A common view is that states formulate and administer policy. However, there is much in the classification and administration of persons that is not narrowly governmental. As an example, this article traces long-term developments in Australia and the United States which have made possible recent broadening and “de-racializing” of governmental formulations of Indigenous identity. This most recent phase has seen emergent kinds of “new politics,” here called “hyper-identification.” This is the self-identification of significant numbers of people as Indigenous, well beyond strictly “demographic” factors. It is easy, and probably partly accurate, to regard such hyper-identification as opportunistic, given the range of entitlements that Indigenous identification may permit. Yet an explanation in terms of opportunity, strategy, or psychology does not treat the conditions that enable that process. This paper attempts to do so in its focus on the relation between state classifications and shifts in the public sphere.
{"title":"Postcolonial politics of elimination?","authors":"F. Merlan","doi":"10.1086/720788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720788","url":null,"abstract":"A common view is that states formulate and administer policy. However, there is much in the classification and administration of persons that is not narrowly governmental. As an example, this article traces long-term developments in Australia and the United States which have made possible recent broadening and “de-racializing” of governmental formulations of Indigenous identity. This most recent phase has seen emergent kinds of “new politics,” here called “hyper-identification.” This is the self-identification of significant numbers of people as Indigenous, well beyond strictly “demographic” factors. It is easy, and probably partly accurate, to regard such hyper-identification as opportunistic, given the range of entitlements that Indigenous identification may permit. Yet an explanation in terms of opportunity, strategy, or psychology does not treat the conditions that enable that process. This paper attempts to do so in its focus on the relation between state classifications and shifts in the public sphere.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82076556","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 discusses the transformative potential of Turkey’s pro-democracy movement which has emerged out of a long history of Kurdish political struggle. It looks at the development of a two-fold strategy that understands internal transformation as a precondition for democratic transition in Turkey. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has been the most recent iteration of this strategic and ideological reconfiguration. Built on in-depth interviews with key movement actors, this article examines (1) the historical context out of which the HDP materialized, (2) the politics introduced as democratic autonomy, (3) the transformative potential of the party’s women’s politics, (4) the limits of debates on “Türkiyelileşme,” and (5) the role of the non-Kurdish opposition. Assessing the opportunities and impasses, I argue that, despite the recent state-orchestrated clampdown on Kurdish politics and its sites of articulation, Kurdish transformative politics remain a key asset for democratic transition in Turkey, though facing internal and external challenges.
{"title":"Kurdish transformative politics in Turkey","authors":"Rosa Burç","doi":"10.1086/719163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719163","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the transformative potential of Turkey’s pro-democracy movement which has emerged out of a long history of Kurdish political struggle. It looks at the development of a two-fold strategy that understands internal transformation as a precondition for democratic transition in Turkey. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has been the most recent iteration of this strategic and ideological reconfiguration. Built on in-depth interviews with key movement actors, this article examines (1) the historical context out of which the HDP materialized, (2) the politics introduced as democratic autonomy, (3) the transformative potential of the party’s women’s politics, (4) the limits of debates on “Türkiyelileşme,” and (5) the role of the non-Kurdish opposition. Assessing the opportunities and impasses, I argue that, despite the recent state-orchestrated clampdown on Kurdish politics and its sites of articulation, Kurdish transformative politics remain a key asset for democratic transition in Turkey, though facing internal and external challenges.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82220049","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 considers the problem of translation and radical interpretation from a post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspective, and challenges the notion of concept, language, and difference being mobilized by Philip Swift.
{"title":"“Where it was, I must come into being”","authors":"Fatima Mojaddedi","doi":"10.1086/719702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719702","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the problem of translation and radical interpretation from a post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspective, and challenges the notion of concept, language, and difference being mobilized by Philip Swift.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81125331","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}
As youngsters in a Pakistani megacity participate in a reading group to discuss the end of time by looking at the eschatological prophecies in Islamic religious sources, they come to relate apparently trivial political actions such as wall-painting, placard-holding, and pamphlet-distributing to the question of justice. We suggest in this article that this complex phenomenon can be best understood through the concept of enaction, as ethical actions are seen to enact a context suffused with political and cosmological considerations. Accordingly, our discussion positions itself against those works in the anthropology of ethics that primarily view such ethical actions in terms of self-cultivation.
