I first received The new science of the enchanted universe as a digital archive, without texture or smell. When I was halfway through it, I received a freshly published hard copy. I started again, from the beginning. As I read it, I was transported to past encounters, both with Marshall the person and with Sahlins the author. A feeling of his presence took hold of me, and I dove headfirst into a silent conversation with his unique style, his ironies, biting reproaches, erudition, but also his critical love for anthropology—critical not only because of his polemical verve, but as his fundamental passion. Of all anthropologists I have met, Marshall was the most in love with anthropology—hence his bid to refound the discipline, over and over again. In my daily walks, I sought to find a suitably decent way of writing these comments with the metaperson of Marshall Sahlins as my interlocutor. I kept trying to imagine how he would take my comments. Would he act like a benevolent or a mean-spirited ancestor? As a ghost or a guardian spirit? As an author (Sahlins) or an old acquaintance (Marshall)? Unable to solve the dilemma, I decided to start my comments on the book with two anecdotes which I think Marshall would find amusing.
{"title":"Untamed Amazonia","authors":"C. Fausto","doi":"10.1086/722592","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722592","url":null,"abstract":"I first received The new science of the enchanted universe as a digital archive, without texture or smell. When I was halfway through it, I received a freshly published hard copy. I started again, from the beginning. As I read it, I was transported to past encounters, both with Marshall the person and with Sahlins the author. A feeling of his presence took hold of me, and I dove headfirst into a silent conversation with his unique style, his ironies, biting reproaches, erudition, but also his critical love for anthropology—critical not only because of his polemical verve, but as his fundamental passion. Of all anthropologists I have met, Marshall was the most in love with anthropology—hence his bid to refound the discipline, over and over again. In my daily walks, I sought to find a suitably decent way of writing these comments with the metaperson of Marshall Sahlins as my interlocutor. I kept trying to imagine how he would take my comments. Would he act like a benevolent or a mean-spirited ancestor? As a ghost or a guardian spirit? As an author (Sahlins) or an old acquaintance (Marshall)? Unable to solve the dilemma, I decided to start my comments on the book with two anecdotes which I think Marshall would find amusing.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"2 1","pages":"947 - 950"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90414494","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}
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is occupying the minds of pundits, scholars, and politicians worldwide and across the political spectrum. In the midst of these discussions, Eastern European voices have mobilized around claims to sovereignty as the ability to make choices about which alliances to join and claims to knowledge about the nature of Russian imperialism. In this essay, I analyze the claims to sovereignty and knowledge from the perspective of one Eastern European subject, namely the Latvian subject. I conclude that the encounter between the Latvian subject and its very own Russian imperialism represents a clash of sovereignties rather than a clash of civilizations. If the Latvian subject strives for an international relations version of sovereignty that allows it to join existing alliances, the Russian state as a multinational federation—or an empire—strives for a geopolitical version of sovereignty that allows it to constitute—or reshape—orders.
{"title":"The clash of sovereignties","authors":"Dace Dzenovska","doi":"10.1086/722723","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722723","url":null,"abstract":"Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is occupying the minds of pundits, scholars, and politicians worldwide and across the political spectrum. In the midst of these discussions, Eastern European voices have mobilized around claims to sovereignty as the ability to make choices about which alliances to join and claims to knowledge about the nature of Russian imperialism. In this essay, I analyze the claims to sovereignty and knowledge from the perspective of one Eastern European subject, namely the Latvian subject. I conclude that the encounter between the Latvian subject and its very own Russian imperialism represents a clash of sovereignties rather than a clash of civilizations. If the Latvian subject strives for an international relations version of sovereignty that allows it to join existing alliances, the Russian state as a multinational federation—or an empire—strives for a geopolitical version of sovereignty that allows it to constitute—or reshape—orders.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"36 1","pages":"651 - 658"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77472965","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}
It is an honor to be part of this inaugural film symposium. We send our sincere thanks to all the contributors. The care and attention you brought in watching, sensing, and reflecting with our film has really touched us and inspired us to revisit with fresh eyes the making of Unwritten Letters. The film in its entirety is available online as a supplement. For the first few months, the process was driven not only by the desire to document Abd’s moment of transition, but by a desire “tomake a film” and to be in a space of active creation. Films like Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin (as Christian Suhr picked up correctly), Notebooks on Cities and Clothes by Wim Wenders, or In the Last Days of the City by Tamer El Said pointed us to a direction of filmmaking as a process of testing, whereby filming a scene and together watching the material became the central gesture. This act of recording and revisiting allowed us to see, feel, and witness Abd’s experience of forced migration but also served as a mirror to our own process of filmmaking. Reconvening every two to three months to continue the ritual of filming and watching that we had started in Beirut, slowly the form of our film started to emerge. As Eda Elif Tibet beautifully describes, the camera became a mediator and holder of the space we had started to cultivate and commit to. This space we always referred to as our
