{"title":"Identity, violence, and the uncomfortable necessity of categorization","authors":"R. Kaur, Andrew B. Kipnis, L. Costa, L. Lombard","doi":"10.1086/721343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721343","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"17 1","pages":"327 - 334"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78010483","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 acknowledgments to the English translation of “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism,” Eduardo Vivieros de Castro (1998: 484) cryptically states that “After this article has reached its present form, I read an essay by Fritz Krause … which advances ideas strikingly similar to some developed here.” In this introduction to the first English translation of Krause’s “Mask and ancestral figure: The motif of the skin and the principle of form,” I sketch what some of these ideas may be and trace how they were addressed in Viveiros de Castro’s later writings. I conclude with a brief survey of some other engagements with Krause’s work in Amazonian ethnology and suggest why this article has remained largely ignored in the discipline.
Eduardo Vivieros de Castro(1998: 484)在对《宇宙学指示和美洲印第安人视角主义》英译本的致谢中隐晦地说:“在这篇文章达到现在的形式之后,我读了Fritz Krause的一篇文章……它提出的观点与这里的一些观点惊人地相似。”在这篇介绍克劳斯的《面具和祖先的形象:皮肤的主题和形式的原则》的第一个英文译本的介绍中,我概述了其中的一些想法,并追溯了维韦罗斯·德·卡斯特罗后来的作品是如何处理这些想法的。最后,我简要介绍了克劳斯在亚马逊人种学方面的其他研究,并提出了这篇文章在该学科中被忽视的原因。
{"title":"The nonanimistic worldview of Fritz Krause","authors":"L. Costa","doi":"10.1086/721579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721579","url":null,"abstract":"In the acknowledgments to the English translation of “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism,” Eduardo Vivieros de Castro (1998: 484) cryptically states that “After this article has reached its present form, I read an essay by Fritz Krause … which advances ideas strikingly similar to some developed here.” In this introduction to the first English translation of Krause’s “Mask and ancestral figure: The motif of the skin and the principle of form,” I sketch what some of these ideas may be and trace how they were addressed in Viveiros de Castro’s later writings. I conclude with a brief survey of some other engagements with Krause’s work in Amazonian ethnology and suggest why this article has remained largely ignored in the discipline.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"80 6 1","pages":"594 - 597"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77409809","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}
Discussions of embodiment in the virtual world mostly focus on online games and virtual reality technologies. By taking the case of Indonesian buzzers—persons employed to propagate opinions on certain issues or products—we argue that social media platforms also allow for virtual embodiment occurring within a Twitter cyberplace. This article theorizes virtual bodies by examining Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach. We also work with Boelstorff’s conception of chora and virtual bodies to argue that virtual bodies can be seen as a practical extension of physical bodies: a cyborg body. Intertwined within marketing relations, we then attempt to see how this amalgam of physical and virtual bodies is disciplined by panopticism, while briefly considering local Javanese particularities in shaping this discipline. Thus, through this examination of an Indonesian case, we bring up wider theoretical issues on social media, technologies of governance, and subjectivity.
{"title":"Virtual embodiment in physical realities","authors":"Tony Rudyansjah, Pradipa P Rasidi","doi":"10.1086/720302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720302","url":null,"abstract":"Discussions of embodiment in the virtual world mostly focus on online games and virtual reality technologies. By taking the case of Indonesian buzzers—persons employed to propagate opinions on certain issues or products—we argue that social media platforms also allow for virtual embodiment occurring within a Twitter cyberplace. This article theorizes virtual bodies by examining Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach. We also work with Boelstorff’s conception of chora and virtual bodies to argue that virtual bodies can be seen as a practical extension of physical bodies: a cyborg body. Intertwined within marketing relations, we then attempt to see how this amalgam of physical and virtual bodies is disciplined by panopticism, while briefly considering local Javanese particularities in shaping this discipline. Thus, through this examination of an Indonesian case, we bring up wider theoretical issues on social media, technologies of governance, and subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"155 1","pages":"436 - 452"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73292619","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 proposes an analysis of local politics through an ethnographic exploration of headship. It approaches the experience and enactment of politics by describing a day in the life of a headman in rural lowland Myanmar to show how an individual embodies and fashions headship through successive social settings. More specifically, this ethnographic device is a way to analyze what a headman, as a situated figure and a political institution embedded in a local society, mediates in context. The paper discusses how a headman composes with multiple layers of responsibilities and chains of relationships, delineating uncertain boundaries between the personal, the political, and the government domains that partly organize local politics. While updating the literature on Bamar lowland society after more than half a century of dictatorship, the paper suggests a position from which we might reconsider the village headman as an ethnographic starting point for an anthropology concerned with history.
