HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Not a member yet
1288 research outputs found
Sort by
Ordinary possibility, transcendent immanence, and responsive ethics: A philosophical anthropology of the small event
No full textBased upon long-term fieldwork among African American families in Los Angeles, this article offers a phenomenological investigation of the indeterminate structures of ethical experience. Drawing upon Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology in the context of one particular family, it explores the way ordinary life serves as a crucial, indeed privileged space in which to investigate ethical possibility. The ethnographic material is not intended to fill out abstract proposals concretely but to elaborate, challenge, and amend formal philosophical claims in light of socially grounded material. How might the existential question of human possibility be asked when focusing on the way it is addressed by particular people facing situations shaped by structural conditions and cultural norms? How might anthropology and philosophy together rethink humanism in relation to human possibility
Selma’s response: A case for responsive anthropology
No full textAnalyzing an episode from a family story in World War II, this paper suggests introducing the concept of responsiveness in philosophical anthropology and anthropology of ethics. It recalls the need for moral imagination when interpreting ethically significant cases and hence argues for the acknowledgment of possibility as an ontological modality essential to our understanding of the reality of human life. It does so by drawing on Heidegger’s hermeneutics of Dasein and Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology
How will we pay? Projective fictions and regimes of foresight in US college finance
No full textFor most American households today, a college education requires financial planning. Planning can seem like a reckoning with “real” economic constraints of household budgetary truths; however, financial planning begins with imaginative acts. To plan, families must craft “projective fictions,” forecasts of trends in the broader economy and family life with which they can guide parenting actions in the present. Drawing on inspiration from ethnographic interviews with more than 160 middle-class college students and their families, this essay examines government policy and financial industry agendas that have linked planning practices with familial virtue. A contrast between two “regimes of foresight” and their moralities—the mid-century US policies’ regime of “near-term prudence” and the contemporary regime of “distant modeling”—exposes the work “real economy” accomplishes: the policies and instruments of planning produce and distribute virtue as much as financial outcomes
Destiny as a relationship
No full textThis afterword takes a closer look at relationships of power involved in destiny, taking inspiration from questions and answers offered in this special section on anthropologies of destiny. Destiny offers a theory of human action according to which humans can have power over their condition only in accordance and alliance with very powerful or omnipotent superhuman beings or processes, such as the monotheist God, polytheistic pantheons, heaven, planets, but also history, progress, or markets. Who are they? Do they need to be intentional? What kinds of power relations, or “relationship power,” do humans and the superhuman authors of their destiny craft? I return to the opening question of the special section—What does it mean to live a life that has already been written?—and suggest that destiny as an intimate relationships of power is meaningful in the sense that it provides practical, moral answers to the question why
The semi-social mountain: Metapersonhood and political ontology in the Andes
No full textThis paper debates how Andean mountains become persons with political ontology, a post-humanist orientation that has recently highlighted this phenomenon. Mountains’ physical bodies synthesize various life processes andprecipitate as metapersons when people engage them socially as willful agents, hoping to regulate mountains’ extra-human powers morally. This socialization remains incomplete, however. Aloof to human vulnerability, mountains frequently appear as q’alas, Andean people’s barely human racial persecutors and class enemies. By taking this form, mountains suggest that people’s relation with the land is similarly troubled, not the benign matter of kinship that political ontology proposes
Beyond ethics: Conscience, pacifism, and the political in wartime Britain
No full textThe central intervention of this article concerns the contingency of the relationship between ethics and politics. The empirical focus is Second World War Britain, where the refusal to fight was often framed as a conscientious objection. More broadly, one of the central propositions in the anthropology of ethics has been that ethics is ubiquitous. However, ethical practices—such as conscience—are not always prioritized in public life. It is not simply, for example, that we might have different ways of answering “how ought I to live?”, but that the question itself is not always thought to be socially significant. We therefore need to pay attention to how and why the question is posed, and what this means for who can speak and about what issues. As such, the paper argues that the valorization of conscience can reproduce forms of privilege
The method of the real: What do we intend with ethnographic infrastructure?
No full textWhat is the source of ethnographic truth? One might just as well ask what is the real economy, for neither has a clear-cut empirical referent. Critical efforts to counter economic abstractions or finance’s fictions often seek a grounding truth in something “real.” In anthropology, this has meant variously the household (oikos) or kinship, or the lived experiences that ethnography supposedly evokes. But none of these concepts are innocent. This essay considers efforts like this special colloquium in Hau and allied projects like the Gens Manifesto, by way of a detour through method acting and the history of other anthropological attempts to theorize the connections among different economic formations. The focus on the real economy falters wherever there are seams or articulations among diverse or plural practices delimited as economic. Ethnography falters when we see it as a representation of a reality rather than as a bridge permitting conversions from one form of action to others. The question, Does capitalism depend on noncapitalist forms, is analogous to the question, Does ethnography depend on an underlying lived experience? This essay suggests that these are the wrong questions. Asking the right ones might mean taking a page from the scripts of the players in ethnographic stories who are always engaged in different games, simultaneously or sequentially, and permitting ourselves the same allowance
The absence of the divine
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