alternative basis for the political imagination of Muslim identity in South Asia
Towards a “contrapuntal” anthropology of the global
No full textThis essay explores the paradox of how Aihwa Ong’s classic work on Chineseness managed to remain in but not of China. Identifying the central importance of Edward Said’s notion of “contrapuntal analysis” to Ong’s approach to both Chineseness and modernity in general, it suggests the usefulness of this method for an anthropology of the global that seeks to make sense of a world in which American paramountcy is no longer guaranteed
