HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Ethnography? Participant observation, a potentially revolutionary praxis
No full textThis essay focuses on the core of ethnographic research—participant observation—to argue that it is a potentially revolutionary praxis because it forces us to question our theoretical presuppositions about the world, produce knowledge that is new, was confined to the margins, or was silenced. It is argued that participant observation is not merely a method of anthropology but is a form of production of knowledge through being and action; it is praxis, the process by which theory is dialectically produced and realized in action. Four core aspects of participation observation are discussed as long duration (long-term engagement), revealing social relations of a group of people (understanding a group of people and their social processes), holism (studying all aspects of social life, marking its fundamental democracy), and the dialectical relationship between intimacy and estrangement (befriending strangers). Though the risks and limits of participant observation are outlined, as are the tensions between activism and anthropology, it is argued that engaging in participant observation is a profoundly political act, one that can enable us to challenge hegemonic conceptions of the world, challenge authority, and better act in the world
The concept of Stimmung: From indifference to xenophobia in Germany’s refugee crisis
No full textThis article deals with the German concept of Stimmung, which does not allow a translation into the English notion of “affective mood,” but rather is simultaneously an internal and external state, subjective (involving the “I”) and objective (involving attunement [einstimmen] to others), enveloping both content and form. To understand the essential imbrication of individual and collective moods summoned by the term, we examine three empirical cases of Stimmungswechsel, or “mood shifts”—from indifference to ambivalence, to xenophilia and xenophobia—as they shaped the September 2016 German regional electoral campaigns. Following Sally Falk Moore, we focus on the “diagnostic events” which triggered these shifts, observed in fieldwork encounters with Germans concerning migrants and refugees who entered Germany in 2015. How did the perception and experience of “the refugee” become internal to the “mood shifts”? How is Stimmung linked to relations to refugees as psychic attachments that either echo an originary collective experience of losing home or promise submission to an experience of self-transformation
The live act of business and the culture of realization
No full textThe concept of reality saturates today’s business curriculum. Educational methods that emphasize an experiential approach to business reality, practical training through real cases, or an active realization of business insights have become almost inescapable in contemporary business education. The case method of instruction in business administration, famously developed at the Harvard Business School, stands perhaps as the most widely acknowledged pedagogical vehicle for this sense of the business real. Ethnographic investigation on the practice of the case method demonstrates the pregnancy of a concept of reality that revolves around the idea of the subjective confirmation of a contextualized experience. But it also suggests the paradoxical centrality of a concept of reality as what cannot be realized. An anthropological examination of the problem of the business real thus requires attention to what appears to be a form of anxiety
Action and its parts
No full textComment on Enfield, N. J. and Jack Sidnell. 2017. The concept of action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Economies of obligation: Patronage as relational wealth in Bolivian gold mining
No full textRecent scholarship in anthropology offers critical attention to inequality as a constitutive feature of social life to which specific legal, cultural, and religious traditions supply diverging answers. Drawing upon these debates, this article explores the ways that Quechua- and Spanish-speaking subjects in the Bolivian province of Ayopaya imagine, inhabit, and strive to address inequalities stemming from the region’s history of labor violence. While Ayopaya’s history of hacienda servitude lives on in contemporary structures of racialized disparity, I argue that it also conditions particular traditions of exchange that rural groups draw from in order to contest a new gold mining economy. Against more pessimistic accounts of late capitalism as a moment of inexorable abandonment, particularly for indigenous groups, I query the tenacity of obligation and probe its political possibilities as a practice of claim making (and a scholarly heuristic) by which to expose the ethical refusals on which “free” exchange relies
Rules without rulers?
No full textComment on Sahlins, Marshall. 2017. “The original political society.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 91–128
The enhancement of enchantments in Melanesia
No full textComment on Jones, Graham M. 2017. Magic’s reason: An anthropology of analogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
On jaguars and fish
No full textComment on Turner, Terence. 2017. “Beauty and the beast: The fearful symmetry of the jaguar and other natural beings in Kayapo ritual and myth.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 51–70
Recombiant analogism and naturalism
No full textComment on Kipnis, Andrew. “Governing the souls of Chinese modernity” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 217–238