The recent anthropological focus on “ordinary ethics” emerges out of a concern to attend to the ethical aspect of social action that is intrinsic to the human condition. Ethnographic and theoretical contributions to this literature have drawn on a variety of philosophical approaches to the study of the “everyday” and the forms that ethical practice takes therein. However, a world affected by the COVID-19 pandemic is far from the “everyday” that is the domain of ordinary ethics and calls for a reconceptualization of the ethical, which could provide coordinates of meaningful interaction in the unfamiliar social. In this “uncanny” world, I seek to explore the layered meanings of care and its implications for an ethics of the uncanny. While the uncanny is an epistemological condition of modernity itself, the alteration brought about by the pandemic makes it ontologically uncanny too. Locked in a cyclical relationship, the uncanny and the everyday inexorably follow the other, making it imperative to conceptualize an ethics that can accommodate the singularities of both.
{"title":"Uncanny ethics","authors":"Sumbul Farah","doi":"10.1086/725343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725343","url":null,"abstract":"The recent anthropological focus on “ordinary ethics” emerges out of a concern to attend to the ethical aspect of social action that is intrinsic to the human condition. Ethnographic and theoretical contributions to this literature have drawn on a variety of philosophical approaches to the study of the “everyday” and the forms that ethical practice takes therein. However, a world affected by the COVID-19 pandemic is far from the “everyday” that is the domain of ordinary ethics and calls for a reconceptualization of the ethical, which could provide coordinates of meaningful interaction in the unfamiliar social. In this “uncanny” world, I seek to explore the layered meanings of care and its implications for an ethics of the uncanny. While the uncanny is an epistemological condition of modernity itself, the alteration brought about by the pandemic makes it ontologically uncanny too. Locked in a cyclical relationship, the uncanny and the everyday inexorably follow the other, making it imperative to conceptualize an ethics that can accommodate the singularities of both.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80489942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael Herzfeld takes two non-earthshaking examples—one from Thailand (Bangkok) and one from Greece (Crete) to illuminate an issue that is of earthshaking importance: namely the historical narrative crafted and broadcast by the nation-state. Every nationstate at least attempts to legitimate itself to its subjects/ citizens and to outsiders by, as Herzfeld asserts, “produc[ing] official narratives emphasizing cultural, social, economic, and political harmony and unity.” “They deploy an array of carefully selected, emblematic cultural products, collectively dubbed heritage, as legitimating evidence of the nation’s deep past and as a mark of the state’s benign tutelage” (p. 1, emphasis in original). He is quick to point out that this narrative typically obscures unresolved debates and even violent political, ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences that cleave the actual body politic. In view of this, it might be more appropriate in most cases to treat the “national narrative” as an aspirational claim that, for the moment, is asserted by the reigning national power-holders. The prevailing narrative may or may not have a largely agreed-upon core, but it is certain to have elements that are still the subject of hot, sometimes violent, dispute. And, over time, the narrative will change in keeping with historical contingencies and the preferences of those currently in power. The change may be radical. Think, for example, of the French national narrative before and after the revolution of 1789, or the Russian national narrative before and after 1917! Some historical narratives
{"title":"The perils of national narratives","authors":"James C. Scott","doi":"10.1086/725102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725102","url":null,"abstract":"Michael Herzfeld takes two non-earthshaking examples—one from Thailand (Bangkok) and one from Greece (Crete) to illuminate an issue that is of earthshaking importance: namely the historical narrative crafted and broadcast by the nation-state. Every nationstate at least attempts to legitimate itself to its subjects/ citizens and to outsiders by, as Herzfeld asserts, “produc[ing] official narratives emphasizing cultural, social, economic, and political harmony and unity.” “They deploy an array of carefully selected, emblematic cultural products, collectively dubbed heritage, as legitimating evidence of the nation’s deep past and as a mark of the state’s benign tutelage” (p. 1, emphasis in original). He is quick to point out that this narrative typically obscures unresolved debates and even violent political, ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences that cleave the actual body politic. In view of this, it might be more appropriate in most cases to treat the “national narrative” as an aspirational claim that, for the moment, is asserted by the reigning national power-holders. The prevailing narrative may or may not have a largely agreed-upon core, but it is certain to have elements that are still the subject of hot, sometimes violent, dispute. And, over time, the