HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Is there mathematics in the forest?
No full textScholars from different fields and epistemological orientations —including anthropologists, science historians, and mathematicians—have argued that technical and social practices of indigenous peoples, exemplified by ornamentation in textiles and kinship taxonomies, embody the mathematical capacity of illiterate people. I take as my main example the kinship calculi of the Cashinahua at the Brazil-Peru frontier, bringing into focus the complex mathematical operations and structures embedded in this domain and inextricably embedded in their ontology. Does that mean I am imposing modern mathematical concepts on indigenous ontologies? Against this charge of epistemic colonialism, I argue in favor of the existence of universal mathematical capabilities (evidenced by the recursive rules used to produce consistent patterns that are transportable across distinct domains of thought and action) across ontological boundaries
Objective functions: (In)humanity and inequity in artificial intelligence
No full textIt is hard to say which is more satisfying: the discovery of order in the material world (science), or the imposition of order on that world (technology). When human language takes material form, through digital computing and information storage devices, it seems even more satisfying to treat knowledge itself as the object of either science or craft. In Cambridge, we hedge our bets between these options, with departments of both Computer Science and Information Engineering. In this essay, I explore new methods of “machine learning” that have swept both departments, promising an information-theoretic revolution in artificial intelligence. I focus in particular on the subjectivities embedded in these mechanical systems, and the human satisfactions and ambitions in constructing them. Key questions include the relationship between order and information, common sense and classification, and the necessity of mathematical objective functions
Teungku Sum’s dilemma: Ethical time, reflexivity, and the Islamic everyday
No full textThis article analyzes a dilemma faced by a young religious teacher in the Indonesian province of Aceh—namely, whether to continue teaching in an Islamic boarding school or to find more lucrative work elsewhere so that he can pursue a spouse. It argues that the way this teacher poses this dilemma as a choice between two mutually exclusive ethical goods makes visible an Islamic everyday constituted by different kinds and degrees of reflective awareness. This Islamic everyday brings different models of Islamic time to bear upon the details of a life in ways that frame multiple, and sometimes competing, accounts of self. In so doing, it challenges a distinction between Islam and the everyday that has been central in the anthropology of Islam
Amerindian political economies of life
No full textElaborating on the notion of “political economy of life,” first developed in a 2009 book on indigenous forms of slavery and servitude, I argue that the idea that all forms of life share the same reserve of vitality, that such life force is transferable between different kinds of beings, and that vitality is scarce or unevenly distributed, seems to be widespread among native Amazonians. As a result, all living beings—humans, animals, plants, spirits, gods, and even some objects—are engaged in a fierce competition to accumulate as much life force as possible in order to guarantee the survival of their own kind. Through a comparative analysis of six ethnographic “scenes,” I explore what life means to native Amazonians, examine the ontologies and eco-cosmologies that provide the indigenous struggle for vitality with its rationale, and identify the elements that prevent the system from becoming a Hobbesian “war of all against all.