HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Inventing nature: Christianity and science in indigenous Amazonia
No full textBased on long-term ethnographic research among the Wari’ Indians from Amazonia, this essay aims to analyze the ontological and moral changes related both to conversion to Christianity and to schooling. I aim to show that although in Christian culture knowledge is still intrinsically moral, the dissociation made by the missionaries between the heart (the Wari’ previous site of knowledge, cognition, and morality) and the brain turned into mind (an unmarked body part for the Wari’), constituted the fundamental step toward an idea of knowledge stripped of its moral components introduced by schooling. I will take as my central example the translation of the Wari’ word xika’pe, whose central meaning is lonely, with a marked negative value, to the mathematical number one, taken in this context as a neutral entity
Turning to ontology in studies of distant sciences
No full textDrawing on contributions to the conference Science in the Forest, Science in the Past, and on exemplary works of Annemarie Mol and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, this article offers reflections on the opportunities and challenges for historians of the sciences that are presented by the “ontological turn.” It notes how this approach leads to recognition of plurality in the sciences, not only with regard to content but also with respect to the personae adopted by their practitioners, and how it encourages attention to aspects of the sciences embedded in everyday and routine practices. In conclusion some suggestions are offered on the problems of accessing and communicating to others distant sciences of the forest and/or the past
Contemporary counterconduct
No full textIn this lecture delivered at Stanford University in February 2019, I explore—in a writing style that I call, following Adorno, “late style”—a conduct that counters pressures to behave in ways shaped by the prevailing governmental mechanisms of a certain milieu. The subject is malice, the setting the academy, and some proximate events in my home department and in my scholarly experience. Critical of the current turn to morality in the discipline, this intervention argues instead for a focus on Haltung, or on a particular stance in the pursuit of knowledge, which is attentive to well-defined sets of human relationships
Valueless value: The question of production in Cofán shamanism
No full textIn this essay, I analyze the production of value in the shamanic complex of the indigenous Cofán people of eastern Ecuador. While acknowledging the ethical nature of human existence and the generative power of human action, I describe the shaman as a paradoxical figure with regard to the efforts that produce him and the criteria that orient his actions. The shaman occupies a central social position, but he profits from little Cofán labor and receives mixed Cofán praise. Consequently, it is arguable that he represents no value at all. If anything, I suggest, he embodies valueless value, a concept I articulate in relation to Pierre Clastres’s notion of “powerless power.” In dialogue with the anthropology of ethics, morality, and productive action, I use my analysis of Cofán shamanism to demonstrate the utility of a value-based approach in any ethnographic investigation that takes human practice as its primary object
Life and its inflections in Kilimanjaro: Becoming and being beyond the metaphoric
No full textThis article explores a set of vernacular notions used by the Chagga-speaking people of Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro Region to investigate how life—moo—is an effect of transfers and transformations of life-force or horu that occur among humans, houses, livestock, and crops. Exploring how they engage and involve a plethora of places, substances, conduits, beings, and processes that derive from the notion of moo, the article investigates how these processes afford and constitute the existence, capacity, health, and well-being of subjects and objects. Investigating how these notions concern efforts to allow different beings to emerge and exist, I argue that moo and horu are not metaphors, but concepts in their own right
Magic is science: Atheist conjuring and the exposure of superstition in South India
No full textThis article examines so-called Miracle Exposure Programs conducted by Atheist activists in South India as a performance of secular difference. It retraces how activists use the sociopsychological properties of conjuring for performing an Atheist epistemology of the production, maintenance, and eradication of “superstition.” In debunking miracles as magic tricks, Atheist conjurers consistently emphasize the importance of immoral social relationships and abuses of differential knowledge rather than questions of ontology. In contrast to the large body of anthropological theorizing on magic, the article’s main focus is the aesthetic production of secularity and secular difference. Pushing beyond the critical discourse on secular disenchantment as itself productive of magic and reenchantment, I propose to understand practices of “exposure” as an aesthetic form that enacts a reflexive distance from both magic and reenchantment insomuch as it makes their sociopsychological nature the object of performative display and sensible perception
Different clusters of text from ancient China, different mathematical ontologies
No full textSources attesting to mathematical activities in ancient China form at least four distinct clusters of texts, bespeaking at least four different—though overlapping—ways of practicing mathematics. I will focus on two such sets of documents: the canons that in the seventh century constituted one of the two curricula taught in the Imperial “School of Mathematics,” and manuscripts recently excavated from tombs sealed in the last centuries BCE. I will argue that these two sets of documents testify to two different ways of practicing mathematics, which related to different material practices. Accordingly, we can perceive that mathematical objects were shaped and explored in different ways, with significant consequences for the knowledge produced
Karma and grace: Rivalrous reckonings of fortune and misfortune
No full textKarma and grace are grammars for material and moral being, each offering onto-cosmological justification for the vicissitudes of destiny. Beyond their scriptural renderings, karma and grace are vernacular cosmologies, which in Sri Lanka, are engaged as repertoires of judgment, reckoning, and discernment of causes of fortune and misfortune. This paper ventures to compare and contrast karma and grace. It queries the agonistic intersection between evangelical imperatives towards Christian proselytism and conversion, and nationalistic imperatives to maintain the Buddhist heritage of Sri Lanka. Pentecostal-charismatic Christians extol conversion as discontinuity, which rests upon surrender to grace. Dedicated Buddhists, in contrast, consider one’s life-conditions as righteously inherited through a karmically-governed cosmos, and thus place great value upon religio-moral continuity. In agonistic interchanges between Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists in Sri Lanka, we see how karma and grace may be seen as constituting two competing economies of religious belonging