HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Not a member yet
1288 research outputs found
Sort by
Relationship and process in long-term care: Older husband carers and COVID-19 in the Spanish Mediterranean
No full textThis article focuses on showing the centrality of the dimensions of relationship and process in long-term care in the contexts of conjugality, aging, and disability in the Spanish Mediterranean. I consider the notions of relationship and process to be essential to understanding how daily care is culturally made when an older husband cares for his ill wife. To give importance to these elements is to approach the long journey of care, its variability and vulnerability in the encounter with the other, as well as the complex trajectories traced in terms of environments, resources, and social actors. The article will use the concept of “constellations of care” to illustrate the complexity of these relationships and processes involved in care. The article seeks to contrast an initial period of expanding care with a second period of fractured care due to COVID-19 distancing policies. In this ethnography, the pandemic has clarified that social care comprises dynamic processes and relationships that seek proximity and collectivization to maintain life
It’s going to be chaos: The emergent connectivity of online experiences
No full textOnline phenomena are frequently examined for how they connect humans socially through technology, with connectivity often considered as a state of being or doing that implies the mutually exclusive binary: connect or disconnect. This study of Airbnb Online Experiences, an online phenomenon that emerged during COVID-19 as a way for people to connect to the world through live interactive events facilitated by video calling, introduces new dynamics of (dis)connection as an emergent process rather than an established binary through the unexpected and ultimately uncontrollable nature of technological connectivity. Through an ethnographic examination of technological (dis)connective happenings that emerge within Airbnb Online Experiences, the study explores the ways in which these happenings are enfolded by a larger consideration of connectivity. Drawing on posthuman relational perspectives, the article proposes connectivity as an agential process, one which involves shifting entanglements of humans and nonhumans always transforming from within and unfolding in new ways
Sexual im/mobilities: On queer Muslim pilgrimage
No full textThe current conflations and opportunities created by globalization lead to an invisible phenomenon of mobility: pilgrimage performed by queer Muslims. Broadly understood as either impossible to be queer and Muslim or as a sin, queer Muslim pilgrimage is a global phenomenon of our times. However, it only gains sketchy attention in mainstream debates on Muslim identities. What is missing is a conceptual understanding of queer Muslim pilgrimage as a basic mode of sexualized mobilities. This article discusses regimes of power that enable, impede, or channel pilgrimage undertaken by queer Muslims in Malaysia. It is argued that “regimes of sexualized mobilities” function ambiguously in Malaysia in order to control and discriminate LGBTQIA+ and to simultaneously cherish them. This ambiguity is based on the entanglement between processes of politicizing Islam as well as on Islamic principles and the historical condition that transgender people have always belonged to Malay society
The US dollar against “the caste”: Argentina’s libertarian right wing and its promise of a new monetary regime
No full textThis article seeks to understand the part played by the US currency in the radical program of Javier Milei and his allies. On the one hand, it explores the ways in which the dollarization project gained presence in the electoral campaign of 2023, conferring identity and making the libertarian project attractive to an important part of society. On the other hand, it shows the continuity and rupture lines of this process with the previous history of the popularization of the US dollar in Argentina. Finally, it sheds light on how Milei’s dollarization becomes a prism for understanding the Argentine uniqueness regarding the radical right’s global growth
A Fanonian anthropology of the atmosphere of felt disasters and felt changes: Revisiting Fanon to explore the felt disasters of war, epidemics, and humanitarian interventions in the tenth Ebola epidemic in Eastern DRC
No full textThis essay proposes a reading of Frantz Fanon to examine resistance during the tenth Ebola epidemic in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (2018–2020). This reading centers on Fanon’s study of atmospheres, which is missing in current debates on atmosphere. Specifically, I suggest that Fanon was less concerned with the justification for violent resistance than with describing the atmosphere of violence that governed the Algerian War of Independence. Fanon seeks to convey the collective presentiment that the liberation struggle ends in a veritable human disaster. Following Fanon, this essay will explore the felt disasters of epidemics and war created by the public health response in the DRC. In addition, I will draw on Fanon to illuminate the felt changes of the Ebola response inspired by an atmosphere of creativity
Revolution, recuperation, and wild speculation: A recollection of the work of Jane Guyer and her courageously anthropological spirit
No full textFrom socialism to “Chinese characteristics”: Searching for a new China out of the old
No full textThis article explores analytic tools for the anthropology of China. It begins by reviewing what I call “the post-socialist framework” that anthropologists in the Anglophone world tend to deploy. I acknowledge the significance of this framework while also identifying discrepancies between its analytical affordances and ethnographic realities in contemporary China. Seeking alternative interpretations, I turn to the emerging “Chinese civilization” approach in mainland China, focusing specifically on tianxia thought. The second half of the article traces the genealogy of the entanglement between socialism and tianxia across the administrations of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jinping. I argue that anthropologies of post-reform China stand to benefit from engaging Chinese history and intellectual tradition. By juxtaposing these discourses, the article demonstrates why and how we should read China as both a post-socialist and a civilizational state
Pandemic, anti-feminism, and austerity: A brief genealogy of a counterrevolution
No full textIn this text, I seek to trace a brief genealogy to account for the electoral triumph of the far right in Argentina. I connect the effects generated by the pandemic, the austerity imposed by inflation, and the ways in which a massive feminist movement in the streets was responded to. I propose to analyze how the terrain of social reproduction, highly politicized by popular and feminist struggles over the last two decades, has been a key location for the development of the far right’s campaign, mobilizing meanings around authority as self-discipline and anti-feminism as a compensatory explanation for inequalities. In turn, I focus on different moments and functions of household debt as a way of understanding the subjective mutations that modulate financial devices at the level of the everyday economy and their exploitation by the far right