HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Mathematical traditions in Ancient Greece and Rome
No full textThere were different ways of doing mathematics in the ancient Greek and Roman world. This essay will explore historiographical approaches to this diversity, from the claim that there were different traditions, to explorations of the social status of mathematicians, to attempts to go beyond written traditions in order to reconstruct practices. I will draw on Jean Lave’s studies on situation-specific mathematics to try and tease out the power relationships and underlying assumptions behind different histories of the evidence available to us
What is a polity? 2018 Lewis H. Morgan Lecture
No full textIn this revised text of the 2018 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, we encounter two communities—one a village in highland Crete, the other a small enclave in the old core of Bangkok—against which bureaucratic forces have exercised disproportionate violence, claiming to do so in response to what are openly admitted to be infractions of formal law. The particularly harsh punishments meted out to these communities, in contrast to what has happened to other, otherwise similarly insubordinate local groups, calls for a specific explanation. This would seem to lie at least partly in the residents’ tactic of subversive archaism, in which residents, through a variety of performative acts, challenge the moral authority of bureaucracies modeled on Western prototypes and imbued with Western-derived and middle-class notions of order and style. While other elements (such as shifts in the distribution of patronage) may shed light on the selective character of the state’s reprisals, the threat that subversive archaism poses to the cultural legitimacy of state and municipal bureaucracies emerges as a broader way of accounting for the official deployment of violence against groups of people whose flamboyant traditionalism ostensibly represents them as the most fundamentally loyal citizens of all
Modeling, ontology and wild thought: Toward an anthropology of the artificially intelligent
No full textThe question at the heart of this essay begins with a curious mid-twentieth-century co-occurrence in the Anglo-American world: on the one hand, of the invention and transformative spread of digital computing; on the other hand, the return from philosophical exile of “ontology” and its subsequent pluralization. What makes this co-occurrence interesting is, first, the machine’s requirement of a “model”—and so an ontology—of the domain to be affected, and second, the indeterminate nature of all digital models. Furthermore, as improvements in the technology have made the machine an ever more fit instrument of that “wily intelligence” (mẽtis) celebrated by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (1974), the laborious construction of models has become the agile practice of modeling—and so brought ever greater emphasis to local, experimental, shifting ontologies
The clash of ontologies and the problems of translation and mutual intelligibility
No full textWe face interlocking questions: (a) of translatability/mutual intelligibility and (b) ontology/reality—that is, what is there to be understood. On (a) I shall take a positive line, combining the following points: (1) no translation is ever perfect and complete, all are provisional and revisable; (2) there is indeed no perfect, complete, mutual understanding, even when all interlocutors share the same natural language. On the other hand, (3) some understanding is always possible, even across divergent systems, and even across incommensurable paradigms, even if (4) there is no neutral vocabulary in which it can be expressed. This depends (5) on allowing that the terms in any language exhibit what I call “semantic stretch.” I shall illustrate these points with ancient Greek and Chinese examples and spell out the implications for our current anthropological and philosophical debates on my second group of questions, (b)
Life, domesticated and undomesticated: Ghosts, sacrifice, and the efficacy of ritual practice in early China
No full textThis article explores classical Chinese conceptions of and practices surrounding life and vitality. Focus is given to the practice of sacrifice as well as the rejections of sacrifice among millenarian movements in Chinese late antiquity. My argument is that an engagement with this material challenges many of our understandings in the anthropology of religion concerning ritual, sacrifice, and interpretation
A clash of ontologies? Time, law, and science in Papua New Guinea
No full textStimulated by recent discussions of temporality, this essay is about abrupt transitions. What is happening when such transitions are reinvented in the future? What is happening when a radical break with one kind of past is also recalled as looking forward to a moment when aspects of another kind of past might finally come into their own? The essay revisits a country, Papua New Guinea, where many have seen colonialism come and go in a lifetime. People’s aspirations for the future, raising questions about the nature of such breaks and about the horizons being engaged, throw out some challenges as to how anthropologists might envisage the kinds of time involved. The questions lead into diverse fields, both unusual and less so. They include, on the one hand, deliberations about introduced and customary law, and on the other hand, everyday processes of generation and the displacement of generations. They also take us beyond particular circumstances to ponder on what is taken for granted in the ubiquity of change, on ideas of reproduction and creativity, and on whether talk of different ontologies is going to be helpful
Rhetorical antinomies and radical othering: Recent reflections on responses to an old paper concerning human-animal relations in Amazonia
No full textNotions of animals as social subjects held by Amazonian Indians have played a central role in anthropology’s ontological turn. Written as a reply to two critical responses to an earlier paper on human-animal relations, this essay explores the complex and often contradictory nature of ideas about animals and attitudes toward them held by both Amerindians and Euro-Americans. It suggests that, alongside mythology and shamanism, a further source of the Amerindians’ ideas about animals as social subjects lies in their everyday interactions with animals, something they share in common with Welsh sheep farmers. This fits uneasily with Philippe Descola’s contrast between animism and naturalism. The essay concludes by querying radical contrasts between “us” and “them.” Such contrasts may have their heuristic, comparative, and rhetorical uses but tend to oversimplify complex ethnographic reality