narrative will change in keeping with historical contingencies and the preferences of those currently in power. The change may be radical. Think, for example, of the French national narrative before and after the revolution of 1789, or the Russian national narrative before and after 1917! Some historical narratives","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80164897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In his essay on the cockfight, Clifford Geertz charted a now familiar course in anthropological argument. He showed how the minute details of a practice can dramatize cultural ideas about it. Many anthropologists since have been persuaded that “practice” matters, that carefully examining the conduct of events is bound to reveal something about the status of such events in cultural life. This article reflects on the role of video footage in this equation, arguing that footage is useful for, among other things, tempering assumptions that all practice is thick with reflexive meaning relevant to its overarching type. Through an extended example drawn from my research on gambling in Laos, I suggest that, when squinted at in the right way while writing and thinking, video footage can be a heuristic for countering the urge to reduce practice into a cultural gestalt, in which all interactional details carry the same meaningful architecture.
{"title":"Video footage and the grain of practice","authors":"Charles H. P. Zuckerman","doi":"10.1086/725027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725027","url":null,"abstract":"In his essay on the cockfight, Clifford Geertz charted a now familiar course in anthropological argument. He showed how the minute details of a practice can dramatize cultural ideas about it. Many anthropologists since have been persuaded that “practice” matters, that carefully examining the conduct of events is bound to reveal something about the status of such events in cultural life. This article reflects on the role of video footage in this equation, arguing that footage is useful for, among other things, tempering assumptions that all practice is thick with reflexive meaning relevant to its overarching type. Through an extended example drawn from my research on gambling in Laos, I suggest that, when squinted at in the right way while writing and thinking, video footage can be a heuristic for countering the urge to reduce practice into a cultural gestalt, in which all interactional details carry the same meaningful architecture.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90889594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, I describe a “magical” dimension in the work of home organizers (HOs) in Belgium. HOs, I argue, as professional organizers, not only help their clients to deal with the disorder and clutter of their homes but deliver a promise of magic: that “care” for the home interior produces “care” for the mind, the body, and even the earth. To do this, they rely on the one hand on knowledge based on an epistemology of analogy; on the other hand, they use specific technical know-hows, allowing them to participate in world transformation. In the course of their interventions, an order of things—both ideological and pragmatic—takes shape. From this double ordering stems a marvelous feeling. Indeed, the analogical principle (body-home-earth) that animates the process of home organizing and the incorporation of collective representations allows the act of tidying to be magical.
{"title":"Home as a second skin","authors":"Edgar Tasia","doi":"10.1086/724921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724921","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I describe a “magical” dimension in the work of home organizers (HOs) in Belgium. HOs, I argue, as professional organizers, not only help their clients to deal with the disorder and clutter of their homes but deliver a promise of magic: that “care” for the home interior produces “care” for the mind, the body, and even the earth. To do this, they rely on the one hand on knowledge based on an epistemology of analogy; on the other hand, they use specific technical know-hows, allowing them to participate in world transformation. In the course of their interventions, an order of things—both ideological and pragmatic—takes shape. From this double ordering stems a marvelous feeling. Indeed, the analogical principle (body-home-earth) that animates the process of home organizing and the incorporation of collective representations allows the act of tidying to be magical.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76547863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Economy and emulation are freighted concepts. They draw attention to universal phenomena, the forms of which vary according to social organization, and in particular the dynamics of (in)equality. Socialist modernization, which is explored here in the context of successive transformations of rural economy in southern Hungary, was characterized by distinctive forms of enchantment and ritualized collective action. These have been lost in the course of postsocialist privatization and marketization. Convergence with capitalist forms of emulation and increasing inequalities are shown to have deleterious ecological as well as social consequences. Theoretical inspiration is drawn from Thorstein Veblen and Stephen Gudeman; these scholars have much in common, including close ties to Minnesota and deep suspicion of mainstream economics.
