HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Miracle, magic, or science: Ritual bathing in modern India
No full textThe paper addresses ritual and quotidian aspects of bathing in thermal springs at Bakreswar, a Hindu pilgrimage site in India. Ascetics, priests, pilgrims, and scientists vouch for the mineral content and healing properties of the spring waters. Drawing on ethnographic field research, the paper identifies three broad trajectories of responses to the origin and importance of the springs in ways that align the local landscape with the grand scale of cosmogony: that of Vedic priests, Tantric ascetics, and scientists from the Department of Atomic Energy. In so doing it explores how different meanings of nature are configured across contrasting registers of religion, magic, and science, which reinforce their confrontation in the locale as an operational, everyday discourse
Andrew’s white cross, Hussain’s red blood: Being Scottish Shia in Brexit’s no-man’s-land
No full textBrexit was a project shaped at the fringes of official politics. Unusually, however, it maintained its fringe-like qualities, including its lack of clarity and ambivalence, even as it took center stage in the political affairs of the country for more than three years. In such a transitional period, powerless segments of society, including vulnerable nonwhite communities, face a much larger and more multifaceted crisis than other sectors of the population. The question of border controls and forms of identification for migrants and those of hyphenated nationality is an alarming sign of a homeland turning into a hostile environment. By relying on data gathered in a three-year-long ethnographic study of the Shia Muslim communities in Scotland, I elaborate on how Scottish citizens marked by their religious culture and darker skin are handling the uncertainty created by Brexit
A tree of many lives: Vegetal teleontologies in West Papua
No full textIn this article, I analyze the ontology of the African oil palm among indigenous Marind communities in Merauke, West Papua. This introduced cash crop is conceptualized by Marind as tree and person, assailant and victim, and stranger and kin. Its ontology further multiplies through its material manifestations as plant, part, and product—from an individual stand to monocrop plantation, and from seedling to packaged oil. Drawing from two ethnographic accounts of negotiations between Marind and state and corporate actors, I then examine how Marind strategically foreground or background different facets of oil palm’s reality to serve the political ends of their activism, producing what I call “teleontologies,” or ontologies that serve an instrumental purpose. Essentializing the reality of oil palm is deemed necessary by many Marind for indigenous activism to succeed. But such essentializations are also deeply contested and can backfire unintentionally on the indigenous activists who deploy them
Anthropology and world peace
No full textThe pursuit of world peace has long been part of the telos of modern anthropology, although this may not be particularly obvious in the discipline’s teaching on its history today. Taking Claude Lévi-Strauss’s essay on Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a key text, this article reviews how anthropology rose to prominence (post–World War II) as a vital body of knowledge in the making of a durable international peace
“Please call my daughter”: Ethical practice in dementia care as an art of dwelling
No full textThis article aims to extend the current understanding of ethical practice within a dementia context, in which people living with dementia are often taken for granted as mere beneficiaries of care, rather than as co-producers in day-to-day care practice. Building on a decade of voluntary work and a year of fieldwork (including six weeks’ intensive observation of nightlife) at a Jewish care home in London, I pay attention to the affective dimension of ethical practice at the moment of sleep disturbance of a resident with dementia. Inspired by Heidegger’s concept of dwelling, I understand the episode not as pathological, but as a process through which ethical subjects emerge in the making of ongoing, entangled ethical endeavors. I argue that ethical practice is neither predetermined nor random: rather, it is the way in which those involved continuously respond and attune to the ever-changing circumstances: what I call an ‘art of dwelling’
Kufala! Translating witchcraft in an Angolan–Chinese labor dispute
No full textDrawing on fieldwork conducted at a Chinese state-owned enterprise brought to Angola in the postwar reconstruction boom, this article devotes sustained attention to a labor dispute between an Angolan laid-off worker and his former Chinese employers. Called upon to interpret between the worker and his bosses, neither of whom spoke directly or transparently, the ethnographer found herself implicated in a prolonged negotiation of attempted kindness and unavoidable cruelty. Through repeated translations and circumlocutions, both parties attempted to preserve sociality despite being structurally positioned in an exploitative relationship. Translating this exchange into an ethnographic narrative, this paper explores how the indirectness both of speech and of witchcraft failed as social relations broke down
“A mad exuberance”: The globalization of luxury
No full textThe issue of the circulation of luxury commodities and of the evolution through which it is going becomes fully meaningful when addressed within the context of an anthropology of globalization that analyzes the nature and impact of flows on contemporary societies. In this article, I explore the ways in which globalization not only affects the luxury economy but also reshapes its cultural and political dimensions. The first part of this essay examines the definition of luxury and its close link with such notions as scarcity, superfluity, and expenditure, and reviews the theoretical debate on luxury and the development of capitalism. The second part is focused on the global expansion of the luxury market, especially its opening to Chinese consumers. A consequence of this appropriation of luxury goods on a large scale is the permanent threat of banalization in a domain in which scarcity and exceptionality are so essential. In this context, the close connection between luxury firms and contemporary art can be interpreted as an antidote against this process of banalization
The ethnography of the global after globalization
No full textThis collection of essays seeks to reinvigorate ethnographic investigation of the contemporary global. At a moment afflicted by transnational pandemic, political chauvinism, and disciplinary retrenchment, they offer a model for reengagement with the global. Critical work in anthropology over a decade ago was published when optimism over a “borderless world” still held sway. In the intervening years, globalization has bequeathed a world of viral contagion, authoritarian nationalism, immigration backlash, sclerotic trade regimes, and intensifying ecological crisis. Nonetheless, if the promise of globalization appears to have evaporated, global problems have redoubled in their importance for an engaged anthropology, as both the recent resurgence of nationalism and the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate. This collection of essays features research and reflection that address the global as a problem space through middle-range analysis. Inspired by the landmark work of Aihwa Ong, the essays embody a distinctive form of ethnographic engagement with the contemporary global
Volunteering for the environment in China: The urban as a terrain of problematization
No full textThis contribution argues that Aihwa Ong’s approach to the urban as problem-space is a powerful and underutilized conceptual tool for studying contemporary urban worlds. Drawing on fieldwork with an environmental nongovernmental organization in Dalian, China, it suggests that environmental volunteering signaled important shifts in the specification of citizen-subjects and in what counted as effective urban governance. Making sense of such urban assemblages required flexible methodological tools, and Ong’s approach of the urban as a terrain of problematization offers this. This conceptual and methodological move facilitates a middle-range theoretical approach that accounts for patterns and emergent paradigms while allowing for contingency, not forcing complex assemblages into singular or universal explanations. It is this kind of anthropology and ethnographic analysis that enables better understandings of our contemporary (global) urban worlds