There is an intangible feeling of time passing that film captures, both when filming and in the edit. In documentary, with real people’s lives, we capture moments, feelings, sounds. A random thing that someone did or said. You catch their love of language, their poetry, the beauty or tension of a moment of life. As a filmmaker you hold onto these precious moments, you rewatch them, listen to them multiple times, and handle them with a lot of care and attention. After all, it is these fragile moments that make up your film. In Unwritten Letters, directed by Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman Dukmak, Abd, the main protagonist, tells Max “I want to see ‘my film’ in this film.” Abd is a twenty-four-year-old Syrian, who took part in the early days of the 2011 revolution and now lives in Padua, Italy. Together with his friend Max they make a film. As they are exploring how to turnAbd’s reality in Italy into a film, Abd is revisiting his past and diving into possible futures. Unwritten Letters documents the story of a young Syrian man arriving in Europe and his process in making sense of who he is through film and friendship. This is a film of fragments, of time moving slowly. It also incorporates the process of editing within the film, revealing the tensions of making sense of the fragments of footage. Max had met Abd in Beirut and as their friendship grew so did the idea of working on a film. For Abd the process of working on this film was an opportunity to come to terms with some of his recent experiences of leaving Syria, of losing dear friends, of moving to Italy to start a new life. He shared with Max letters he
{"title":"Time, grief, and hope on film","authors":"Yasmin Fedda","doi":"10.1086/723736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723736","url":null,"abstract":"There is an intangible feeling of time passing that film captures, both when filming and in the edit. In documentary, with real people’s lives, we capture moments, feelings, sounds. A random thing that someone did or said. You catch their love of language, their poetry, the beauty or tension of a moment of life. As a filmmaker you hold onto these precious moments, you rewatch them, listen to them multiple times, and handle them with a lot of care and attention. After all, it is these fragile moments that make up your film. In Unwritten Letters, directed by Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman Dukmak, Abd, the main protagonist, tells Max “I want to see ‘my film’ in this film.” Abd is a twenty-four-year-old Syrian, who took part in the early days of the 2011 revolution and now lives in Padua, Italy. Together with his friend Max they make a film. As they are exploring how to turnAbd’s reality in Italy into a film, Abd is revisiting his past and diving into possible futures. Unwritten Letters documents the story of a young Syrian man arriving in Europe and his process in making sense of who he is through film and friendship. This is a film of fragments, of time moving slowly. It also incorporates the process of editing within the film, revealing the tensions of making sense of the fragments of footage. Max had met Abd in Beirut and as their friendship grew so did the idea of working on a film. For Abd the process of working on this film was an opportunity to come to terms with some of his recent experiences of leaving Syria, of losing dear friends, of moving to Italy to start a new life. He shared with Max letters he","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":"83686276","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}
When is film taken as evidence of the past and of truths in the world and when does the content become less significant than the practice of making images itself? The meaning of moving images change as the material and cultural logics and technologies of image production and circulation evolve. In legal and journalistic public discourse, recorded images are meant to be empirical evidence that can hold people accountable for their actions. Video camcorders and then mobile phone cameras democratized recording equipment which in many cases revealed abuses of power. But mobile technologies for recording and circulating film—as well as shifting genres for interpreting them—have also reshaped how audiences understand the veracity of what they see and hear. In shifting attention from content to context, cellphone filming becomes about circulation itself. Rather than a means for gathering evidence (epistemic) it is a sign of presence (ontologic). This has implications for legal cases of sex-gender and racial violence when visual evidence, rather than leading to successful prosecutions, creates defensive outrage amongst the powerful.