{"title":"Economy, emulation, and equality: Sociogenesis in the postsocialist capitalocene","authors":"C. Hann","doi":"10.1086/724887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724887","url":null,"abstract":"Economy and emulation are freighted concepts. They draw attention to universal phenomena, the forms of which vary according to social organization, and in particular the dynamics of (in)equality. Socialist modernization, which is explored here in the context of successive transformations of rural economy in southern Hungary, was characterized by distinctive forms of enchantment and ritualized collective action. These have been lost in the course of postsocialist privatization and marketization. Convergence with capitalist forms of emulation and increasing inequalities are shown to have deleterious ecological as well as social consequences. Theoretical inspiration is drawn from Thorstein Veblen and Stephen Gudeman; these scholars have much in common, including close ties to Minnesota and deep suspicion of mainstream economics.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73946054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R. Kaur, L. Lombard, L. Costa, Andrew B. Kipnis, A. Masquelier
On a gloomy dark stage, Yerma sits on the floor mourning her fate as onlookers move, stare, and gossip. In Gabriel Federico Garcia Lorca’s brutal drama, the pressure of social judgment on a childless marriage leads Yerma to commit an awful act. On the cover of this issue is the British Bangladeshi dancer and choreographer, Amina Khayyam, who in 2014 transposed this nineteenthcentury story set in patriarchal Spain to the inner city of contemporary Britain, with an innovative adaptation of north Indian neoclassical dance, Kathak. In the process, the Amina KhayyamDanceCompanymadeGarcia Lorca’s rural narrative relevant to many women in marginalized communities in urban settings today. On her style of rendition, Khayyam reflects on how dancing is “always intrinsically to tell a story” where Kathak literally means “the person who tells a story.” The use of a white mask helps in lifting the visual performance away from the superficiality of the look of the dancer to the bare force of the story in motion. Khayyam explains: “I use Abhinaya—the gestural facial expressions—as the central movement within it, but I subvert it by negating it—so thatmy Yermawears a face of death—there is no prettiness, no jewels, no shine.” Abhinaya draws inspiration from both Asian and European traditions, as is also apparent in another work, Stage of Blood, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, inwhichKhayyamperformedwith LokendraArambam, a theater director fromManipur in India. Staged on
在一个阴暗的舞台上，Yerma坐在地板上哀悼她的命运，旁观者移动，凝视和八卦。在加布里埃尔·费德里科·加西亚·洛尔卡这部残酷的戏剧中，社会对无子女婚姻的评判压力导致耶尔玛做出了可怕的行为。这期杂志的封面人物是孟加拉裔英国舞蹈家兼编舞阿米娜·卡亚姆(Amina Khayyam)。2014年，她将这个19世纪发生在父权制西班牙的故事搬到了当代英国的内城，创新地改编了印度北部新古典主义舞蹈——卡萨克舞。在这个过程中，阿米娜·卡亚姆舞蹈公司使加西亚·洛尔卡的乡村叙事与今天城市环境中边缘化社区的许多妇女息息相关。在她的表演风格上，卡亚姆认为舞蹈“本质上总是讲述一个故事”，而卡塔克的字面意思是“讲故事的人”。白色面具的使用有助于将视觉表演从舞者外表的肤浅提升到动态故事的赤裸力量。卡亚姆解释说:“我使用阿比纳亚——面部表情的手势——作为它的中心运动，但我通过否定它来颠覆它，所以我的耶尔玛戴着一张死亡的脸——没有美丽，没有珠宝，没有光彩。”阿比纳亚从亚洲和欧洲的传统中汲取灵感，这在另一部作品《血的舞台》(Stage of Blood)中也很明显，这部改编自莎士比亚的《麦克白》(Macbeth)的作品中，他与来自印度曼尼普尔邦的戏剧导演洛肯德拉·阿拉姆巴姆(LokendraArambam)合作演出。在举行
{"title":"Magic, metaphysics, and methods","authors":"R. Kaur, L. Lombard, L. Costa, Andrew B. Kipnis, A. Masquelier","doi":"10.1086/725382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725382","url":null,"abstract":"On a gloomy dark stage, Yerma sits on the floor mourning her fate as onlookers move, stare, and gossip. In Gabriel Federico Garcia Lorca’s brutal drama, the pressure of social judgment on a childless marriage leads Yerma to commit an awful act. On the cover of this issue is the British Bangladeshi dancer and choreographer, Amina Khayyam, who in 2014 transposed this nineteenthcentury story set in patriarchal Spain to the inner city of contemporary Britain, with an innovative adaptation of north Indian neoclassical dance, Kathak. In the process, the Amina KhayyamDanceCompanymadeGarcia Lorca’s rural narrative relevant to many women in marginalized communities in urban settings today. On her style of rendition, Khayyam reflects on how dancing is “always intrinsically to tell a story” where Kathak literally means “the person who tells a story.” The use of a white mask helps in lifting the visual performance away from the superficiality of the look of the dancer to the bare force