HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Iron bubbles: Exploring optimism in China’s modern ghost cities
No full textFinancial bubbles are generally understood retrospectively as ruptures or bursts, indexing some form of radical change. Conversely, this article proposes that when engaged ethnographically, bubbles are premised upon a collectively imagined continuity. Empirically, I unpack investment rationales in the wake of a local resource boom in a high-growth region in Inner Mongolia. Among interlocutors, anticipated price increases in property investments were not considered as speculation; investments were not hopes of a radically different future. Rather, they were imaginative ways of pulling a future of continuous growth into the present. What I relate as a present continuous. I argue that optimism understood through this temporal sensibility does not serve to freeze time but instead dictates continuity as the only possible kind of change. Finally, I suggest that collective efforts to adhere to the temporality of the bubble were also actively contributing to its collapse
The reality of inchoateness
No full textDeborah Puccio-Den, working from long ethnographic experience, has provided an intriguing and challenging account of how the mafia effect—which she approaches through her own coinage of “mafiacraft”—spreads its power while resisting reification. The value of this approach would be amplified by contextualizing it more fully in terms of existing research both on mafia and on related phenomena elsewhere, and by clarifying the dynamics of performativity and inchoateness and the observer’s role in reconstructing these dynamics
Hybrid warfare in Brazil: The highest stage of the military insurgency
No full textSince 2013, Brazil has undergone various moments of political turbulence, ultimately culminating in the seizure of power by the Far Right. The lack of clarity on how this movement has been led and the role played by the military in the political arena allows us to ask if Brazil has been the target of a form of hybrid warfare—similar to the kind experienced by various other countries that have undergone sudden changes in regime (such as Ukraine and Egypt, and more recently Honduras and Paraguay). This article explores the limits and implications of applying the notion of hybrid warfare to the Brazilian case, seeking to understand how politics came to be merged with elements adopted from military strategies and tactics. Based on my own ethnographic experience with military personnel, I aim to show how, with the assistance of other state powers, they produced a high-impact psychological operation that paved the way for the 2018 elections and the seizure of power by the Far Right. Following this line of analysis, I argue that in the Brazilian case, there has been a hybrid warfare as well as an insurgency of state corporations and their networks
Hindu majoritarianism, forms of capital, and urban politics: The making of a new ordinary citizen in India
No full textThis article explores the remaking of ideas of the “ordinary citizen” in India in the context of Hindu majoritarian politics and changing relationships between the state and private capital. Focusing on one of India’s largest privately developed townships, DLF City, which adjoins Delhi, the article explores the ways in which activities by middle- and upper middle-class residents of DLF City produce new narratives of “ordinariness.” Within them, socioeconomically privileged groups come to be represented as “the common people,” contesting the postcolonial state’s historical focus on the welfare of marginal populations. The article suggests that contemporary narratives of ordinariness in India require an understanding beyond its deployment in critical social science literature where it is posited as a politics of speaking truth to power. The appropriation of ordinariness by the privileged in the Indian context is part of a new politics of class, caste, and majoritarianism
On embracing the vague
No full textAt the same time as, in Paris, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl experimented with the concept of “participation,” at Harvard, William James undertook a parallel trajectory by taking recourse to the notion of “the vague.” For him, vagueness described the fact that reality is richer than any and all conceptualizations. In light of the ethnographic material provided by contemporary developments in the ethnography of pharmaceuticals, this paper mobilizes James’s concept of vagueness by reference to Lévy-Bruhl’s participation in order to develop instruments for capturing ethnographically the complexities of entanglement and emergence in human sociality. The paper concludes that indeterminacy and underdetermination are doors of entanglement as they both limit and make possible the constitution of entities in sociality
Witchcraft after modernity: Old and new directions in the study of witchcraft in Africa
No full textWhat are the current trends in the study of witchcraft in Africa? Twenty years ago, the “modernity of witchcraft” approach was very influential. Although key texts from that framework are still often cited, its heyday seems to have passed. This overview of scholarly debates about witchcraft in Africa after 2010 shows three trends: the attempt to explain witchcraft, which stands in a long anthropological history; the focus on human rights, mainly by authors from fields beyond anthropology; and, influenced by the ontological turn, efforts to take witchcraft seriously. The article gives a critical overview of these current trends in the study of witchcraft in Africa, placing them in the context of theoretical perspectives that have preceded them, as well as looking to the future
Iconoclasms in Africa: Implications for the debate on restitution of cultural heritage
No full textThis article demonstrates that a long history of iconoclastic struggles exists in numerous countries of sub-Saharan Africa and extends into the present. Exploring a range of motives and messages, I argue that iconoclasm targets people and their emotions and not just things, as monuments, devotional objects, and works of art become substitutes for those individuals, who are identified with them as patrons, makers, or caretakers. Iconoclastic controversies constitute a site where knowledge about the nature of representation and about the relationship of the past to the present is created and challenged. Whereas ongoing discussions about restitution have tended to foreground professionals in the culture industry, iconoclastic controversies provide a valuable opportunity to listen to self-identified stakeholders who claim a voice in determining the role of images in their societies, the question that lies at the core of the restitution debate
Abrogation and assertion: The fault lines of the Indian Constitution with regards to Kashmir
No full textIn this article I look at the responses of Indians to political events in 2019 regarding the abrogation of Article 370 concerning Kashmir in the Constitution of India and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The critiques of abrogation as well as of the CAA as put forth by the people of India were based on constitutional grounds, decrying them as inconsistent and in conflict with the basic principles and ambit of the Constitution. I juxtapose these responses with a critique of the Constitution and the sovereignty it offers to India through an engagement with Kashmiri Muslims in Delhi. The anti-CAA protests offered Kashmiris an opportunity to extend their solidarity with Indian Muslims as well as comment on the ambivalent nature of Indian secularism as it is pitched against minorities. However, Kashmiris also offered a structural critique and a rejection of the sovereignty of the Indian Constitution: for while it sanctioned equality and freedom for Indian citizens, it is the basis of oppression and occupation of their homeland
Making things fungible
No full textThis essay draws on Aihwa Ong’s conception of “fungible life,” applying it to the practice of stockpiling essential goods. It argues that stockpiling is not just a matter of gathering and storing troves of supplies, but is linked to a broader style of reasoning about collective life in terms of its vulnerability to disruptive shock, and the need to ensure the resilience of vital systems