{"title":"Relational filmmaking","authors":"Max Bloching, Abd Alrahman Dukmak","doi":"10.1086/724111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724111","url":null,"abstract":"It is an honor to be part of this inaugural film symposium. We send our sincere thanks to all the contributors. The care and attention you brought in watching, sensing, and reflecting with our film has really touched us and inspired us to revisit with fresh eyes the making of Unwritten Letters. The film in its entirety is available online as a supplement. For the first few months, the process was driven not only by the desire to document Abd’s moment of transition, but by a desire “tomake a film” and to be in a space of active creation. Films like Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin (as Christian Suhr picked up correctly), Notebooks on Cities and Clothes by Wim Wenders, or In the Last Days of the City by Tamer El Said pointed us to a direction of filmmaking as a process of testing, whereby filming a scene and together watching the material became the central gesture. This act of recording and revisiting allowed us to see, feel, and witness Abd’s experience of forced migration but also served as a mirror to our own process of filmmaking. Reconvening every two to three months to continue the ritual of filming and watching that we had started in Beirut, slowly the form of our film started to emerge. As Eda Elif Tibet beautifully describes, the camera became a mediator and holder of the space we had started to cultivate and commit to. This space we always referred to as our","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"238 1","pages":"975 - 978"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76863617","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}
Studies of prophecy in the context of Judaism have predominantly attended to how messianic sects react when prophecies fail to be fulfilled; they have drawn on the concept of cognitive dissonance to explain how such setbacks tend to bolster rather than weaken belief. Less attention has been paid to how subjects react to and live with the perceived fulfillment of prophecy. This article describes religious Jewish winemakers in West Bank settlements whose phenomenal experience of meta-historical time in the temporal frame of ge’ula, redemption, displaces the precarity and uncertainty of the contemporary settlement projects, renders the moral and political stakes of the occupation less disturbing, and fosters hope for a prosperous future. The temporal consequences of lived prophecy for the settlers can be understood as “temporal dissonance,” characterizing the disjuncture between the harsh reality of the political present and the prophesied idyllic future.
{"title":"“Again you will plant vineyards”","authors":"Ian McGonigle","doi":"10.1086/723678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723678","url":null,"abstract":"Studies of prophecy in the context of Judaism have predominantly attended to how messianic sects react when prophecies fail to be fulfilled; they have drawn on the concept of cognitive dissonance to explain how such setbacks tend to bolster rather than weaken belief. Less attention has been paid to how subjects react to and live with the perceived fulfillment of prophecy. This article describes religious Jewish winemakers in West Bank settlements whose phenomenal experience of meta-historical time in the temporal frame of ge’ula, redemption, displaces the precarity and uncertainty of the contemporary settlement projects, renders the moral and political stakes of the occupation less disturbing, and fosters hope for a prosperous future. The temporal consequences of lived prophecy for the settlers can be understood as “temporal dissonance,” characterizing the disjuncture between the harsh reality of the political present and the prophesied idyllic future.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"45 1","pages":"856 - 871"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74984739","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}
A treasure chest, as depicted on the cover of this issue, carries so many resonances. In Arabic, treasure chest is the etymological and conceptual source for the term for the state. This is a theme explored at length in the article by Judith Scheele in this issue ’ s Special Section on political vocabularies. The links between the concepts of a state and a treasure chest can easily be grasped when one thinks of the importance of a national “ treasury ” in contemporary political formations. But the implications of beginning our imagination of “ the state ” from a treasure chest instead of, say, a monopoly on the legit-imate use of force, are multiple. Here we would like to extend the metaphoric links of this idea further — to the importance of an anthropological treasury of ideas about the relationships among power, sovereignty, politics, economy, persons, and collectivities. Such an anthropological treasury cannot be formed solely from ideas from political science in Western nations, but must include a variety of concepts that emerge in the ethnographic investigation of the entire range of human, nonhuman, and metahuman societies. The Currents section in this issue focuses on “ Russia
