4,844 research outputs found
World. An anthropological examination (Part 1)
Get PDFAnthropologists often take recourse to the word “world” as if its meaning were selfevident,
but the word remains highly ambivalent, often extending its meaning in a
perilously polysemic fashion. So, the question of “what world are we engaging?” imposes
itself, particularly as it leads to another important question: are there “worlds”? This latter
question raises some of the fundamental perplexities that have haunted anthropological
theory throughout the past century. In this series of two articles, I propose to abandon the
established dichotomy between rather crude forms of realism and equally crude forms of
semiotic idealism. I sustain that we cannot discuss world without considering for whom,
but that this is fully compatible with single-world ontology if we take into account the role
of personhood in the human condition. This first article argues for a single-world ontology
and for the centrality of personhood. It explores the implications of a form of minimal
realism that best suits the ethnographic gesture, while the second article responds to the
question of world-forming, the matter of worldview
The materiality of indeterminacy . . . on paper, at least
No full textResponse to HAU Book Symposium on Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press
Human and proud of it! A structural treatment of headhunting rites and the social definition of enemies
No full textThis article is a reprint of McKinley, Robert. 1976. “Human and proud of it! A structural treatment of headhunting rites and the social definition of enemies.” In Studies in Borneo societies: Social process and anthropological explanation , edited by G. N. Appell, 92–126. DeKalb, IL: The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University. The appendix, containing reflections on a debate between J. van Baal and the author, was written for publication in HAU
Ethics and the “rough ground” of the everyday: The overlappings of life in postinvasion Iraq.
Get PDFBeyond the stories of collapse, devastation, and moral uncertainty in Iraq’s recent history there are tales of connections, relations, and the entanglements of lives which are named in forms such as friendship and family, and modes of comporting to others such as care, attention, and even love, which have yet to become part of how one thinks and writes about life after the invasion. In this article the authors draw attention to a picture of the lives of Iraqis as caught not merely in the forms and structures of tribal obligations and sectarianism, and the violence and destruction of terror, but also in the rough ground of mundane affairs and encounters. We argue that in the overlappings and relations of lives and intentionalities resides an intercorporeal ethics of the rough ground of the everyday. An ethics of the rough ground of the everyday is one understood not only in terms of the ways in which life is open to the pain, suffering, joy, and ennui of others, but in terms of how in the entanglements and relations of lives with other lives in the everyday, lines of care and concern emerge, are fostered, and also frayed
God is other(s): Anthropological pietism and the beings of metamorphosis
Get PDFRejoinder 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
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
Reincarnation redux
No full textJarillo et al.’s attempted refutation of Malinowski’s claims as to Trobrianders’ “universally” shared belief in baloma reincarnation fails. Contrary to their claims, Malinowski’s “Baloma” article (1916) documented wide, often contradictory variation in Islanders’ opinions which his revolutionary methodology was explicitly aimed at resolving. Jarillo et al.’s multidisciplinary research has not produced an explanatory model sufficient to supersede Malinowski’s solution—the formulation of the culture as a functionally integrated totality. Methodologically, they incorporate ethnographic preconceptions arising from Euro-American assumptions about indigenous personhood, agency, exchange, hierarchy, and the afterlife which are incapable of shedding new light on beliefs and practices current in Malinowski’s time. Their claims as to Malinowski’s own Western preconceptions do not change the documented fact that reincarnation beliefs predate his arrival. Finally, Jarillo et al.’s Trobriand collaborators and survey participants have been selected through non-random procedures at variance with the standards of quantitative social science
The social skin
No full textThis is a reprint of Terence S. Turner, 1980. “The Social Skin.” In Not work alone: A cross-cultural view of activities superfluous to survival, edited by Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, 112–140. London: Temple Smith
“Mafiacraft” and mafia activity: A dynamic and changing interaction
No full textDeborah Puccio-Den has conducted ethnographic research in Palermo since the mid-1990s, focusing on efforts to criminalize the mafia, both on the part of the criminal justice system, and also by ordinary citizens, among them photographers, artists, writers, social scientists, journalists, and antimafia activists. She proposes the word “mafiacraft” to conceptualize this process, evoking anthropological analyses of efforts to criminalize witches. The analogy dramatizes how much violence has occurred in modern Sicily without either prosecutors or morally sensitive Sicilians being able to identify, much less agree upon, those responsible. Puccio-Den acknowledges that “historical and political conditions” influence turning points in the ability of both sets of actors to concretize responsibility (“responsibilize,” as she puts it). Because the author does not touch on these conditions, I have taken the liberty to elaborate on two that I consider crucial: Sicily’s postwar struggle for agrarian reform, and the island’s becoming a hub for heroin trafficking to the United States in the “long 1980s.
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