{"title":"Virtue’s cosmos","authors":"Muhammad Ali Nasir, Muhammad Mukarram Bin Tariq","doi":"10.1086/719412","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719412","url":null,"abstract":"As youngsters in a Pakistani megacity participate in a reading group to discuss the end of time by looking at the eschatological prophecies in Islamic religious sources, they come to relate apparently trivial political actions such as wall-painting, placard-holding, and pamphlet-distributing to the question of justice. We suggest in this article that this complex phenomenon can be best understood through the concept of enaction, as ethical actions are seen to enact a context suffused with political and cosmological considerations. Accordingly, our discussion positions itself against those works in the anthropology of ethics that primarily view such ethical actions in terms of self-cultivation.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76464173","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}
Most ethnographers have little use for models and other formal abstractions, yet even a staunch empiricist such as Franz Boas could appreciate the “aesthetic” advantages of idealization and simplification. These advantages have been largely ignored in recent decades, as anthropologists have come to favor ever more intricate and encompassing accounts. The resulting “ethnographic involution,” I suggest, has steadily diminished anthropology as a source of usable, socially shared knowledge. Much the same problem, interestingly, was confronted long ago by Max Weber, who developed the method of “ideal types” precisely as a way to grasp, represent, and investigate the complexity of historical reality. Weber converged in this regard with his contemporary at Halle, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933). Since the late twentieth century, Vaihinger’s “fictionalism” has attracted renewed interest within philosophy and beyond. Yet his notion of “as-if” reasoning—a via media, I would argue, between particularism and positivism—remains virtually unknown within anthropology.
{"title":"Reality remodeled","authors":"Lars Rodseth","doi":"10.1086/719660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719660","url":null,"abstract":"Most ethnographers have little use for models and other formal abstractions, yet even a staunch empiricist such as Franz Boas could appreciate the “aesthetic” advantages of idealization and simplification. These advantages have been largely ignored in recent decades, as anthropologists have come to favor ever more intricate and encompassing accounts. The resulting “ethnographic involution,” I suggest, has steadily diminished anthropology as a source of usable, socially shared knowledge. Much the same problem, interestingly, was confronted long ago by Max Weber, who developed the method of “ideal types” precisely as a way to grasp, represent, and investigate the complexity of historical reality. Weber converged in this regard with his contemporary at Halle, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933). Since the late twentieth century, Vaihinger’s “fictionalism” has attracted renewed interest within philosophy and beyond. Yet his notion of “as-if” reasoning—a via media, I would argue, between particularism and positivism—remains virtually unknown within anthropology.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73859626","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 argues that China’s National College Entrance Exam, the Gaokao, provides routinized charismatic ratification of elite merit and state authority. In his writings, Max Weber differentiates between original and routinized charisma. Whereas original charisma disrupts social orders, routinized charisma legitimizes them by preserving a spark of the extraordinary and the divine. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Chinese high schools, this article examines a mode of charisma preservation that Weber ignored: routinized fateful rites of passage like the Gaokao. Despite being routinized, such events are chancy, their outcomes contingent and undetermined. This indeterminacy is indexed by magical concepts like fate and luck, which lend charismatic authority a divine imprimatur. This analysis illuminates the importance of indeterminacy in understanding the compulsion of charisma, contributes to understanding the dialectical interplay between original and routinized charisma, and explains the Gaokao’s magical-charismatic role in preserving the moral authority of China’s ruling elite.
{"title":"Fateful rite of passage","authors":"Z. Howlett","doi":"10.1086/719267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719267","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that China’s National College Entrance Exam, the Gaokao, provides routinized charismatic ratification of elite merit and state authority. In his writings, Max Weber differentiates between original and routinized charisma. Whereas original charisma disrupts social orders, routinized charisma legitimizes them by preserving a spark of the extraordinary and the divine. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Chinese high schools, this article examines a mode of charisma preservation that Weber ignored: routinized fateful rites of passage like the Gaokao. Despite being routinized, such events are chancy, their outcomes contingent and undetermined. This indeterminacy is indexed by magical concepts like fate and luck, which lend charismatic authority a divine imprimatur. This analysis illuminates the importance of indeterminacy in understanding the compulsion of charisma, contributes to understanding the dialectical interplay between original and routinized charisma, and explains the Gaokao’s magical-charismatic role in preserving the moral authority of China’s ruling elite.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89389392","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}
Vdra-ba society in western Sichuan, China, has been represented by evolutionist Chinese scholars as a primitive matrilineal society that was in transition to a patrilineal system, and it has been likened to that of the Na/Moso. This is a misleading characterization. Vdra-ba society has no tribal organizations and was critically shaped by the overarching Tú-sī system for many centuries. The kinship system is centered on the “house,” and is better described as undifferentiated. The gá-yì (visiting) relationship, with marriage in rare occasions, and conventions of adoption, allows their ideal of a female line to be practiced and transformed in the house into an undifferentiated form of inheritance and accession. There is no descent group. The Vdra-ba kindred, however, is individual-centered rather than ancestor-centered, with its bilateral character.
