HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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The selfie speaks a thousand words: Negotiating masculinity, intimacy, and sameness through the photograph in Pune
No full textWhile the selfie has come to symbolize notions of selfhood in the age of social media, the photograph that has become a visual trope across the Facebook accounts of lower-middle-class young men in the western Indian city of Pune offers a different reading of online selfhood. In this article, I discuss the creation of a localized selfie—the “professional selfie”—in which young men stage their masculinity by engaging in a mimetic economy of exchanging characteristics with film heroes. In contrast to Susan Sontag’s () theorization of the intimate photograph, the professional selfie is devoid of interiority. Far from unaware of the camera in the manner described by Sontag, young men in Pune utilize the services of photographers to capture them at a distance and conceal their surroundings, thereby creating relations of social distance and distinction with their peers on Facebook
Hong Kong identities and the friends and enemies of recent protests
No full textThis essay analyzes the current protests in Hong Kong from the perspective of the friends/enemies dialectic. It depicts the opposed political positions involved in the protests, considers the relations of these positions to ethnic and linguistic identities in Hong Kong, and analyzes the protests through a case study of the politics and identities of a woman who immigrated to Hong Kong from Mainland China thirty years ago. The essay concludes by considering both the necessity and limitations of analyzing political actions through the lens of friends and enemies. It also introduces the other essays in this Currents collection of articles about protests in Hong Kong
Ghost twitter in Indigenous Australia: Sentience, agency, and ontological difference
No full textBy distinguishing between attributions of sentience and agency we begin to take crucial analytical steps to consider ontological and cosmological differences between groups. Scholars in New Animist and Actor-Network Theory camps sometimes expound broadly generalized notions of agency, thus overlooking the ways in which characterizations of different kinds of beings—and the implications of these characterizations—may apply to aspects of environment and change historically. In Australia there has been debate about the “sentience” of the country as understood by Indigenous Australians. In a broader Australian public culture, there has come about in the last four decades or so an “etherealized” apprehension of Indigenous relations to landscape, which has privileged attention to certain kinds of cosmogenic being (that is, “Dreamings” as world founding agencies). Considering Australian Aboriginal practices and descriptions of spirit, human, other-than-human figures, and sacralized countryside, I take the view that there is incommensurability between Indigenous and non-Indigenous experiences of environment as sentient. Drawing on both my field experience with Indigenous people in North Australia and the broader Australianist ethnographic record, I discuss the many other kinds of being that populate and animate the countryside, showing a wide range of beings and forces. Three themes of continental distribution stand out: continuities between life and death; human-animal ambiguity; and communicative connectivities among life-forms. All these were elaborated in a way of life integral with its surroundings. The article considers change over time to such understandings, reduction in the range of life-forms, and what this may involve
Epistemophilic obsessions: Espionage, secrets, and the ethnographer’s will to know
No full textAs a young ethnographer, I was weirdly obsessed with closed doors and what was going on behind them. To some extent I still am. How come? Starting from my own obsession with closed doors and secrets in a fieldwork setting particularly prone to secrecy and mutual spying, namely the Nigerien gendarmerie, this essay is as an investigation into the practical, not just theoretical, problem of knowledge in anthropology, as called for by Johannes Fabian, by way of exploring the practical, not just theoretical, problem of ethnographic epistemophilia—the ethnographer’s will to know. What emerges is an uncanny resemblance between my own and the gendarmes’ performances of epistemophilia and concealment (real or imagined). The general point is this: If knowledge in anthropology is relational, then so is the ethnographer’s will to know. And this has implications for who we think we are—as anthropologists
Brexit and the temporalities of racism in British higher education
No full textBrexit has brought into visibility various strands of racist thinking and practice that have, for many years, simmered under the surface in British life. Discourse about Brexit reveals an enduring nativist and imperialist sentiment that calls into question British liberalism and its purported multiculturalism. Much writing regarding Brexit has focused on issues of class and urban and rural divides related to the disenfranchised white working class. This piece focuses not only on how race/racism (re)emerges as an important category of experience, but also how it mobilizes young people who have been subject to various forms of violent and everyday racialized exclusion in the UK to voice their discontent and demands publicly and, in some cases, collectively within the context of British higher educational institutions. I focus, in particular, on the temporalities these young people invoke to understand and fight against racism in the Brexit era, and the sort of generational divides they make visible
The slip of a philosopher and the sinking of the ship: Translation, protest, and the Iranian travails of learned politics
No full textThis article examines the politics of translation in Iran in order to contribute to a debate in anthropology around cultural difference and epistemic violence. It does so through a critical exposition of the forced confession of an Iranian politician, Saeed Hajjarian, who testified that his translation of European concepts into an Islamic idiom was responsible for unrest in Iran. It locates Hajjarian’s confession within Iranian histories of anti-Western politics and an Islamic discourse of learned judgement. It argues that the enactment of the Islamic state is mediated by the translation of the West and proposes that protests manifest as a problem of incommensurability for the Islamic state analogous to the problem of incommensurability in cultural anthropology. In attempting to sequester the Islamic Republic from the West, state officials reproduce sectarianism domestically. Anthropology risks the same when it attempts to insulate the non-West from Western epistemologies and ontologies
Calling through the water jar: Domestic objects in Nahua emotional assemblages
No full textThis article re-examines human–object relations in an Indigenous Nahua context in Mexico. Inspired by the Deleuzian notion of assemblage, the study shifts the focus from the agency of objects to emphasize the emotions of human and nonhuman animals as “persons.” Artifacts like clothes and water jars emerge as intersubjective connectors that transfer human substance and voice in short-lived, but emotionally charged, domestic assemblages. The focus on quasi-plain domestic artifacts defines love, the Nahuas’ mode of relating, and motherhood, as central to their understanding while, more broadly, reframing the status of objects beyond anthropomorphism
Destruction or dialectics: Other iconoclasms and the new heritage culture industry
No full textThis essay examines Zoë Strother’s efforts to historicize recent debates about the repatriation of cultural heritage while also situating contemporary protest movements, such as “Rhodes Must Fall,” in the long and varied history of iconoclasm on the African continent. Additionally, it considers what might be gained conceptually if iconoclasm is extended to encompass forms of critique directed against dominant image traditions by feminists and critical race theorists. It asks if such an explosion of the concept might deliver us from the colonial histories that try to explain African resistance to colonialism as an effect of African culture