HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Ideological blackening, masculinity and comparative racialization: Situating Southeast Asian Americans
No full textThis contribution uses a comparative racialization framing to revisit Aihwa Ong’s notion of ideological blackening as applied to Southeast Asian refugee youth. Examining a case study of a Hmong teen in Wisconsin who received a long adult sentence based on his imputed gangster status, it disrupts generalized attributions to East Asian Americans of femininity and honorary whiteness. It interrogates instead the specific conditions that allow Southeast Asian newcomer young men to be treated as racially unmarked but implicitly “blackened” in the American racial order, and thereby sometimes subject to the state violence, excessive policing, and judicial overreach that have been denounced for Black Americans
Iconoclasm and restitution: Between denial and cultural realism
No full textThe destruction or loss of objects belonging to African cultural heritage, usually the result of historical antecedents, has had a serious impact on communities and their way of life. Burned, stolen, or destroyed, the images targeted by iconoclasm have been interrupted, leaving serious voids that the communities have tried to fill, often with difficulty. The problems that Zoë Strother addresses in her article “Iconoclasms in Africa” are complex, questioning, among other things, the legitimacy of iconoclastic activities in light of people’s expectations and protective measures taken to conserve cultural property. This is where the current debate on restitution takes on its full meaning in favor of or against repatriation. It is crucial to focus on the category of the objects at issue. Questions that deserve in-depth analysis include: Who are the parties responsible for the collections to be repatriated to their countries of origin? At what institutions will the returning artifacts be received? What is the impact of the destruction or absence of the objects? What is the existing national policy in each African country concerning the conservation of cultural heritage? This contribution draws on examples from Côte d’Ivoire
Searching for the new human: Glacier melt, anthropogenic change, and self-reflection in Andean pilgrimage
No full textArguing in favor of anthropology’s humanity-centered research tradition, this article examines how the encounter with human remains on the bedrock of retreating glaciers shapes not only the notion of divinity and power underpinning Andean pilgrimage but also the pilgrims’ identity as a species. The article asks, how do the pilgrims account for their own and other humans’ impact on Andean glaciers? How does the pilgrims’ experience of anthropogenic change challenge their ideas of human/nonhuman interactions? And, lastly, who is the new human emerging from this experience? My point is that climate change both secularizes the world, as the pilgrims know it, and lends them a new experience of transcendence. By causing glacier retreat, climate change strips Andean mountains of their divine powers. But by disclosing other people’s leftovers on the glaciers’ bedrock, it also offers the pilgrims a new perspective on humans’ role as the planet’s steward
Constructing cosmoscapes: Cosmological currents in conversation and contestation in contemporary Bolivia
No full textThis article explores how cosmological currents contest and converse with one another to compose a shifting “cosmoscape” in Kaata, a community in highland Bolivia. Contrasting worlding practices encompass reciprocal relations between humans, ancestral mummies, and animate earth beings like mountains, and an emerging conviction that such nonhumans merely comprise natural resources for human exploitation. Challenging an easy contrast between modernity and animism as reified ontologies, I explore the community as a cosmoscape composed of conversations between these contrasting cosmological trends, surfacing circumstantially; while some villagers engage with wondrous currents of self-enrichment, many believe they will have catastrophic consequences. Mountain beings are the result of cosmopolitical colonial negotiations with the state rather than timeless constructs, and the community continues to equivocate their meaning through social movements at the state level, contesting the instrumentalized use of earth beings by the so-called indigenous state, which enables rather than contests extractivism
Black bloc against red China: Tears and revenge in the trenches of the new Cold War
No full textDuring the mass protest movement, Hong Kong has witnessed intense and disturbing levels of violence, intolerance, and anti-Chinese xenophobia. In this article, I reflect on the aggravation of a conflict system in which both sides are vitalized by the energies of fear and anger supplied by the real and imagined intrusions of the other. I trace the roots of this conflict system in the historical formation of Hong Kong’s identity as a sacred space of freedom under threat from Communist China, and the merging of these localized structural tensions with the rise of a globalized existential fear of Chinese power in the West and elsewhere. Hong Kong has become a frontline in the new Cold War. The hatred, violence, and Sinophobia can be seen as the explosion, through human emotions and acts, of the sparks and flames at one of the hottest points of friction on the fault line
Amidst backward-walking somnambulists
No full textThis Currents section provides accounts of Britain’s exit (Brexit) or departure from the European Union (EU)—a decision based on a closely won referendum in June 2016, and declared in January 2020 by the Conservative political party. With few exceptions, the views and experiences of those excluded from dominant narratives of “the people” have not been substantially considered in mainstream nor indeed anthropological debates. Contributors to the section offer (auto) ethnographic perspectives on the legacies and implications of empire, nationalism, racism, cultural diversity, gender, and generational divides made explicit in Brexit phenomena. They range from the trolling of women of color, the repercussions of race and racism in academia, culturally diverse perspectives on resilience, the experiences of those from the European mainland who work in England, and views on the English from a former colony and now EU country, the Republic of Ireland
