HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Deconstructing anthropology: First Annual Stephen F. Gudeman Lecture
No full textThis lecture makes a start at deconstructing some of anthropology’s most venerable avatars. Classical theories invoked a certain kind of person as the subject of anthropology. He was the savage, the tribal, the indigenous. More recently he became simply The Other. Always, he was our mirror opposite, ourselves turned upside down in a fairground mirror. And the theories that tried to explain this imaginary actor recycled a recurrent set of ideas and arguments about nature and culture, and savagery and civilization.If we are to return to the real world we must free our thinking of these imaginary dichotomies, and set aside the repetitive cycle of mythical transformations that they support. Begin with the recognition that we are very like the people we study. Then construct a cosmopolitan anthropology that will confront current theories, models and methods with the experience and the understanding of the people we live with as ethnographers
Greek divination from an Amerindian perspective: Reconsidering “nature” in mantike
No full textThis article explores and reconfigures certain epistemological patterns of oracles and divination (mantike in ancient Greek), concepts of relevance in the fields of anthropology and classical studies. The history of “divination” dates back not only to ancient Greece but also to successive European constructions of alterity. This Western inheritance made “divination” a key concept for above all approaching cultural difference as a problem of belief or religion, thus marginalizing any kind of epistemic legitimacy or understanding of their relation to the natural environment. The role of a certain idea of nature in mantic practices, both Greek and non-Western, was omitted. By interpreting the Greek oracles from the Andean notions of camac and wak’a, one can reconsider Greek divination as a cosmopraxis of cure between beings of a different nature (humans, metahumans, and nonhumans), and gain other points of view to approach ancient sources and contemporary ethnography
Climaxing in other ways and other places: From plant spasms to psychopomp pillows
No full textTaking as a point of departure the status accorded to sexual orgasm in Western societies, we take a step back from modern “orgasmolatry” as well as from its critique. By considering the choices made in other cultural worlds and making room for concepts of sexuality among Amerindians of Amazonia, the latest Japanese sex toys, and the debates surrounding cybersex, it envisages new interpretative approaches to a topic that has spawned an abundant literature in other fields. Our aim is to open up avenues for reflecting on notions about the experience of orgasm in different cultural contexts. What exactly does the orgasm mean elsewhere? Is it viewed in the same way as in the West? Where it is cultivated as a sensitive moment in relationships between the living, what types of sociocosmological connections does it reveal
Road animism: Reflections on the life of infrastructures
No full textIn recent contributions to the emerging anthropology of infrastructure, the issue of agency often plays the role of the proverbial elephant in the room—an area that most scholars are reluctant to engage with. In this paper we highlight the implicit dichotomization between human and non-human that characterizes this body of literature. In so doing we approach the question of agency not as a subjective property emanating from a conscious self—what would be very much the way traditional anthropology has come to imagine animism. Rather, by turning such an understanding of agency on its head, we take the animacy of the in-between as the starting point from which life unfolds. According to Tim Ingold’s work on the subject, this view is consistent with the cosmologies of people traditionally described as “animists.” Yet unlike conventional understandings of the term, Ingold describes this ontology as an openness to a world in becoming. Here what brings things into existence is not an animating principle inscribed within them, but rather the potential of the field of relations in which they are embedded. We suggest that this analytical reversal can provide us with a novel framework for the analysis of infrastructures. Accordingly, we argue that roads’ doings cannot be understood as active subjectivity or a function of their material resilience. Instead of connecting, roads should be understood as growing out of connections—as an “in-between” in which their doing is also their undergoing. We will make this argument through ethnographic cases from Pakistan, Nepal, China, Myanmar, and Austria
The river grew tired of us: Spectral flows along the Mekong River
No full textAlong the Mekong, where it creates the border between Thailand and Laos, distant hydropower projects have triggered a transformation. Strange floods and ebbs disrupt fish migrations, undercut riverbanks, and sweep away nets. Facing this new landscape, fishermen on the Mekong seek out new, hidden sources of potency that have revealed themselves as well as identifying those old powers that have eroded. Via an ethnographic study of Mekong “river beings,” this article addresses a reconfiguration of sources of power on the river away from the proximate and material, and towards the inaccessible, distant, and spectral
Antidomestication in the Amazon: Swidden and its foes
No full textJohn Locke never acknowledged the existence of any agriculture and hence of property in the Americas. Yet, one can say that in Amazonia, cultivation not only existed among humans but was a capacity shared with almost every living being and with spirits. While Amazonia is presently recognized as a major center of plant domestication, one can argue that indigenous agriculturalists did not conform to a proper definition of domestication. One is tempted to say that they resisted absolute domestication of plants as well as of themselves, as they avoided losing the ability to survive as foragers. Swidden agriculture was no “subjection of the land” (as Locke would have it) but a science of both cultivation and forest producing in which humans shared rights with other beings
God is other(s): Anthropological pietism and the beings of metamorphosis
No full textRejoinder to Willerslev, Rane, and Christian Suhr. 2018. “Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 65–7
Back to the future with the theory of affordances
No full textRejoinder to Keane, Webb. 2018. “Perspectives on affordances, or the anthropologically real.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 27–3