HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Maths lessons from Amazonia
No full textRejoinder to Vilaça, Aparecida. 2018. “The devil and the hidden life of numbers: Translations and transformations in Amazonia.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 6–19
Christmas: An anthropological lens
No full textWhy does the festival of Christmas appear to be expanding worldwide while other festivals decline? Why do people emphasize their local rituals, given this is a global festival? Is this a religious festival whose values have been destroyed by materialism? What is the relationship between this family celebratory meal and the divine family to which it pays obeisance? These seemed to be questions that lent themselves to an anthropological perspective. For this reason in 1993 I brought together an edited volume Unwrapping Christmas, which was published by Oxford University Press. For that collection I also obtained permission from Claude Lévi-Strauss to include the first translation of his paper “Le Pere Noël supplicié.” Subsequently, on request from Suhrkamp Verlag, who had published several of my books in German, I submitted the following manuscript as part of their launch of a series of more popular academic works in a digital edition. This is the first publication of the manuscript in English
Message, myopia, dystopia
No full textThe workings of “message”—a coherent, brand-like biographical chronotope—as it has long-circulated in the specifically American system of fifty-state presidential electoral politics helps to explain the outcome of the 2016 vote. The agōn of positive and negative messaging about the respective candidates, Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump, seems to have worked, at the regional margins of an otherwise remarkably stable system, to the ultimate disadvantage of the former and the ultimate advantage of the latter
Governing the souls of Chinese modernity
No full textPhilippe Descola argues that human societies can be categorized by the ways in which they utilize broad assumptions about interiority and physicality, where interiority refers to something similar to what Edward Tylor and James Frazer meant by soul . In Descola’s scheme, traditional Chinese culture, which gives play to infinite variability in both interiority and physicality, is strongly “analogist.” In contrast, Descola defines modern, Western societies as “naturalist.” We moderns see nature or physicality as universally fixed, but culture or interiority as variable. Contemporary China is rapidly modernizing and scientizing. In Descola’s terms, its culture should be transitioning from an analogist one to a naturalist one. Through an examination of practices of memorialization and funerary ritual in urban China as well as Chinese Communist Party attempts to steer the evolution of these practices in reaction to “modernity,” this essay attempts to tease out what is modern about the conceptions of soul implicit in contemporary Chinese dealings with death
Cultivating ambivalence: Methodological considerations for anthropology
No full textAnthropologists’ longstanding ambivalence toward political advocacy has, in recent years, come under sustained fire—a shift that is often framed in terms of the discipline’s “moral turn.” In this essay, we make a case for the value of ambivalence, asking what lessons it yields as a methodological heuristic. Tracing the history of the concept, we argue that anthropology was founded on an epistemological ambivalence regarding its orientation to social problems. Thus, the moral turn implies a fundamental transformation in the ways that ethnography is conceived. Although the possibility of conflating moral evaluation with anthropological interpretation is a recognized danger of this shift, we don’t believe that the problem can be resolved by being reflexive, or that all ethnographers confront it. Instead, we suggest that cultivating an analytic of ambivalence is our best strategy for understanding what is going on around us, and teaches us more about the character of social relations than prefigured moral stances can
Cyborg political machines: Political brokering and modern political campaigning in Colombia
No full textColombian professional political consultants couple information technologies and local political brokering to circumvent strict voter privacy regulations that limit campaigns’ access to voters’ personal data. I argue that political consultants use information technologies to bolster traditional vertical, personality-centered political organizations, and to produce tightly controlled “cyborg political machines.” I challenge widespread notions that oppose media-based politics to traditional face-to-face politics (known also as clientelism). Instead, I show that although political elites introduced American political marketing methods hoping to modernize campaigns, the American way provided a new framework to preserve traditional authoritarian political arrangements after the extensive democratic reforms of the early 1990s
Mistranslating relationism and absolving the market
No full textComment on de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Bearing witness: Testimonies, translations, and ontologies in the Andes
No full textComment on de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Philia and phagia: Thinking with Stimmungswechsel through the refugee crisis in Greece
No full textComment on Borneman, John, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. 2017. “The concept of Stimmung: From indifference to xenophobia in Germany’s refugee crisis.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 105–135
In anthropology, it’s emic all the way down
No full textResponse to comments on Sahlins, Marshall. 2017. “The original political society.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 91–128