{"title":"Filming as being, images as evidence","authors":"J. Shipley","doi":"10.1086/724090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724090","url":null,"abstract":"When is film taken as evidence of the past and of truths in the world and when does the content become less significant than the practice of making images itself? The meaning of moving images change as the material and cultural logics and technologies of image production and circulation evolve. In legal and journalistic public discourse, recorded images are meant to be empirical evidence that can hold people accountable for their actions. Video camcorders and then mobile phone cameras democratized recording equipment which in many cases revealed abuses of power. But mobile technologies for recording and circulating film—as well as shifting genres for interpreting them—have also reshaped how audiences understand the veracity of what they see and hear. In shifting attention from content to context, cellphone filming becomes about circulation itself. Rather than a means for gathering evidence (epistemic) it is a sign of presence (ontologic). This has implications for legal cases of sex-gender and racial violence when visual evidence, rather than leading to successful prosecutions, creates defensive outrage amongst the powerful.","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":"83495044","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}
Marshall Sahlins depicts the cosmos of immanence before the Axial Age and its monotheistic religions, which transformed divinity from being immanent in all human activity to transcendent and removed. This does not mean that no one lives in an immanent cosmos in our world: “There are still faith healers and witches in our midst—even some . . . pure animists” (p. 5). However, it does mean that prevailing cultural assumptions about reality have fundamentally shifted.We no longer live in a world of spirits and metahumans that inhabit and shape all aspects of human life; the world in our age has been left “alone to humans, now free to create their own institutions by their own means and lights” (p. 2), often through Christianity and its effects on the colonized the world over, as well as Islam. This book explores the ontology of the immanent world in a range of societies around the world; Sahlins seems to have read virtually every ethnography of tribal peoples ever written, as well as an array of historical works on ancient societies. “In an enchanted universe,
{"title":"Marshall Sahlins, where are you? From the intellectual to the existential","authors":"G. Mathews","doi":"10.1086/722387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722387","url":null,"abstract":"Marshall Sahlins depicts the cosmos of immanence before the Axial Age and its monotheistic religions, which transformed divinity from being immanent in all human activity to transcendent and removed. This does not mean that no one lives in an immanent cosmos in our world: “There are still faith healers and witches in our midst—even some . . . pure animists” (p. 5). However, it does mean that prevailing cultural assumptions about reality have fundamentally shifted.We no longer live in a world of spirits and metahumans that inhabit and shape all aspects of human life; the world in our age has been left “alone to humans, now free to create their own institutions by their own means and lights” (p. 2), often through Christianity and its effects on the colonized the world over, as well as Islam. This book explores the ontology of the immanent world in a range of societies around the world; Sahlins seems to have read virtually every ethnography of tribal peoples ever written, as well as an array of historical works on ancient societies. “In an enchanted universe,","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":"80473168","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}
This article takes up the question of “Russia’s influence in the world” by focusing on the impact of Russian state policy and military action on ethnographers working in Ukraine. Bringing foundational theories about psychological trauma into conversation with contemporary principles of ethnographic method, I recount, in epistolary form, my own experiences as an ethnographer of Ukraine during a period defined by Russian political and military aggression. I describe the specific challenges I have faced in producing ethnographic work out of these experiences and theorize how certain aspects of psychological trauma—at least as I have experienced them—inhibit the core emotional and narrative capacities that enable such work in the first place. I argue that intimate and insightful ethnography that illuminates the human element of pivotal historical happenings may be counted among the many losses that traumatizing events, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine, produce.
{"title":"Losing the plot","authors":"J. Carroll","doi":"10.1086/723680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723680","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes up the question of “Russia’s influence in the world” by focusing on the impact of Russian state policy and military action on ethnographers working in Ukraine. Bringing foundational theories about psychological trauma into conversation with contemporary principles of ethnographic method, I recount, in epistolary form, my own experiences as an ethnographer of Ukraine during a period defined by Russian political and military aggression. I describe the specific challenges I have faced in producing ethnographic work out of these experiences and theorize how certain aspects of psychological trauma—at least as I have experienced them—inhibit the core emotional and narrative capacities that enable such work in the first place. I argue that intimate and insightful ethnography that illuminates the human element of pivotal historical happenings may be counted among the many losses that traumatizing events, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine, produce.","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":"90556525","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}
This article examines the work survivors of sexual violence and abuse do to assert their credibility and the labor, in turn, that feminist journalists and activists do to help make victims and survivors believable. Drawing on a video clip made by the survivor that appears in Big Mouth and examples of survivor-based media witnessing in Canada, I analyze how survivors, anti-violence advocates, and feminist reporters build networks of media witnessing to address sexual abuse and assault, and provide the support and validation that survivors need. I approach their witnessing labor as affective and transmissible forms of movement work that carves out crucial spaces of informal justice for victims and survivors of gender violence and mobilizes forms of militant evidence that connect survivors to other survivors and social change intermediaries.
