Nature and its discontents
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Author: Nancy Munn
Destroying the negatives: M. N. Srinivas, fire, and photography
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Against what?
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Ethnography and applied metaphysics
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Behind the “racism” of the 2019 Hong Kong protests
Scholars, intellectuals, and left-wing activists have recently come to reflect on the hostility and exclusion of Hong Kong protesters against mainland Chinese in the city’s democratic movement. This article is a response to the critical voice. Borrowin…
The polyphony of nature
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Natural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism: On the making of a philosophical anthropologist
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Beyond order, beyond the human: Unruly socionatures and contested politics
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
One year later: Reflections on the farmers’ protest in India
Beginning November 2020, over two hundred thousand farmers have gathered in a prolonged sit-in on the borders of New Delhi. The immediate impetus for the protests was the passage of three laws that ease the entry of agribusiness into the agricultural s…
The song of power: A fugue of dystopia and racial regeneration
In this paper I take the form of the fugue in music to query a contemporary dynamic. It is one where hopefulness entwines with worrisome, oppressive realities that pervade biosocial trends concerning race. Genetic ancestry testing, forensic uses of DNA…
Acting counter to our time
This essay poses the question of the timeliness of anthropological knowledge. Paul Rabinow’s writings suggest that anthropological research has a particular relationship to the demands of the present day. The role of the anthropologist is neither that …
Towards a collaborative ethos
Collaboration is a key thread in the wide-ranging experimental work of Paul Rabinow. This experimental work of giving form to a collaborative ethics of anthropology can be seen in the crucible of experience and experimentation (foyer d’expérience) know…
Ethics and the spacetime discontinuum
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Concept-work: In its passions and throes
This short essay is a brief account of my encounters with Paul Rabinow over some thirty years, forming a close relationship although we were never in the same place for any length of time.
Adjacency and secession
What matters is not what we know but how we learn. This principle of inquiry shapes Paul Rabinow’s life work. It is also an ethics, an aspiration. This principle sustains the practice of problematization, or the delineation of zones of inquiry in terms…
Between justice and goodness
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Sentiment and pragmatics in Teheran
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
If only there was a Department of Fieldwork in Philosophy
Fieldwork in philosophy amounts to a second-order philosophical anthropology. It examines contemporary forms of the human by attending to lower-level concepts and practices. It departs from Michel Foucault’s gray and meticulous approach to the history …
The future
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Rabinow turned to the study of emergent assemblages, which are rooted in the recent past and possess an uncertain future. The turn to assemblages therefore brings a distinctive temporality into view. Attending to this temp…
Law, society, and the anthropology of noncontemporaneous contemporary
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Everyday forgiveness: The practice and politics of mercy
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
The work of uncertainty: Relational aesthetics in contemporary Iran
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
But beautiful …
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
From ethics to politics
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Forgiveness as a technology of the state
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory