HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Not a member yet
1288 research outputs found
Sort by
Ethnographic views of Brazil’s (new) authoritarian turn
No full textIn this introduction to Currents, we argue for the potential of ethnography to aid in understanding the present. Extended periods of fieldwork allow anthropologists that are in the field well before the facts—that is, before significant political events occur—to provide unique frameworks for understanding those events, frameworks that can incorporate conjuncture as it is lived by the subjects in the sceneries being researched into analysis that take into account more long-term processes. Focusing on the current political conjuncture in Brazil and placing it in a comparative perspective, we explore the peculiar position that anthropologists of contemporary Brazil occupy, in which their role in the production of knowledge and their participation in public debates makes them a target for the conservative and reactionary wave that is engulfing the country
On gambling, divination, and religion
No full textThis comment on Levy-Bruhl’s essay on gambling has three parts. The first raises some linguistic and analytical questions and identifies some deficiencies in the author’s use of ideal-type analysis with reference to Max Weber’s approach. The second focuses on the issue of divination as a bridge between French gamblers and “primitive mentality.” A magisterial essay on this subject by Meyer Fortes draws on Durkheim’s idea of religious ritual as a way of linking what is known and what unknown. The third part extends these reflections beyond the limits of Levy-Bruhl’s essay to consider money as the great unknown of modern life with which we crave connection. Some make money and most just take it. Betting on a large or small scale gives players a relationship to money that is both active and passive. It is a ritualized form of engagement with society through money
Devil’s advocate: Sketch of an amoral anthropology
No full textThis essay polemicizes against contemporary anthropology’s ubiquitous moralism and its demand for engagement. It does so by trying on the glasses of evolutionary theories of moral behavior. If we take Homo sapiens to be a moralistic ape and consider that anthropologists are members of the species they study, their moralizing appears only natural. In the past decade, however, the moral and political landscapes of North America and Europe have changed dramatically, which has provoked a renewed problematization of moral discourse. Like all polemics, this essay proposes an alternative to what it attacks: the possibility of an amoral anthropology, in which the anthropologist plays the role of devil’s advocate. The project refurbishes the ivory tower as a high-containment laboratory for ideas, especially dangerous ideas that we might have good reason to sanction in public
Neoliberal globalization, the punitive, and the pastoral
No full textIn this contribution I draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia and provide an overview of the punitive trends in legal spheres and more encompassing cultural-political domains that typically accompany neoliberal globalization. I also consider some of the pastoral developments that are commonly entangled with these trends. Finally, I point to some of the ways that my work in these areas has been inspired by Aihwa Ong’s scholarship and suggest that, going forward, pastoral modalities of care, leadership, and governance are among the themes that ethnographers of contemporary global processes and problems should prioritize
Against invisibilization—towards “Blackness” as a universal claim
No full textFrom post-World War II Germany to contemporary contexts beyond Europe and the United States, this contribution considers the extent to which “Blackness” has become a universal claim. It thinks through this claim in relation to Aihwa Ong’s discussion of invisibilization. In a context in which new immigrants to countries such as the United States or Germany face at best exclusionary incorporation through a process that also appends their potential noncitizenship to Blackness, a reinvigorated Blackness offers a different kind of possibility. Ong’s discussion of ethnic succession in the United States also illuminates the persistence of systemic racism and “White” supremacy, making analytical space for the academic and the activist to consider the possibilities for Blackness as a universal claim
“Mafiacraft” and mafia activity: A dynamic and changing interaction
No full textDeborah Puccio-Den has conducted ethnographic research in Palermo since the mid-1990s, focusing on efforts to criminalize the mafia, both on the part of the criminal justice system, and also by ordinary citizens, among them photographers, artists, writers, social scientists, journalists, and antimafia activists. She proposes the word “mafiacraft” to conceptualize this process, evoking anthropological analyses of efforts to criminalize witches. The analogy dramatizes how much violence has occurred in modern Sicily without either prosecutors or morally sensitive Sicilians being able to identify, much less agree upon, those responsible. Puccio-Den acknowledges that “historical and political conditions” influence turning points in the ability of both sets of actors to concretize responsibility (“responsibilize,” as she puts it). Because the author does not touch on these conditions, I have taken the liberty to elaborate on two that I consider crucial: Sicily’s postwar struggle for agrarian reform, and the island’s becoming a hub for heroin trafficking to the United States in the “long 1980s.
Mafiacraft, witchcraft, statecraft, or the politics of mafia knowledge and the knowledge of mafia politics
No full textWhile praising Deborah Puccio-Den’s proposal for its invitation to a more reflexive kind of mafia studies, capable of addressing epistemological and even ontological issues typically assumed but rarely dealt with in the literature, I suggest developing her “mafiacraft” framework along two research lines: (1) a focus on the “craft” dimension of the “mafia” and of mafiosi as engaged in work activities and embedded in (even) a (moral) division of labor; (2) adding “statecraft” to the pair mafiacraft/witchcraft in order to bring to light the political roots of the “mafia” as both a “state effect” and an instance of elementary forms of political organization paradoxically flowering inside the formal apparatus of the (Western and “modern”) state. Finally, I make a plea for a definitive recognition of the cognitive difficulties in making sense of the “mafia” as an integral part of the same phenomenon, of its semantic field, not dissimilar from other “native” terms that have entered the Western lexicon, such as “mana” and “potlatch.
Mafiacraft: How to do things with silence
No full textHow to construct an ethnography about such a phenomenon as “the mafia,” shrouded in silence? What methods might anthropologists use to investigate silence and understand the denied, the unspeakable, the implicit, and the unspoken? The ethnographer can begin by indexing the conjectures and speculations surrounding this mysterious entity, describing the social, judicial, or graphic acts made in the attempt to break up the silence in and around this secret phenomenon, and exposing the manifold issues at stake regarding its indeterminacy: impunity, invisibility, unrepresentability. The methodological assumption is that “the mafia” is not a social fact fixed once and for all, available for being studied or “exposed,” but a cognitive event shaped by silence. In the process of producing an ethnography of what has been said or written on this secret and uncertain phenomenon, one comes to realize the imaginative power of silence, giving consistency to special kinds of social facts which draw substance from their indeterminacy. Hence, the need to coin a neologism, mafiacraft, which I discuss as an inverted paradigm of witchcraft: while the latter emphasizes the power of words, the former highlights the strength of silence: how does it resist, fight, or capitulate to the strength of words or to the force of law