{"title":"Media witnessing and the feminist labors of making survivors believable","authors":"Carrie A Rentschler","doi":"10.1086/723225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723225","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the work survivors of sexual violence and abuse do to assert their credibility and the labor, in turn, that feminist journalists and activists do to help make victims and survivors believable. Drawing on a video clip made by the survivor that appears in Big Mouth and examples of survivor-based media witnessing in Canada, I analyze how survivors, anti-violence advocates, and feminist reporters build networks of media witnessing to address sexual abuse and assault, and provide the support and validation that survivors need. I approach their witnessing labor as affective and transmissible forms of movement work that carves out crucial spaces of informal justice for victims and survivors of gender violence and mobilizes forms of militant evidence that connect survivors to other survivors and social change intermediaries.","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":"76622129","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}
This article explores the emergence and transformation of the concept of good governance in contemporary Thailand after the 1997 economic crisis to reveal how it morphed from a technocratic category to a moral one, central to conservative and anti-democratic discourses in the country. By reconstructing historical and contemporary debates over word coinage and translation in Thailand, this article questions the easy distinctions between “metropolitan” and “vernacular” concepts. In so doing, I propose to carve a new space for an ethnographically grounded political anthropology that neither assumes a flattened and universal conception of political categories—such as state, power, or government—nor seeks refuge into pristine “vernacular concepts” but rather explores the processes through which specific people, organizations, and institutions are constantly reworking and diffusing concepts on multiple scales while aligning, challenging, or creating “global hierarchies of value,” in the plural, along which those concepts are positioned.
{"title":"Beyond vernacular and metropolitan concepts","authors":"C. Sopranzetti","doi":"10.1086/722611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722611","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the emergence and transformation of the concept of good governance in contemporary Thailand after the 1997 economic crisis to reveal how it morphed from a technocratic category to a moral one, central to conservative and anti-democratic discourses in the country. By reconstructing historical and contemporary debates over word coinage and translation in Thailand, this article questions the easy distinctions between “metropolitan” and “vernacular” concepts. In so doing, I propose to carve a new space for an ethnographically grounded political anthropology that neither assumes a flattened and universal conception of political categories—such as state, power, or government—nor seeks refuge into pristine “vernacular concepts” but rather explores the processes through which specific people, organizations, and institutions are constantly reworking and diffusing concepts on multiple scales while aligning, challenging, or creating “global hierarchies of value,” in the plural, along which those concepts are positioned.","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":"75122694","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":"Reflections on Unwritten Letters and the neorealism of contingency","authors":"E. Carpi","doi":"10.1086/723868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723868","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"90140983","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}
This article takes up the loaded topic of “Russia in the world of Ukraine.” Now an object of official Russia’s aggressive attention, contemporary Ukraine presents a pressing case for reconsidering colonialism which, I propose, requires reconceptualizing sovereignty. I compare descriptions of sovereignty resting on two different genealogies, “limited sovereignty” as described by Russian expert Igor Gretskiy and “creative sovereignty” from Ukrainian scholar Oleksandr Merezhko, and bring them into conversation with Ukrainian Semyon Gluzman’s argument that thinking about colonialism in Ukraine implicates temporality, reflexivity, and subjectivity. Beyond “center” and “periphery,” beyond mapping control, suffering, production, and exploitation onto topographies of sovereign power and rural subjectivity, can we imagine sovereignty beyond territoriality? Can we decolonize the present from the past? The essay concludes with a suggestion to expand consideration of colonialism from a spatial to a temporal frame, the lexicon of colonialism beyond spatial deictics, and the project of decolonization to ourselves.
