HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Choose, judge, and move on: The tensions arising from implementing personalized care for homeless people with mental health issues in the UK
No full textFor the last decade, the UK government has followed an agenda of “personalizing care.” Based on ethnographic material from three hostels supporting homeless people with mental health issues in central London, I analyze tensions in the everyday implementation of this policy agenda: on the one hand, using tools such as personal budgets, personalization was practiced by providing people with short-term, concrete choices—between different care workers, activities, and housing options, for instance. On the other hand, the implementation involved developing judgment around longer-term plans, centered on how to “move on” people to independent living. What I describe as personalization’s focus on positive liberty is complicated by the consequences of mental health issues and the after-effects of long-term institutionalization. As a result, choice and judgment were often in tension with each other and more substantially with the residents’ desires for maintaining support and care, linked to a different kind of “freedom in dependence.
This has a name: Witchcraft, suspicion, and circumlocution in Central Angola
No full textThe literature on witchcraft has focused predominantly on the accusation of witches, the procedures for establishing guilt, and the effects thereof. However, during my fieldwork in Central Angola, I did not encounter processes of accusation but rather a prevailing mood of unresolved suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2014 and 2019, this paper theorizes the relationship between witchcraft and suspicion by examining the micro level of social interactions in which witchcraft narratives emerge. It explores how suspicion operates through circumlocution and tautology, arguing that it thrives on indeterminacy, doubt, and suspended indication—elements that structure the dialectic between the general and the particular in witchcraft. This tension allows the relationship between witchcraft and witches to remain open, conditioned not only by social conventions of plausibility and hierarchical relations that position witches and sorcerers but also by the contingencies of how these conventions are enacted in specific interactions
Rock climbing as lithic ethnography: Animacy, aesthetics, and deep time
No full textWhat does it mean for scholars to engage rocks ethnographically? And how is ethnography redefined back by an encounter with lithics? Although rock has long lingered in the background of sociocultural research, it is only recently that ethnographers have begun to foreground the geologic, often in conversations about extraction and extinction. But how do everyday practices of knowing and caring for rocks and lithic places articulate with what some call the “geologic turn” in the humanities and social sciences? In this article, I propose the term “lithic ethnography” to encompass research in and around cultural anthropology that is attentive to aesthetic, linguistic, and material/body practices of human–rock intimacy across scales. I showcase rock climbers as paradigmatic figures of a lithic ethnography, as they demonstrate what it can mean to privilege movement and correspondence over static form or identity and to try to forge relations—however partial—with lithic material