{"title":"A treasury of ideas","authors":"Andrew B. Kipnis, L. Lombard, R. Kaur, L. Costa","doi":"10.1086/723869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723869","url":null,"abstract":"A treasure chest, as depicted on the cover of this issue, carries so many resonances. In Arabic, treasure chest is the etymological and conceptual source for the term for the state. This is a theme explored at length in the article by Judith Scheele in this issue ’ s Special Section on political vocabularies. The links between the concepts of a state and a treasure chest can easily be grasped when one thinks of the importance of a national “ treasury ” in contemporary political formations. But the implications of beginning our imagination of “ the state ” from a treasure chest instead of, say, a monopoly on the legit-imate use of force, are multiple. Here we would like to extend the metaphoric links of this idea further — to the importance of an anthropological treasury of ideas about the relationships among power, sovereignty, politics, economy, persons, and collectivities. Such an anthropological treasury cannot be formed solely from ideas from political science in Western nations, but must include a variety of concepts that emerge in the ethnographic investigation of the entire range of human, nonhuman, and metahuman societies. The Currents section in this issue focuses on “ Russia","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"21 3 1","pages":"615 - 620"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78239626","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}
The concept of defense-respect is elaborated here as a cornerstone of Urarina ethics and politics and an alternative to the concept of respect inherited from the Kantian tradition. While similarly expressing a kind of liberal and egalitarian ethos, it is founded on very different premises, for the worth of an individual has little to do with their inherent dignity or membership in a common humanity, and emerges instead from concrete, practical knowledge in the context of an ongoing relationship. Defense-respect demands a willingness to take on responsibility for another’s well-being and to abstain from certain forms of evaluation or judgment. It is not opposed to love or care, but as an art of diplomacy and civility and vehicle of moral power, proves crucial for the successful management of social distance.
{"title":"In defense of the heart","authors":"Harry Walker","doi":"10.1086/723047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723047","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of defense-respect is elaborated here as a cornerstone of Urarina ethics and politics and an alternative to the concept of respect inherited from the Kantian tradition. While similarly expressing a kind of liberal and egalitarian ethos, it is founded on very different premises, for the worth of an individual has little to do with their inherent dignity or membership in a common humanity, and emerges instead from concrete, practical knowledge in the context of an ongoing relationship. Defense-respect demands a willingness to take on responsibility for another’s well-being and to abstain from certain forms of evaluation or judgment. It is not opposed to love or care, but as an art of diplomacy and civility and vehicle of moral power, proves crucial for the successful management of social distance.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"82 1","pages":"791 - 804"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85548404","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 special section approaches “politics” from a specifically ethnographic point of view. It does this by privileging ethnographically derived political concepts rather than more familiar preestablished and supposedly universal categories of political analysis. This introduction offers a general theoretical framework for doing this, and establishes a shared language of analysis. It situates current developments in relation to the history of political anthropology and of the broader discipline, and proposes a definition of the domain of political anthropology through an emphasis on politics as collective ethics. It then reflects on the relationship between language and concepts, and the articulation of different “global” hierarchies of value.
{"title":"Towards a critical ethnography of political concepts","authors":"Anastasia Piliavsky, J. Scheele","doi":"10.1086/723216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723216","url":null,"abstract":"This special section approaches “politics” from a specifically ethnographic point of view. It does this by privileging ethnographically derived political concepts rather than more familiar preestablished and supposedly universal categories of political analysis. This introduction offers a general theoretical framework for doing this, and establishes a shared language of analysis. It situates current developments in relation to the history of political anthropology and of the broader discipline, and proposes a definition of the domain of political anthropology through an emphasis on politics as collective ethics. It then reflects on the relationship between language and concepts, and the articulation of different “global” hierarchies of value.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"25 1","pages":"686 - 700"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74897500","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 the 1890s, at the height of the rubber boom, steamboats dominate the rivers of Bolivian Amazonia. The technophile discourse of the period presents the steamer as a revolution that changes everything: it allows social progress and economic development, it frees transport from the constraints of the geography, it reinforces national sovereignty and, at the same time, it overcomes interethnic conflict. Nevertheless, a careful reading of the historical sources allows us to question whether it is reasonable to reduce the rubber-transporting steamer to an icon of progress and the nationalist agenda. A historical anthropology of the steamer helps to understand what happens with the vessel itself beyond political economy, nation-building processes, and the Amazonian landscape, while also aiming to reconstruct the biographies, histories, and imaginaries of the steamboat itself and its people, and in turn an integral fluvial experience that embodies novel perceptions of alterity of the river and the Bolivian jungle.
