Author: Nancy Munn

This creative article seeks to trouble dominant modes of how anthropologists position themselves as moral subjects and grapple with their complicity with/in empire today: what we call “bearing witness” and “denunciation/confession.” In contrast to thes…

Casting the self as the primary unit of profit-making and value creation, the entrepreneurial self evolves from neoliberal ideas of self-enterprise and self-development to find ramifications in varying contexts. This article characterizes the entrepren…

This article introduces the translation of Manuela Carneiro da Cunha’s atricle “Logic of myth and action: The Canela Messianic Movement of 1963” in Hau 13 (2). Analyzing the relationship of the structural inversion between prophetic events that irrupte…

I met Brigida in 2015. At the time, she presented herself as a young gay man, somewhat androgynous, and identified herself as culturally mixed-race (Mestizo). Today, in 2023, her identity card is that of an Indigenous woman, a Chola. This took place in…

Debate about the status of animals has long impassioned theologians and philosophers. Are other animals “subjects” sharing the same rights as humans? Or are animals, as Descartes thought, mere machines? In many primitive societies but also in rural Eur…

The Karimojong prophet Apaokere was called by Divinity in a dream to sacrifice. In this vision, Divinity instructed him to kill a prized dark ox for the women of his household to avoid the onset of “nothingness.” This two-part essay (the second part to…

The first White man, so runs the Ramkokamekra Canela myth, was Aukê, a miraculous Indigenous boy who ends up killed by his kin. He reappears as a farmer and offers the Canela access to shotguns and proper dishware. Yet infelicitous choices made by the …

During the Shanghai lockdown in the spring of 2022, over twenty-five million residents had difficulty securing staple food and fresh groceries for days and even weeks. This article draws on both in-depth interviews and social media content to explore h…

This article outlines China’s pandemic governance as an ever-changing assemblage of old and new techniques, material forms, and organizational structures over the course of three years. It zooms in on the ways in which the party-state drew on and (re)c…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

For the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, most urban Chinese displayed a high level of “willing compliance” with strict pandemic control measures. This willing compliance, however, collapsed in late 2022, as the state’s promises of per…

During Shanghai’s two-month lockdown in 2022, residential community members coped with stress collectively. For many, this experience of intensive community engagement was a learning process with regard to the deliberation of community affairs and coll…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This paper draws attention to the ways in which the policy of zero covid disciplines spatiotemporal proximity to control the spread of coronavirus. The infrastructure of surveillance deployed for contact-tracing models degrees of spatiotemporal closene…

COVID-19 lockdowns instituted a new kind of normal for many in China in the past three years. From Wuhan to Shanghai, urban lockdowns (封城 fengcheng) have become synonymous with the state’s draconian COVID control measures enforced upon the whole of soc…

This article offers a case study of six-day lockdown experiences in a post-danwei (work unit) neighborhood in Mianyang, a third-tier city in southwest China. It argues that implementing lockdown, no matter how brief it was, allows local governments of …

For more than two years, China was one of the most difficult countries to enter. Within China’s borders, people’s everyday mobility in many cities was severely restricted due to its zero-COVID strategy and periodic lockdowns; outside the borders, Chine…

How were lockdowns implemented, experienced, and perceived under China’s zero-COVID regime? How do we make sense of its sudden collapse after three years of its hegemonic presence dominating Chinese lives? What does it tell us about the zero-COVID regi…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

In his essay on the cockfight, Clifford Geertz charted a now familiar course in anthropological argument. He showed how the minute details of a practice can dramatize cultural ideas about it. Many anthropologists since have been persuaded that “practic…

This article centers on a close reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s The golden bough, showing how Wittgenstein’s Remarks offer a prescient view of anthropology. More than a critique of Frazerian evolutionism, the Remarks sit on the ver…

The recent anthropological focus on “ordinary ethics” emerges out of a concern to attend to the ethical aspect of social action that is intrinsic to the human condition. Ethnographic and theoretical contributions to this literature have drawn on a vari…

In this article, I describe a “magical” dimension in the work of home organizers (HOs) in Belgium. HOs, I argue, as professional organizers, not only help their clients to deal with the disorder and clutter of their homes but deliver a promise of magic…