HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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#MeToo: #MeToo is little more than mob rule // vs // #MeToo is a legitimate form of social justice
No full textThis Shortcuts section engages the debate on whether the #MeToo movement is best understood as a form of social justice, bringing heinous acts often shrouded in decades of silence into the public domain, or as mob rule, foregoing official legal channels to summarily shame individuals through unmoderated character assassination. The four contributors offer diverse views on the efficacy of the #MeToo movement to bring forth structural change. They consider the relationship between #MeToo and other longer-running civil rights initiatives, the role of new communication technologies in producing collective suffering, and the need to better contextualize the production of shame. They address questions of how love and desire might fit into twenty-first-century biopolitics, and critically assess the relationship between hashtag movements and institutionalized law
“The vulture without fear”: Exploring the noble Muslim in contemporary rural Mali
No full textThis article explores the relationship between religiosity and prosperity through a particular ethnographic case from Mali and interrogates the suitability of applying models that use the lens of neoliberalism to this relationship. In the eyes of many Muslims in WestAfrica, the material prosperity displayed by Muslim scholars indexes a pious life based on the practice of Islamic precepts. In contrast to neoliberal interpretations, I analyze a resilient mode of prosperity in rural southwest Mali associated with a figure of moral success that Malians nostalgically date back to a precolonial Mande era: “the noble Muslim.” I do so through an in-depth portrait of a particular individual who described himself as “Rasta Muslim” Moussa, whose life epitomized a diffuse traditional ethics and notions of prosperity in the region. Excavating these dimentation of experience back in time, I investigate how Moussa interpreted the contemporary noble Muslim through a dynamic of leterroir. This concept stresses a cultural formation that stems from a creative engagement with the soil as a vector of tradition in dialogue with larger contemporary Rasta influences
The possibility of life
No full textIn a 2012 critique of John D. Barrow’s The artful universe, I explored the problems inherent in attempting to predict what can andcannothappen—what is and is not possible—in the universe, with special reference to the emergence of life, consciousness, andculture. In the present essay, I revisit my arguments in light of new works that have appeared on this topic. I also argue that such cosmic debates have counterparts in familiar anthropological dilemmas, such as those that developed around the idea of “totemism.
Divining, testing, and the problem of accountability
No full textRejoinder to Whyte, Sue Reynolds, Michael Whyte, and David Kyanddondo. 2018. “Technologies of inquiry: HIV tests and divination.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 97–10
Precariousness and prosperity among Javanese fish traders
No full textFish traders in a port on the north coast of Central Java say that they work as hard as they do so that their children may enjoy greater material security and tranquility than they themselves have ever experienced. Particular visions of prosperity are often formulated in explicit contrast to traders’ own experiences of precariousness, which they hope their children will be spared. Anthropological arguments about precariousness, as well as about kinship and rituals of regeneration in Java, are useful for highlighting both the practical difficulties that traders encounter in their struggle for prosperity and the symbolic tensions that give these struggles their dramatic depth. With reference to two particular traders, the paper examines how these struggles for prosperity unfold in particular domestic and occupational situations
The real ontological challenge
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