Author: Nancy Munn

Convinced that ethnography still provides a critical tool for studying and understanding our ever-changing and complex world, I present here a case for approaching ethnographic work through “listening.” I extend the notion of listening to include readi…

Calls to “decolonize” the social sciences have reverberated in academia since at least the 1950s. Anthropology, in particular, has been marked as the “child of colonialism” and “handmaiden of imperialism” (Gough ). Over the course of eight decades now,…

The contemporary retranslation and circulation of Lucumí songs for the orishas (deities) among devotees and scholars in Cuba inadvertently reproduces both the sources and methods of Ortiz’s earliest linguistic ventures and reinforces his enduring influ…

Anthropologists, in regular intervals, tend to ask a cardinal question: How do we know what we know? Storms about ethnography and theory, epistemology and representation rage, and in their wake the debris of epistemic inequities, philosophical villainy…

The specific character of Ortiz’s theory of transculturation is dependent on the Cuban context in which, and for which, it was elaborated. This article, opening with a sketch of Ortiz’s place of upbringing, Menorca, as a site of brutal struggles for id…

In the contemporary debate concerning European integration and the “problem” of Third World immigration no less than in developments in anthropology in the past decade, the boundedness of cultures and cultural difference have gained new prominence. Ant…

For this Currents section, we have called upon anthropologists across the global South and North in the attempt to mainstream the long overdue issue of decolonizing ethnographies. On the one hand, movements for ethnic/racial equality across the world h…

This afterword comments on the articles collected in this special issue dedicated to the counterpoint between the Mediterranean where Fernando Ortiz grew up, and the Caribbean where he lived most of his life. Under the influence of Lombroso, Ortiz bega…

Inspired by the idea of “transculturation,” formulated as a contrastive metaphor and concept by Fernando Ortiz in the 1940s, this article seeks to explore the making of clay balls called “Moengo pemba,” extracted from former bauxite excavation areas by…

The cult of María Lionza is an Afro-Latin American religion native to Venezuela which usually involves episodes of spirit possession. Its most notable figure is María Lionza, a plural goddess imagined and represented in different ways (as an Indian, Wh…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This article analyzes the lexicographical studies undertaken by the distinguished Cuban anthropologist and ethnologist Fernando Ortiz Fernández concerning the Spanish spoken in Cuba. It begins with a brief exposition of the factors conducive to the ris…

Probing the possibilities for transregional anthropological scholarship in light of the Cuban polymath Fernando Ortiz’s prolific work, this introduction surveys the development of Mediterraneanist and Caribbeanist anthropology, situates Ortiz’s intelle…

This article analyzes the role that Fernando Ortiz played in the articulation of transatlantic intellectual and academic networks between different Latin American countries, and between these and Spain. The intellectual community formed in the first th…

Questions related to hybridity, creolization, and the porosity of cultural forms have long concerned anthropologists. More often than not, these issues have been explored at sites within the boundaries of national cultural spaces even when those sites …

This article explores the social framework of spiritism in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia during the time Fernando Ortiz lived there, and the connections of active spiritists with the pedagogical environment of the Cuban thinker. I reconstruct the …

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Resource regimes in postsocialist Laos have been dominated by foreign actors in ways that frequently dovetail with the prerogatives of multilateral investment and the work of nongovernmental development organizations. A common theme among these diverse…

This essay draws on Aihwa Ong’s conception of “fungible life,” applying it to the practice of stockpiling essential goods. It argues that stockpiling is not just a matter of gathering and storing troves of supplies, but is linked to a broader style of …

This essay develops the method of mesoanalysis to comprehend problems shared at divergent sites, but that are not reducible to universal or general forces. Drawing on fieldwork at a state-owned steel factory in Indonesia, the essay describes a specific…