{"title":"From “limited sovereignty” to decolonization in Ukraine","authors":"M. Eppinger","doi":"10.1086/724016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724016","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes up the loaded topic of “Russia in the world of Ukraine.” Now an object of official Russia’s aggressive attention, contemporary Ukraine presents a pressing case for reconsidering colonialism which, I propose, requires reconceptualizing sovereignty. I compare descriptions of sovereignty resting on two different genealogies, “limited sovereignty” as described by Russian expert Igor Gretskiy and “creative sovereignty” from Ukrainian scholar Oleksandr Merezhko, and bring them into conversation with Ukrainian Semyon Gluzman’s argument that thinking about colonialism in Ukraine implicates temporality, reflexivity, and subjectivity. Beyond “center” and “periphery,” beyond mapping control, suffering, production, and exploitation onto topographies of sovereign power and rural subjectivity, can we imagine sovereignty beyond territoriality? Can we decolonize the present from the past? The essay concludes with a suggestion to expand consideration of colonialism from a spatial to a temporal frame, the lexicon of colonialism beyond spatial deictics, and the project of decolonization to ourselves.","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":"85294369","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}
Political subjectivities that are produced outside the realm of formal politics and activism often go unnoticed in scholarly analyses. This essay explores forms of embodied feminist testimony in the Republic of Guinea that emerge from a community of dancers who do not participate directly in political deliberations. Through attention to non-elite logics and practices in Guinea, the essay proposes that robust feminist advocacy and theory must consider the legitimacy of diverse semiotic ideologies that undergird the production of evidence.
{"title":"Multimodal feminist testimony","authors":"Adrienne J. Cohen","doi":"10.1086/723681","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723681","url":null,"abstract":"Political subjectivities that are produced outside the realm of formal politics and activism often go unnoticed in scholarly analyses. This essay explores forms of embodied feminist testimony in the Republic of Guinea that emerge from a community of dancers who do not participate directly in political deliberations. Through attention to non-elite logics and practices in Guinea, the essay proposes that robust feminist advocacy and theory must consider the legitimacy of diverse semiotic ideologies that undergird the production of evidence.","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":"87135466","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}
This essay articulates a framework for understanding radical alterity in the aftermath of the abandonment of strong claims about ontological pluralism in recent works by key figures in anthropology’s Ontological Turn. Arguing that both ontological anthropologists and their critics have overemphasized the ideational at the expense of material practice, it builds on the insights of STS-influenced work on ontology to develop a materialist case for the continued relevance of radical alterity to the anthropological endeavor. In so doing it advocates replacing a crypto-Protestant emphasis on “strange beliefs” with an attention to the materio-cultural precipitates of successful practical action in the world. In service of this goal, it elaborates a notion of “ontic capaciousness” that attends centrally to practice in a single, yet multiple, world in which multiple modes of successful practical engagement with the unknowable really Real result in the working up of disparate relatively durable and incommensurable actionable reals.
{"title":"Not “multiple ontologies” but ontic capaciousness","authors":"Chris Vasantkumar","doi":"10.1086/721993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721993","url":null,"abstract":"This essay articulates a framework for understanding radical alterity in the aftermath of the abandonment of strong claims about ontological pluralism in recent works by key figures in anthropology’s Ontological Turn. Arguing that both ontological anthropologists and their critics have overemphasized the ideational at the expense of material practice, it builds on the insights of STS-influenced work on ontology to develop a materialist case for the continued relevance of radical alterity to the anthropological endeavor. In so doing it advocates replacing a crypto-Protestant emphasis on “strange beliefs” with an attention to the materio-cultural precipitates of successful practical action in the world. In service of this goal, it elaborates a notion of “ontic capaciousness” that attends centrally to practice in a single, yet multiple, world in which multiple modes of successful practical engagement with the unknowable really Real result in the working up of disparate relatively durable and incommensurable actionable reals.","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":"79226040","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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