of the story in motion. Khayyam explains: “I use Abhinaya—the gestural facial expressions—as the central movement within it, but I subvert it by negating it—so thatmy Yermawears a face of death—there is no prettiness, no jewels, no shine.” Abhinaya draws inspiration from both Asian and European traditions, as is also apparent in another work, Stage of Blood, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, inwhichKhayyamperformedwith LokendraArambam, a theater director fromManipur in India. Staged on","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89835215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dissonances between human expectations and actual experiences of sacred presence and actions—as materialized in unexplained deaths, diseases, deadly possessions, and repudiated rituals—are sites where insubstantial sacralities are not only made real but also agentic. Refusing human attempts to relate to it through choreographed rituals and voluntary offerings, this sacred asserts its own agenda. To make inscrutable sacralities ethnographically accessible, I propose the twin pivots of (1) insatiability and (2) excess—attributes of presence, appetite, and attitude—which embody a repudiation of anthropocentric signification. Decentering human intentions and actions allows for the excavation of an uncanniness intrinsic to the sacred. This forces a confrontation with the limits of anthropological epistemologies, language, and authority. Privileging instances when the sacred eludes epistemological capture to assert its own irrepressible and enigmatic vitality, this article strives to—not explain away radical ontological differences but—make room for an uncanny metaphysics amid ethnographic theorizing.
{"title":"The sacred unbound","authors":"Indira Arumugam","doi":"10.1086/725206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725206","url":null,"abstract":"Dissonances between human expectations and actual experiences of sacred presence and actions—as materialized in unexplained deaths, diseases, deadly possessions, and repudiated rituals—are sites where insubstantial sacralities are not only made real but also agentic. Refusing human attempts to relate to it through choreographed rituals and voluntary offerings, this sacred asserts its own agenda. To make inscrutable sacralities ethnographically accessible, I propose the twin pivots of (1) insatiability and (2) excess—attributes of presence, appetite, and attitude—which embody a repudiation of anthropocentric signification. Decentering human intentions and actions allows for the excavation of an uncanniness intrinsic to the sacred. This forces a confrontation with the limits of anthropological epistemologies, language, and authority. Privileging instances when the sacred eludes epistemological capture to assert its own irrepressible and enigmatic vitality, this article strives to—not explain away radical ontological differences but—make room for an uncanny metaphysics amid ethnographic theorizing.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89795556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On resistance and pluriversal voices of subversive archaism","authors":"P. Laungaramsri","doi":"10.1086/724923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724923","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77780554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Using theoretical debates about how to deploy reflexivity in ethnographic research to contextualize anthropological knowledge, this article begins with an awkward encounter between an anthropologist from the Global South and a research participant to reflect on some of the intersectional complexities of identity and relationality when an ethnographer of color does fieldwork within a community of color: in this case, a brown-skinned Mexican researching same-sex attracted Chinese men in Australia. Following Indigenous anthropologists’ calls for more locally grounded frameworks and methodologies, we propose the Diidxazá term binni ruyubi (“person who searches”) to extend concepts of reflexivity beyond the Western/native, insider/outsider, and other binaries and median points, to give a more complex account of intersectional reflexivity, one that attends to the interaction between identity and background characteristics including skin tone, Indigeneity, sociocultural background, language, sexuality, economic status, and colonial histories in Westernized universities.
