HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Diasporic baraka
No full textIn this paper I reflect on two interconnected phenomena associated with Lebanese migration: a high incidence of gambling among immigrants and the experience of migration itself as a form of “gambling with the self.” I show how both these dimensions are illuminated by Levy-Bruhl’s reflections on gambling and risk-taking. I examine the affinity that Levy-Bruhl’s ideas have with Bourdieu’s notion of illusio that I’ve also used to explore these dimensions
Situating time: New technologies at work, a perspective from Alfred Gell’s oeuvre
No full textA scholarship on “time” has emerged that pays attention to the ways contemporary economic life and information technology affect temporal perception and practice. A critique of this scholarship, along with a joint reading and reinterpretation of Alfred Gell’s two books The anthropology of time and Art and agency, provides this article’s point of departure for “situating time” in the theoretical sense of setting out an explicit temporal ontology—a kind of reflection that I argue is often missing in scholarship on time. This temporal ontology is in turn substantiated and developed through an ethnographic exploration of time’s performative dimensions, brought to bear through practices of situating time, here in an ethnographic sense. The empirical material is from fieldwork among people working via the internet from their homes in rural Denmark
Experiencing presence: An interactive model of perception
No full textThis essay brings literature in experimental psychology and visual perception into conversation with psychological anthropology to propose a new theory of presence. We examine data on Catholic nuns’ experiences of God’s presence, proposing that presence—indeed all perceptual consciousness—can be conceived of as the dynamic and ever-emerging interaction of a perceiver-environment system. By understanding presence as interactional, we shift away from framing experience of the divine as a puzzle to be explained in the face of what we know about the natural order of things toward a model in which perceptual experience is co-constituted by a perceiver and environment in relation. By proposing a common language that can be used to talk across the bounds of the “natural” and “social” sciences, this essay introduces a model that can capture and represent the lived experiences of individuals in a way that both takes that experience seriously and renders that experience open to empirical investigation
Brexit as postindustrial critique
No full textAnthropologists and other commentators struggle to make sense of pre-COVID-19 political developments in the postindustrial Global North. Various narratives were created to explain these dramatic events and changes, deploying an armory of social science analysis. We could approach one of these worrying developments, Brexit, as a postindustrial phenomenon. To make this case, I will compare my ethnographic material from postindustrial German cities with my experience in North East England as a non-UK, EU citizen. Brexit is not just a delayed response to economic decline and insecurity, epitomized in the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent times of austerity. Rather, Brexit indicates that the former industrialized countries of the Global North have not yet redefined their political and economic organization. Further, they have not developed an idea of what life after the postindustrial crisis can look like. I show that anthropology can contribute to precisely this kind of future-thinking
“The revolution we are living”
No full textThis article presents three ethnographic scenes extracted from Brazilian urban life, the earliest dating from 2013. It reflects on the rise of the extreme right in contemporary Brazil, a process that shares similarities with what takes place in many parts of the world. I argue that specific types of militarism, anti-intellectualism, and entrepreneurial monetarism became a part of the daily lives of different social classes as three discursive matrices of a mass movement. Major sectors of the religious world, of the police and military, as well as the professional world and the financial market, offered a political-electoral program for this movement, resulting in Jair Bolsonaro’s victory. This movement of the masses aims to destroy the current political system, perceived as degenerate, and substitute for it a new order, which will produce a new man. The social conflict instilled by this program does not fundamentally organize itself as class struggle, although, paradoxically, it creates them under the guise of a “struggle.” Theoretically, I am interested in the role of daily life and daily conflicts in structuring regimes of power
Ethical citizenship and global development: Exploring the intersections
No full textDeparting from Aihwa Ong’s influential analysis of citizenship as a Foucauldian cultural project of subject-making, this contribution examines three global development citizen-subjects: transnational high-tech companies, marginalized women, and everyday humanitarians. It draws on two ethnographic research projects to analyze how market logics and digital technologies contribute to the global configurations of corporate citizenship and online microfinance that articulate corporate and development objectives