{"title":"The pedigree of the house","authors":"Bo-Shen Chen","doi":"10.1086/718687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718687","url":null,"abstract":"Vdra-ba society in western Sichuan, China, has been represented by evolutionist Chinese scholars as a primitive matrilineal society that was in transition to a patrilineal system, and it has been likened to that of the Na/Moso. This is a misleading characterization. Vdra-ba society has no tribal organizations and was critically shaped by the overarching Tú-sī system for many centuries. The kinship system is centered on the “house,” and is better described as undifferentiated. The gá-yì (visiting) relationship, with marriage in rare occasions, and conventions of adoption, allows their ideal of a female line to be practiced and transformed in the house into an undifferentiated form of inheritance and accession. There is no descent group. The Vdra-ba kindred, however, is individual-centered rather than ancestor-centered, with its bilateral character.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82562264","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}
L. Costa, Raminderjit Kaur, Mariane C. Ferme, Andrew B. Kipnis
more and pernicious as the world tackles a swathe of problems to do with ill-ness, stigma, violence, disasters, and displacement. The painting on the cover of this issue, “ Balancing the sky, ” reiterates this theme with a young girl on the streets of Mumbai earning a precarious living from the capricious generosity of passersby. She balances on a wheel on a tight-rope a good two meters from the ground. As the artist, Viveek Sharma, re fl ected, “ the painting is about keeping the balance. Despite all the cacophony around her in the city, she kept her balance. It ’ s like a metaphor for keeping the balance during all the ordeals that we ’ re going through in the pandemic, and also for nature — even though lives have been lost, nature is trying to keep its balance. ”
随着世界处理与疾病、耻辱、暴力、灾难和流离失所有关的一系列问题,它变得越来越有害。这期封面的画作《平衡天空》(Balancing The sky)重申了这一主题:孟买街头的一个年轻女孩靠路人反复无常的慷慨施舍维持着不稳定的生活。她在离地面两米远的地方用一根紧绳拴着轮子保持平衡。正如艺术家维韦克·夏尔马(Viveek Sharma)所说,“这幅画是关于保持平衡的。尽管城市里的嘈杂声不绝如耳,她还是保持了平衡。这就像一个隐喻,在我们正在经历的大流行的所有考验中保持平衡,也是对大自然来说——即使生命已经失去,大自然也在努力保持平衡。”
{"title":"Balancing acts and worldviews","authors":"L. Costa, Raminderjit Kaur, Mariane C. Ferme, Andrew B. Kipnis","doi":"10.1086/719522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719522","url":null,"abstract":"more and pernicious as the world tackles a swathe of problems to do with ill-ness, stigma, violence, disasters, and displacement. The painting on the cover of this issue, “ Balancing the sky, ” reiterates this theme with a young girl on the streets of Mumbai earning a precarious living from the capricious generosity of passersby. She balances on a wheel on a tight-rope a good two meters from the ground. As the artist, Viveek Sharma, re fl ected, “ the painting is about keeping the balance. Despite all the cacophony around her in the city, she kept her balance. It ’ s like a metaphor for keeping the balance during all the ordeals that we ’ re going through in the pandemic, and also for nature — even though lives have been lost, nature is trying to keep its balance. ”","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72430512","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}
lives the capital most work is Grassroots and local cultural heritage in
居住首都最工作的地方是基层和地方文化遗产
{"title":"Place, materiality, and gender in subaltern memories of long lives in a poor Beijing neighborhood","authors":"Harriet Evans","doi":"10.1086/718649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718649","url":null,"abstract":"lives the capital most work is Grassroots and local cultural heritage in","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75867741","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, through various ethnographic encounters, highlights the advantages and explores the challenges of fieldwork for a female researcher studying what might be taken to be her own community. Doing a native anthropology in a marginal borderland that has not been explored anthropologically before turns out to be an interesting experience. On the one hand, the identity of being a native of the region carves out ways in the field that help her overcome barriers; on the other hand, the same identity, through her common ethnic and cultural belonging, kinship relations, and local familiarity restricts her in many ways. Through explorations of her identity in the field along gender, caste, class, and ethnic lines, the work highlights how sometimes she is an insider, sometimes an outsider, and sometimes a partial-insider-outsider, thereby collapsing the strict division of a researcher into categories of an outsider and an insider.
{"title":"Insecurities of nativism","authors":"Malvika Sharma","doi":"10.1086/719413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719413","url":null,"abstract":"This article, through various ethnographic encounters, highlights the advantages and explores the challenges of fieldwork for a female researcher studying what might be taken to be her own community. Doing a native anthropology in a marginal borderland that has not been explored anthropologically before turns out to be an interesting experience. On the one hand, the identity of being a native of the region carves out ways in the field that help her overcome barriers; on the other hand, the same identity, through her common ethnic and cultural belonging, kinship relations, and local familiarity restricts her in many ways. Through explorations of her identity in the field along gender, caste, class, and ethnic lines, the work highlights how sometimes she is an insider, sometimes an outsider, and sometimes a partial-insider-outsider, thereby collapsing the strict division of a researcher into categories of an outsider and an insider.","PeriodicalId":51608,"journal":{"name":"Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85495490","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}