{"title":"Embodying and fashioning headship","authors":"S. Huard","doi":"10.1086/721182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721182","url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes an analysis of local politics through an ethnographic exploration of headship. It approaches the experience and enactment of politics by describing a day in the life of a headman in rural lowland Myanmar to show how an individual embodies and fashions headship through successive social settings. More specifically, this ethnographic device is a way to analyze what a headman, as a situated figure and a political institution embedded in a local society, mediates in context. The paper discusses how a headman composes with multiple layers of responsibilities and chains of relationships, delineating uncertain boundaries between the personal, the political, and the government domains that partly organize local politics. While updating the literature on Bamar lowland society after more than half a century of dictatorship, the paper suggests a position from which we might reconsider the village headman as an ethnographic starting point for an anthropology concerned with history.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"401 1","pages":"499 - 512"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76626384","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 2021 state statistics demonstrated that for the first time in modern history the Uyghur population itself has begun to recede. This demographic shift is the result of both endemic family separation and the implementation of systematic gynecological exams, IUD insertions, and surgical sterilization. This article places this negative eugenics campaign in conversation with older colonial systems that strove to maintain control over women’s bodies by considering anthropological scholarship on hygiene and reproduction. It contends that contemporary eugenics in China should be seen as related to the history of racial and colonial logics, and the normalization of public health discourse in Europe and North America, even as it is adapted to new “counterterrorism” purposes in Northwest China.
{"title":"Eliminate all illegal births","authors":"Darren Byler","doi":"10.1086/720761","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720761","url":null,"abstract":"In 2021 state statistics demonstrated that for the first time in modern history the Uyghur population itself has begun to recede. This demographic shift is the result of both endemic family separation and the implementation of systematic gynecological exams, IUD insertions, and surgical sterilization. This article places this negative eugenics campaign in conversation with older colonial systems that strove to maintain control over women’s bodies by considering anthropological scholarship on hygiene and reproduction. It contends that contemporary eugenics in China should be seen as related to the history of racial and colonial logics, and the normalization of public health discourse in Europe and North America, even as it is adapted to new “counterterrorism” purposes in Northwest China.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"37 1","pages":"367 - 372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79059988","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}
Theories of the gift agree that social relations are (re)generated through gift-giving between groups and individuals. Landscape studies have also shown how people weave relations between humans, nonhumans, and their environment through walking. This article argues that these two important dynamics intersect in the building of infrastructure by locals. It explores what Wakhi herders and farmers of northern Pakistan call nomus: a pooling of gifts through which they build structures that they name after a deceased or loved person. The living and the deceased (re)generate their relations through the circulation of gifts, but also through the building of collective infrastructure that will enable them to circulate. This ethnographic reality calls for articulating the anthropology of the gift with the anthropology of the environment to show how the motivations to give are experienced not by beings detached from the world but within an ontological relationship with this world.
{"title":"The social life of pathways","authors":"Thibault Fontanari","doi":"10.1086/720746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720746","url":null,"abstract":"Theories of the gift agree that social relations are (re)generated through gift-giving between groups and individuals. Landscape studies have also shown how people weave relations between humans, nonhumans, and their environment through walking. This article argues that these two important dynamics intersect in the building of infrastructure by locals. It explores what Wakhi herders and farmers of northern Pakistan call nomus: a pooling of gifts through which they build structures that they name after a deceased or loved person. The living and the deceased (re)generate their relations through the circulation of gifts, but also through the building of collective infrastructure that will enable them to circulate. This ethnographic reality calls for articulating the anthropology of the gift with the anthropology of the environment to show how the motivations to give are experienced not by beings detached from the world but within an ontological relationship with this world.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"9 1","pages":"525 - 543"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76300532","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 confusions, intimacies, and distress of war are common to the experience of journalists reporting from war zones, yet the professional conventions of war reportage erase these experiences from the commodity journalists produce. Journalists are left struggling with a twinned burden: the violence that saturates journalistic life, and the demands of an authoritative narrative genre. Based on two years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, this article tracks what the news must expel, assessing a tension between journalist and journalism as the pressures of war and its commodification bear down. Contrary to scholarship emphasizing the separation of experience from output, I show how the production of war news is precipitated by what is occluded from that news, finding in journalists’ dreams, jokes, and traumas an archive that both transgresses and perpetuates the reality represented in journalism. Experience and output, I argue, form a relationship essential to the practice of war reportage, and to the production of a social fantasy of what war is. What disturbs this dominant fantasy is displaced by war reportage but never disappeared.