{"title":"Ti binni ruyubi, beyond binaries and median points","authors":"Rodrigo Perez Toledo, L. Wynn","doi":"10.1086/725384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725384","url":null,"abstract":"Using theoretical debates about how to deploy reflexivity in ethnographic research to contextualize anthropological knowledge, this article begins with an awkward encounter between an anthropologist from the Global South and a research participant to reflect on some of the intersectional complexities of identity and relationality when an ethnographer of color does fieldwork within a community of color: in this case, a brown-skinned Mexican researching same-sex attracted Chinese men in Australia. Following Indigenous anthropologists’ calls for more locally grounded frameworks and methodologies, we propose the Diidxazá term binni ruyubi (“person who searches”) to extend concepts of reflexivity beyond the Western/native, insider/outsider, and other binaries and median points, to give a more complex account of intersectional reflexivity, one that attends to the interaction between identity and background characteristics including skin tone, Indigeneity, sociocultural background, language, sexuality, economic status, and colonial histories in Westernized universities.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82941090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
To begin, we want to offer our warmest thanks to Katherine Pratt Ewing,Marilyn Strathern, GordonMatthews, and Carlos Fausto for their generous and insightful comments onThe new science of the enchanted universe. Such affectionate appraisals and congenial criticisms do signal service to the anthropological legacy of Marshall Sahlins, which we too will attempt to honor in response. As assistants and editors in the production of his final book, we aim to stay close to its spirit and argument, although of course he is gone and we can only do our best to speak for him. Long before Marshall Sahlins passed, he vowed to leave his body to science. In the event, he taught his last “in-person” class to students at the University of Chicagomedical school. The anecdote holds two key dimensions of his life: his own pursuit of “science,” including the “science of anthropology,”which was a lifelong commitment; and his quest for immortality, which he pursued with great urgency in the work of his last decade. True, he had always sought immortality. In a not entirely comforting response sixty years ago to his young daughter when she discovered the concept of death, he told her that “If you write a book, you will live forever.” Just so, in The new science of the enchanted universe he turns his full attention to human finitude and the spirit world, to metempsychosis and the cycle of life and death. His explorations of these concepts may indeed have helped him
{"title":"At the track","authors":"F. Henry, Peter Sahlins","doi":"10.1086/724017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724017","url":null,"abstract":"To begin, we want to offer our warmest thanks to Katherine Pratt Ewing,Marilyn Strathern, GordonMatthews, and Carlos Fausto for their generous and insightful comments onThe new science of the enchanted universe. Such affectionate appraisals and congenial criticisms do signal service to the anthropological legacy of Marshall Sahlins, which we too will attempt to honor in response. As assistants and editors in the production of his final book, we aim to stay close to its spirit and argument, although of course he is gone and we can only do our best to speak for him. Long before Marshall Sahlins passed, he vowed to leave his body to science. In the event, he taught his last “in-person” class to students at the University of Chicagomedical school. The anecdote holds two key dimensions of his life: his own pursuit of “science,” including the “science of anthropology,”which was a lifelong commitment; and his quest for immortality, which he pursued with great urgency in the work of his last decade. True, he had always sought immortality. In a not entirely comforting response sixty years ago to his young daughter when she discovered the concept of death, he told her that “If you write a book, you will live forever.” Just so, in The new science of the enchanted universe he turns his full attention to human finitude and the spirit world, to metempsychosis and the cycle of life and death. His explorations of these concepts may indeed have helped him","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84170652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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