{"title":"Amazonia by steam","authors":"Diego Villar","doi":"10.1086/721923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721923","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1890s, at the height of the rubber boom, steamboats dominate the rivers of Bolivian Amazonia. The technophile discourse of the period presents the steamer as a revolution that changes everything: it allows social progress and economic development, it frees transport from the constraints of the geography, it reinforces national sovereignty and, at the same time, it overcomes interethnic conflict. Nevertheless, a careful reading of the historical sources allows us to question whether it is reasonable to reduce the rubber-transporting steamer to an icon of progress and the nationalist agenda. A historical anthropology of the steamer helps to understand what happens with the vessel itself beyond political economy, nation-building processes, and the Amazonian landscape, while also aiming to reconstruct the biographies, histories, and imaginaries of the steamboat itself and its people, and in turn an integral fluvial experience that embodies novel perceptions of alterity of the river and the Bolivian jungle.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"21 1","pages":"836 - 855"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81053293","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}
Increasingly over the past five years, the Russian government has been expanding its spheres of influence in Africa, chiefly via the operations of Wagner Group mercenaries. The Central African Republic has been a Wagner testing ground, a place where they have wide range to operate at will and have taken control of mining areas while targeting armed group members and civilians. What drew Central African government elites to this new relationship? Russia offered exactly what they wanted most: the feeling of autonomy created by having greater firepower and ruthless fighters, which let them feel less dependent on their traditional donor relationships. One can loosely analogize these diplomatic relationships to the urban Central African dating scene, where people play with multiple suitors in search of material benefit and commitment. Such analogizing underlines that relationships, emotions, and transactions are key to sovereignty.
{"title":"Sovereignty triangles","authors":"Louisa Lombard","doi":"10.1086/723226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723226","url":null,"abstract":"Increasingly over the past five years, the Russian government has been expanding its spheres of influence in Africa, chiefly via the operations of Wagner Group mercenaries. The Central African Republic has been a Wagner testing ground, a place where they have wide range to operate at will and have taken control of mining areas while targeting armed group members and civilians. What drew Central African government elites to this new relationship? Russia offered exactly what they wanted most: the feeling of autonomy created by having greater firepower and ruthless fighters, which let them feel less dependent on their traditional donor relationships. One can loosely analogize these diplomatic relationships to the urban Central African dating scene, where people play with multiple suitors in search of material benefit and commitment. Such analogizing underlines that relationships, emotions, and transactions are key to sovereignty.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"25 1","pages":"624 - 631"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75238772","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}
“Being” can be a heavy burden to carry in Sinja, Nepal. The lack of a given self comparable to the Christian soul makes the struggle for being a potentially life-threatening affair, especially when circumstances impede the fulfillment of social expectations. Suicides that flow from the incapacity to embody what a person is socially expected to be illustrate the phenomenological dimension of what “social death” might really mean for people whose being is articulated in and through webs of social ties. Conversion to Christianity provides social misfits with a community of fellow believers that promises to guarantee them a full-fledged presence in the world vis-à-vis the potentially devastating outcomes of an utter failure of being, yet which also poses entirely new challenges. Ernesto de Martino’s concept of “presence” captures the existential stakes of conversion better than sweeping tropes about the in/dividuality of personhood, circumventing the impasse faced by long-standing debates in the anthropology of Christianity.
{"title":"Failures of being","authors":"Samuele Poletti","doi":"10.1086/722034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722034","url":null,"abstract":"“Being” can be a heavy burden to carry in Sinja, Nepal. The lack of a given self comparable to the Christian soul makes the struggle for being a potentially life-threatening affair, especially when circumstances impede the fulfillment of social expectations. Suicides that flow from the incapacity to embody what a person is socially expected to be illustrate the phenomenological dimension of what “social death” might really mean for people whose being is articulated in and through webs of social ties. Conversion to Christianity provides social misfits with a community of fellow believers that promises to guarantee them a full-fledged presence in the world vis-à-vis the potentially devastating outcomes of an utter failure of being, yet which also poses entirely new challenges. Ernesto de Martino’s concept of “presence” captures the existential stakes of conversion better than sweeping tropes about the in/dividuality of personhood, circumventing the impasse faced by long-standing debates in the anthropology of Christianity.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"42 1","pages":"872 - 888"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79282854","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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