HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Not a member yet
1288 research outputs found
Sort by
Forms of life and life itself: Reflections on human relations with ideas, artworks, and other species
No full textThis essay explores experiences that lie ambiguously between the inchoate, the intuitive, and the impressionistic, on the one hand, and the verbal, conceptual, aesthetic, andideological, ontheother. I am particularly interested in experiences that gobeyondthe nominally human and are felt to be shared by other species and to belong to “life itself.” Empirical examples are adduced from ethnographies on human–animal relations and from the world of art
Caught in the language of fate: The quality of destiny in Taiwan
No full textIn Taiwan, fate (mingyun) powerfully emerges and circulates in and through language. I focus on three core genres through which the “language of fate” operates in local life—the language of rumors, the language of personal crisis, and the language of misfortune—and trace the multiple registers through which people come to be “caught” by this language, and thus by fate itself. The language of fate effectively catches those involved in its fated logics by requiring human participation, responsibility, decision—and even creation—operating through the constitutive tension between fixity and motility that lies at the heart of the ethnographic concept of mingyun. Developing this argument, I show that the language of fate here is a conceptual substance rather than a “second best” entry point into mingyun
In search of dignity: Political economy and nationalism among Palestinian camp dwellers in Amman
No full textThis article aims to problematize the well-rehearsed argument that the rise of the neoliberal tide has submerged alternative values and moral codes. In al-Wihdat, a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, neoliberal understandings of prosperity do not fully encompass vernacular notions of prosperity. Palestinian refugees value well-being not only on the basis of income but also in terms of the ethical and political qualities often entailed in “being poor.” However, if neoliberal desires tarnish the moral environment by bringing excessive individualism and anomy, poverty, too, can be detrimental to refugees’ well-being. Rather than simply being an unconditioned source of dignity and a superior moral stance, refugees recognize poverty as being a condition fraught with deeply ambivalent images and feelings. Refugees navigate this inconsistency through the conscious cultivation of what I describe as “connectivity” for the realization of full dignity and, ultimately, the pursuit of happiness
Revisiting “the repugnant other” in the era of Trump
No full textAnthropology has long challenged etic characterizations of the contradictory other, highlighting the logics of putatively back- ward subjects. Recent punditry on Donald Trump ’ s election echoes this ethnographic imperative, calling on concerned citizens to empathetically listen to the otherized Trump Voter to resolve the alleged contradictions in his worldview. This article calls for a different ethnographic approach to elucidating this confounding political moment. Instead of searching for coherent subjects beneath Red State contradictions, we must explore the ways in which today ’ s caustic politics give a particular shape to the in- consistencies and illogical predilections endemic to the human condition. Drawing from interviews with several Trump sup- porters and anthropological literature on political subjecthood in Argentina, Indonesia, Micronesia, and Sierra Leone, I high- light three ethnographic insights on contradictions that destabilize the alleged “ spectrum ” of deliberative political subjects. In so doing, I situate the United States ’ current political landscape within the broader existential paradoxes salient to human society
Being open to the world
No full textAs the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka poetically phrased it, human beings are “beings of the far reaches.” Our human condition is, in other words, conditioned by the existential fact that we are beings who are open, attuned, and responsive to the world. Building upon and extending some of my earlier reflections on the distinctive modes of openness, attunement, and responsivity that are revealed in the context of ethnographic practice, this essay will seek to clear some new pathways to potentiating generative dialogue between anthropological and philosophical phenomenology. In particular, the article will explore how a phenomenologically informed analysis of the specific form of bracketing that arises in ethnographic encounters—what I have termed the ethnographic epoché—can help anthropologists and philosophers alike to rethink possibilities for thinking, not only in the context of their respective modes of inquiry but also at points where the two fields mutually intersect
The politics of the real economy
No full textIn this special section of Hau (part II), we present four texts that allow us to go further with the objective to provoke the real, ethnographically. We explore the empirical and conceptual program involved in the making of an ethnographic theory of the “real economy,” a critical concept shaping contemporary public debates about the present and future of our collective existence. In this cooperative exploration of a concept that holds varied and shifting places, we are particularly interested in questioning how assemblages of vernacular and scientific realizations and enactments of the real economy are linked to concepts of truth and to moral values; how these multiple and shifting realities become present, and entangle with historically and socially situated lives; and how the formal realizations of the real in the governance of economies engage with the experiential life of ordinary people
Food-for-words: Sacrificial counterpoint and oracular articulacy in Cuba
No full textBy critically engaging with anthropological theories on sacrifice and religious “mediation,” this article offers a doubly indigenous ethnographic theory of sacrifice and much beyond. Using material on Afro-Cuban divination and Fernando Ortiz’s notion of “counterpoint,” it goes beyond dominant scholarly understandings of sacrifice as a dialectical mediation between the “sacred” and the “profane,” and an act of substitution and annihilation. Rather, it offers an account of sacrifice as part of a much wider praxis and field wherein it serves, among many other offerings, materials and sensibilities, as a counterpoint and crossroads of exchange. The outcome is a dynamic transformation of a point of view into a “path” that is guided and forged through the ignition and further cultivation of oracular articulacy
Making space for free subjects: Squatting, resistance, and the possibility of ethics
No full textAnthropologists working on ethics have emphasized the importance of freedom for the becoming of ethical subjects. While some have therefore aligned themselves with the later work of Foucault, his earlier work has been identified as part of a “science of unfreedom” antithetical to the study of ethics. In this article, I suggest that the “early Foucault” can nevertheless be relevant for the anthropology of ethics, specifically by looking at contexts where freedom is not a given, but has to be actively created through the overcoming of conditions of unfreedom. Drawing on Faubion’s discussion of ethical subject positions, as well as Foucault’s work on disciplinary architectures, I discuss how subject positions, ethical and otherwise, are also and especially produced through practices of ordering material and symbolic space. Different socio-spatial orders can therefore either be designed to impede the flourishing of free ethical subjects, or to facilitate it
