HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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From moral facts to human finitude: On the problem of freedom in the anthropology of ethics
No full textThe ethical turn in anthropology was to a large extent premised on a decisive break with Durkheimian “unfreedom.” This essay explores the theoretical condition in which this break has left the project of describing ethnographically the possibilities of human freedom. The essay explicates some ambiguities in the way freedom has been conceptualized in the current anthropological debates, and proposes to view freedom in terms of excessive experiences of existential transcendence surging from human finitude. Guided by the notion of “existential transcendence,” the essay contributes to a new humanism by tracing an intimate connection between “the ethical” and finite human existence as such
Humanism
No full textThis essay offers a brief reflection on the problem of death as it has been elaborated within certain strands of humanist thought. In their attempts to come to grips with the scale of slaughter produced during World War I, European thinkers turned to a reexamination of the meaning of death within human life. The essay addresses two opposing viewpoints that emerged from this endeavor, an ontological conception, developed primarily in Heidegger, and a relational conception, explored here in the work of Levinas. In conclusion, I highlight the ongoing relevance of this debate for our contemporary moment
Faith in anthropology
No full textResponse to rejoinders 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): 65–78
Electoral ripples: The social life of lies and mistrust in an Indian village election
No full textAnthropologists who study elections tend to restrict their analysis to the run-up to and conduct of an election and only its immediate aftermath. This article suggests that this approach misses the complicated afterlife of elections. Through an ethnographic analysis of a village election in India, the article proposes the concept of “electoral ripples” to capture the enduring transformations in ordinary sociality that are caused by a particular election well past its formal end. Instead of offering a general theory of events, this article explores the way in which the specific unfolding of a distinctive repetitive event impacts the social. It traces how the dilemmas generated by this election triggered many voters to lie about whom they had voted for. The shifting nature and the unprecedented scale of the social deception thus unleashed caused electoral rifts to ripple through the future in ways that seemed to undermine the very possibility of social relationships
Corporal destinies: Faith, ethno-nationalism, and raw talent in Fijian professional rugby aspirations
No full textMany young itaukei (indigenous) Fijian men train daily in the hope of becoming professional rugby athletes, despite the difficulty of this unpaid work and the uncertainty of the overseas careers to which they aspire. Rugby players and their families draw on a sense of destiny grounded in three ideologies of success to understand and control their futures. First, many view rugby in terms of an indigenous warrior ideal imagined as innate to itaukei men. Second, most Fijians link godliness, moral discipline, and religiosity to professional success. Third, they increasingly draw on ideas of natural talent, genetics, and pedigree widely held in global rugby. Ethnography among Fijian rugby players both in Fiji and abroad shows that this sense of destiny includes the future orientation of hope, but adds a moral imperative for action. Reading these emic conceptions of the future in terms of corporal and spiritual destiny highlights their influence not just on individual aspirations but also on social and political life, revealing both the power and limits of destiny as an analytical tool
Popfinance: From the economic man to the Swabian housewife
No full textThis article is based on my field work on finance seminars and consultancies in Germany, which are part of the financial literacy campaigns whose popularity is growing worldwide. I analyze the messages they deliver to argue that popfinance—that is, the terms by which financial markets incorporate the lay population—implies anything but the kind of value-calculating, satisfaction-maximizing, and enterprising agency that is often inferred in popular and scholarly literature. People are rather taught to distrust their impulses, lower their expectations, becautious and responsible, and assume a defensive and disciplined stance. Financialized households are thereby constituted as the reliable raw material from which capital can be generated and profit garnered in the highest echelons of financ
Perspectives on affordances, or the anthropologically real: The 2018 Daryll Forde Lecture
No full textAnthropology is defined by the vast scope of its concerns. We often forget to ask, however, what makes something a matter of concern, and for whom. A matter of concern is contingent on its relationship to some “we” for whom it is relevant. But that “we,” and those concerns, are neither given in advance nor are they pure creations. The perspective of affordances offers an alternative to reductive determinism, on the one hand, and the stronger versions of social constructivism, on the other. This perspective is an argument for possibilities: people are perpetually discovering new things about themselves (including who “we” might be) and about their worlds (including what matters for “us”) that they didn’t put in there in the first place. These points are developed through discussions of American feminist consciousness-raising and Melanesian theories of mind
Ethics, self-knowledge, and life taken as a whole
No full textWhat does thinking of “world as a whole, life” entail for ethnography? Would the modification of life with the adjectival everyday— i.e.“every day life”—provide a different lens with which to take forward our notions of ethics, or rather, ethicallife, in anthropology? The argument of this paper is that everyday life can not be taken as a given, or treated as an object that can be directly apprehended. Rather we have to ask what picture of intimacy, closeness, or ordinariness we might be able to imagine to render everyday life as knowable? Within this picture of everyday life, ethics are not a matter of finding a specialized vocabulary through which moral life can be rendered but rather of tracing the work that goes into making everyday life inhabitable
Time-rich: 1960s counterculture and time as affluence in a dropout community in Hawai‘i
No full textWhat does it mean to be rich? This paper explores prosperity from the perspective not of material affluence but of temporal affluence. Drawing on ethnographic material from an American counterculture dropout community in Hawai‘i, I examine ways in which material lack and temporal plenty can be bound together and understood not as privation but as affluence. Bringing Sahlins’s (1972) work on the “Zen solution to scarcity and want” and the seminal countercultural text Be here now (Ram Dass 1971) into dialogue with anthropological, economic, and philosophical analyses of the present moment, this paper offers a framework for examining “having” and “taking” time as forms of affluence beyond the framework set by the study of slow movements. It offers an ethnographic example of an “expanded present” as a conceptual space from which to envision and enact forms of modernity that escape the anxieties of acceleration that tend to dominate discussions of time and modernity