{"title":"Agitation at the margins","authors":"Isaac Blacksin","doi":"10.1086/720817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720817","url":null,"abstract":"The confusions, intimacies, and distress of war are common to the experience of journalists reporting from war zones, yet the professional conventions of war reportage erase these experiences from the commodity journalists produce. Journalists are left struggling with a twinned burden: the violence that saturates journalistic life, and the demands of an authoritative narrative genre. Based on two years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, this article tracks what the news must expel, assessing a tension between journalist and journalism as the pressures of war and its commodification bear down. Contrary to scholarship emphasizing the separation of experience from output, I show how the production of war news is precipitated by what is occluded from that news, finding in journalists’ dreams, jokes, and traumas an archive that both transgresses and perpetuates the reality represented in journalism. Experience and output, I argue, form a relationship essential to the practice of war reportage, and to the production of a social fantasy of what war is. What disturbs this dominant fantasy is displaced by war reportage but never disappeared.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"54 1","pages":"421 - 435"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72403718","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 paper seeks to explore the epistemic role of testimonies in the ongoing Uyghur crisis, as well as their development in patterns and focus. It first unfolds the metanarrative of the Uyghur genocide and shows how it has increasingly shaped individual stories, based on examples from my fieldwork in the Uyghur diaspora in Europe in 2018 and 2019 and observations of videorecorded testimonies I contributed to broadcasts on online platforms from 2019 to 2021. My main argument is that the Uyghur genocide metanarrative can empower Uyghurs, especially women, by telling stories they wouldn’t tell in other contexts, but can also obscure our understanding of a complex situation by limiting individual narratives to serve a larger collective cause.
{"title":"Testimonies and the Uyghur genocide metanarrative","authors":"Vanessa Frangville","doi":"10.1086/720368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720368","url":null,"abstract":"This paper seeks to explore the epistemic role of testimonies in the ongoing Uyghur crisis, as well as their development in patterns and focus. It first unfolds the metanarrative of the Uyghur genocide and shows how it has increasingly shaped individual stories, based on examples from my fieldwork in the Uyghur diaspora in Europe in 2018 and 2019 and observations of videorecorded testimonies I contributed to broadcasts on online platforms from 2019 to 2021. My main argument is that the Uyghur genocide metanarrative can empower Uyghurs, especially women, by telling stories they wouldn’t tell in other contexts, but can also obscure our understanding of a complex situation by limiting individual narratives to serve a larger collective cause.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"110 1","pages":"413 - 420"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79553865","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 analysis of the frontier genocides waged against the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia, Benjamin Madley (2004) identified three phases. The first is initiated by colonial invasion: economic and political frictions develop as settlers and indigenous peoples struggle for limited resources and power. In Phase Two, indigenous peoples attack settlers to reclaim lost resources and land, and this prompts a genocidal military campaign. In Phase Three, the settlers’ government incarcerates the indigenous peoples in concentration camps, where it continues genocide by attrition (through malnutrition, inadequate medical care, overwork, unsanitary conditions, and violence). All three genocides began with the assertion that the land was empty or should be made empty. Here, I consider how far the concept tabula rasa (“a map scraped clean”) applies to contemporary “re-educated” Xinjiang on China’s northwest frontier.
{"title":"Tabula rasa","authors":"Joanne Smith Finley","doi":"10.1086/720902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720902","url":null,"abstract":"In his analysis of the frontier genocides waged against the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia, Benjamin Madley (2004) identified three phases. The first is initiated by colonial invasion: economic and political frictions develop as settlers and indigenous peoples struggle for limited resources and power. In Phase Two, indigenous peoples attack settlers to reclaim lost resources and land, and this prompts a genocidal military campaign. In Phase Three, the settlers’ government incarcerates the indigenous peoples in concentration camps, where it continues genocide by attrition (through malnutrition, inadequate medical care, overwork, unsanitary conditions, and violence). All three genocides began with the assertion that the land was empty or should be made empty. Here, I consider how far the concept tabula rasa (“a map scraped clean”) applies to contemporary “re-educated” Xinjiang on China’s northwest frontier.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"13 1","pages":"341 - 356"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79796782","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 draws on two examples of encounters with the limits of fog capture in Lima to frame limitations as creative resources for ethnographic inquiry. In both examples, fog capture rendered speculatively conceivable previously backgrounded urban and ecological (dis)connections to residents on the city’s periphery, including the possibility to envisage certain relational reconfigurations. By analogously framing these experimental effects as one potential outcome of ethnographic practice, the article locates the kernel of such outcomes in the inescapability of limitations. This not only acknowledges the many obstructions and exclusions inherent to anthropological research, but taps into them as that which might allow for fieldwork encounters to properly bear on theory and analysis. Rather than things to avoid or overcome, I argue that limits by and of themselves have the capacity to suspend and modify abstractions and the course of events.
{"title":"Speculative relations in Lima","authors":"Chakad Ojani","doi":"10.1086/720367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720367","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws on two examples of encounters with the limits of fog capture in Lima to frame limitations as creative resources for ethnographic inquiry. In both examples, fog capture rendered speculatively conceivable previously backgrounded urban and ecological (dis)connections to residents on the city’s periphery, including the possibility to envisage certain relational reconfigurations. By analogously framing these experimental effects as one potential outcome of ethnographic practice, the article locates the kernel of such outcomes in the inescapability of limitations. This not only acknowledges the many obstructions and exclusions inherent to anthropological research, but taps into them as that which might allow for fieldwork encounters to properly bear on theory and analysis. Rather than things to avoid or overcome, I argue that limits by and of themselves have the capacity to suspend and modify abstractions and the course of events.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":"36 1","pages":"468 - 481"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85426577","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}