HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Brand displaced: Trademarking, unmarking, and making the generic
No full textIn this paper, I examine the creation of prop “non-brands” in the United States movie and television industry. In taking up the work of Independent Studio Services, a large prop house located in California, I look to how fictive and generic alternatives to “real” brands replicate brandedness without any brand. As product placement in movies and television becomes increasingly important as a form of brand promotion, the prop-brand cuts out a unique semiotic space in which a particular ideology of the generic is constituted. Such spaces of the generically marked and unmarked are, however, of much broader importance to anthropological and social theory. Reaching far beyond branding, the generic exists as a conceptual space in which we can understand the world of short-hands, blueprints, and proxies, and how they serve as conduits for universal and generalizable forms of knowledge
Asia as strategy: Deployments of a Chinese planet
No full textThis contribution reflects on Aihwa Ong’s thoughts on the global and her later work with Asian scientists to look at recent Chinese state approaches to climate change. Departing from popular accounts that pose China as either an engine of climate catastrophe or as a singular hope for its aversion, I argue that the planetary predicament that climate change raises has been taken up in Chinese politics as a strategic site to reimagine the Chinese Communist Party as a necessary component of the geopolitical and geophysical machinery of continued planetary existence. Rather than gathering difference into the universal scale that the planet has implied in environmentalist discourses, Ong’s work exhorts us to approach the strategic deployment of a Chinese mode of planetarity
Spiritual economy as mesoanalytics: An ethnography of a global problem space in Indonesia
No full textThis essay develops the method of mesoanalysis to comprehend problems shared at divergent sites, but that are not reducible to universal or general forces. Drawing on fieldwork at a state-owned steel factory in Indonesia, the essay describes a specific assemblage of capitalist restructuring and Islamic reform. The essay argues that the term “spiritual economy” conceptualizes the affinities between particular interventions to mobilize religious piety for economic practice with analogous efforts elsewhere
Moral anthropology: A critique of criticism
No full textThe anthropology of morality continues to be met with resistance. Opposition rests on the perception that one cannot study morals without moralizing or advocating which makes it both epistemologically and professionally questionable. This blinkered view of the objectives of moral anthropology ignores the differences in approaches which need to be considered if epistemic integrity is the real issue. Since most criticisms are aimed at Didier Fassin and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, I argue that the issue is political and that this singling out of their work raises its own set of questions regarding professional ethics. With reference to my own work and others who focus on embodied moralities, I show that neither moralizing nor advocating are an inevitable consequence of this approach and that the study of morals has genuine ethnographic value
The future is family
No full textFuture visions energize growing enterprises, states, and families to act. Together, these entwined processes and their conflicts open unpredictable avenues for both profit-making and social transformation. This was a key insight of Aihwa Ong’s classic ethnography Spirits of resistance, which was published more than thirty years ago. In Spirits, Ong developed a feminist approach to political economy that begins with this dynamic. Today, anthropological studies place the category of the future at the heart of the discipline but have neglected family aspiration and experimentation as critical forces. Returning to Ong’s focus on relationships between parents and children is necessary to deepen insights about contemporary capitalism and to revitalize political economy
The Wambɲug emblem of the University Félix Houphouët-Boigny and its implications for contemporary iconoclasm in Côte d’Ivoire
No full textThe present reflections are intended as a contribution to the theme of the colloquium “Iconoclasm, heritage, and restitution.” The wambɲung symbol, which is shown on the emblem of the University Félix Houphouët-Boigny, finds itself at the very heart of contradictory actions and assertions, reflecting the ebb and flow in the status of the rest of the monument of which it is part, on the university boulevard, between 2001 and 2010. The wambɲung symbol is in a delicate and unstable statutory position, determined by time and context
From hope to hate: The rise of conservative subjectivity in Brazil
No full textThis essay focuses on the voters of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro in Morro da Cruz, a low-income community in Porto Alegre. The transition from Lulism (2002–16) to Bolsonarism (2018–) was marked by the rise and fall of the economy and the collapse of the political system. Based on a ten-year longitudinal ethnography, we look at the effects of such major shifts at the national level on people’s individual self- and political subjectivity. We investigate how and why “new consumers”—those who accessed the finance system during the Workers’ Party (PT) Administration—came to support a far-right candidate. We argue that the inclusion of the poor into the market economy brought about individual empowerment and a sense of self-worth in the PT era—a process that was threatened by economic recession and unleashed an existential crisis, especially among men. Bolsonaro, as a male figure, and his campaign gave order to a changing world, resulting in a reconciliation of personhood and political belonging
Pedagogies of value: Marketing luxury in China
No full textIn just a few years, China has become one of the world’s largest markets for Western luxury products. Marketing professionals play a key role in this market. As symbolic brokers between the production and consumption of goods, they analyze and attempt to shape the relationship between Chinese people and foreign things. In this essay, I explore the ideas and practices of marketing professionals based in China, mainly foreign professionals, surrounding the consumption of foreign luxury goods in China. I develop the notion of “pedagogical value” to refer to the politics of value deployed in marketing activities in China today. The circulation and consumption of foreign goods in China involves power relations that challenge not only the value of things but also the authority to decide what value is and who can create value. I show that the marketing of foreign luxury in China among such professionals is transformed into a political pedagogy of value that attempts to protect the image of foreign luxury in this country as a source of power and value