HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Not a member yet
1288 research outputs found
Sort by
“We got citizenship but nothing else”: Love, (be)longing, and betrayal in the context of India’s citizenship regime
No full textWhile recent amendments to India’s Citizenship Act are designed to exclude Muslims from claims to citizenship in India, this essay seeks to problematize the assumption that Hindu migrants who seek citizenship under the new Act are incorporated seamlessly and unproblematically into the nation. The constitutional grant of citizenship and social acceptance into everyday local worlds are not always congruent. My ethnographic examples are drawn from an earlier wave of migration of Hindu men from Sindh into western India. They illustrate both a feeling of love and anticipation at the prospect of Indian citizenship as well as an acute sense of betrayal that they did not get “anything else” apart from legal citizenship—which in this case is social dignity, honor, and acceptance into local Hindu caste society. While the state may read cross-border migration in the terms of broad religious categorizations that are then written into its citizenship laws, there is no good reason to assume that these legal documents translate into everyday life in the same manner. The grant of citizenship—even to the Hindus that the state is so eager to make into citizens—is not the end of the story of cross-border migration; often it is just the beginning of a long negotiation for migrants who need to learn a new language of belonging in order to integrate. That language—as this ethnographic example from Kutch shows us— has to do as much with caste equations as with the question of religion or nationality per se
Rising tides and anthropological morals
No full textDrawing on debates in southern African anthropology, I suggest that where knowledge claims themselves are in question, comparison, uncertainty, and play may be critical in reframing debates about the relation between anthropology and moral worlds, including anthropology’s own
Resisting the configurations for a Hindu nation
No full textThe protests against the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) and a nationwide NRC (National Register of Citizens) have emerged as an important challenge against right-wing majoritarianism in India. These protests frame themselves as part of a struggle to save the Indian constitution and its secular character. How can we understand the role of such protests in resisting the right-wing efforts for a Hindu Rashtra, or a Hindu nation where minorities, especially Muslims, will be marked as undesirable Others? The article attempts to answer this question by looking at Hindu Rashtra as a performative project. The manner in which the processes of anti-CAA-NRC protests attempt to challenge the claims of Hindutva narratives are analyzed. The article explores the possibility of undoing the Hindutva ecosystem of hate through cultural and media materials as well as bodies from the sites of protests which assert the constitutionally guaranteed principle of equalit
The digitalia of everyday life: Multi-situated anthropology of a virtual letter by a “foreign hand”
No full textThe article considers the transmissions and effects of a digital letter, and its implications for multi-situated—as opposed to a multi-sited—anthropology. Multi-situated moves beyond multiple sites as supplementary contexts to the life flows of people, materials, and ideas, to consider multi-ontological, dynamic, and temporally contingent situations constitutive of such movements in the making, that are embedded and/or enfolded along several intersecting planes on- and offline. The public letter was written collaboratively in May 2012 by activists in Britain, agreed to and signed off by supportive British members of Parliament among others, and addressed to the then prime minister of India and the chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu. The letter’s contents pertained to the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in south India, with concerns about mandatory procedures in the construction of a nuclear power station, and democratic and human rights abuses against nonviolent protestors. By focusing on the emergence, travels, and receptive trajectories of the letter, the article makes a case for the increasing need to encompass aspects of digital anthropology not as a discrete subdiscipline, but as an integral part of core anthropological focus and method for the study of “onlife” entanglements—what effectively has become the digitalia of everyday life
Shedding light on diverse cultures of mathematical practices in South Asia: Early Sanskrit mathematical texts in conversation with modern elementary Tamil mathematical curricula (in dialogue with Senthil Babu)
No full textDiscourses promoting alternative sciences—that is, traditional “scientific” systems as opposed to modern “Western” science—are part of a wider reflection in South Asia on how to shape the future. History of science, then, is a very politicized affair. We will describe how two contrasting practices of numbers, measures and computations can be documented in South India as they appear in early Sanskrit mathematical treatises and commentaries (seventh–twelfth centuries) and also in elementary mathematical curricula in Tamil (seventeenth–twentieth centuries). We will question whether they should be described as two different mathematical ontologies
Inquiries raised by the dead
No full textMany people continue to maintain links with deceased relatives or friends, often in surprisingly inventive ways: doing things the deceased used to do while alive; finding some way to continue what the deceased had begun and which death interrupted; at times asking the deceased for help; dreaming of loved ones or sensing their presence after death; remembering their existence through gestures or photographs; commemorating them with rituals; and the like. The narratives of people who enact such experiences reveal two interrelated concerns: on the one hand, to maintain the perplexity and indeterminacy that accompanies their experience and, on the other, to preserve the vitality of their relationships with the deceased and render them alive and present in some way. Beginning with a statement made by a spirit medium in Belgium, “The dead are people like everybody else,” I explore the ways in which spiritist circles are able to create veritable therapeutic devices for those who attend seances when the deceased are summoned