HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Deception in practice: Hunting and bullfighting entanglements in southern Spain
No full textDeception is a recurrent strategy deployed in the relations between human beings, between humans and animals, and even between animals, and is normally analyzed from a perspective that emphasizes its discursive nature and certain of its ontological, epistemological and axiological effects. According to this orthodox view, deception falsifies, distorts, and conceals reality; it thus equates to a lie and is consequently devalued by it. An analysis of two ethnographic contexts of human–animal relations in southern Spain—partridge hunting and bullfighting—allows us to go beyond such a univocal and simple notion of deception. Through our analysis we wish to problematize and reconceptualize that notion, in a way that considers it as a practice and even as a resource; as a form of knowledge that fosters interaction and the generation of singular frameworks of experience, in which reality, the product of that deception, is lived—paradoxically—in terms of truth
Headless queues: Disorder and disorientation in a Zimbabwean market, 2007–2008
No full textIn this paper, I analyze Zimbabweans’ efforts to make sense of ubiquitous queues for basic goods during a period of record-breaking hyperinflation. My discussion draws on a series of daily journal entries kept by a resident of the urban informal economy during 2007 and 2008. Besides opening a window onto everyday life amid economic collapse, his journals show how economic and political turmoil was registered in mundane actions (like standing in queues and buying goods on the black market) and perceived violations of established moral geographies and social processes. He framed this experience using common-sense notions of disorder, which were themselves internal to ideas and practices of ordered hierarchy. For him and for many others, then, the country’s so-called “crisis” registered less in explicit historical narrative than in perceptions of reversal and absence
Global anthropology and the art of the middle range
No full textOver the past forty years, Aihwa Ong has invented a remarkable collection of powerful concepts, delivered in compact and vivid terms, that have become essential instruments of a global anthropology. These concepts—which she crafted in response to anthropology’s engagement with globalization beginning in the late 1970s—might be understood as products of work in the “middle range.” They remain powerful tools for a global anthropology of the present
Researching India’s Muslims: Identities, methods, politics
No full textThis article maps out the relationship between the academic/intellectual work and political positioning of a Muslim researcher in contemporary India. It is divided into three parts. In the first part, I raise conceptual and methodological questions, especially in relation to my ongoing research on the politics of Muslim political representation. Through these questions I make an attempt to share my own anxieties and the problems that I encounter while engaging with the issues of Muslim identity. In the second part of the article, I discuss the methodological moves which I make or intend to make to deal with these questions. These moves are primarily organized as self-clarifications. In the final section, I make a broad argument for what I call intellectual politics
Introduction: “Lévy-Bruhl on gambling”
No full textAfter his most successful book, La mentalité primitive (), Lévy-Bruhl published in The Criterion, a journal then directed by poet T. S. Elliott, an article entitled “Primitive mentality and gambling” whose French version, “Mentalité primitive et jeu de hasard,” was published two years later in the Revue de Paris. In this introduction to the forum around the reedition of this text, I contextualize this and other works by this author not only within the intellectual currents of the day, but also within events in broader French society in the period leading up to WWI, and particularly the “Dreyfus Affair,” which directly affected him. My interpretation is the following: while Dreyfus was accused by the army with arguments whose rationality was borrowed from magic and witchcraft, and the dreyfusards had to use the rationality of the Enlightenment to defend him, Lévy-Bruhl and his fellow socialists had to « think like primitives » when they engaged in the war as in a gamble
Living between incongruous worlds in Hong Kong
No full textThis article explores the uneasy position of Mainlanders within and in relation to the Anti-Extradition Movement amid rising anti-Mainland sentiment in Hong Kong. It shows how the continued reliance on the Chinese language, contact, and media for information, communication, and socialization have contained them within the Chinese “national space,” influencing their perceptions of the Movement and curtailing the discursive space for articulating political views. Meanwhile, language barriers prevent non-Cantonese-speaking Mainlanders from integrating with the local society and participating in the Movement, in which Cantonese is dominant. The nativist sentiment among protestors also makes those who supported or joined the Movement feel marginalized and invisible. It remains a huge challenge for Mainlanders to break down or bridge over such divisions guarded by both the Great Firewall and nativist sentiments in both Mainland China and Hong Kong
