Author: Nancy Munn

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This contribution explores the discursive and practical marking of gay males as targets of a biopolitical regime whose aim, ostensibly, was and is to secure the health and well-being of the Vietnamese population. I consider how the contemporary apparat…

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…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Future visions energize growing enterprises, states, and families to act. Together, these entwined processes and their conflicts open unpredictable avenues for both profit-making and social transformation. This was a key insight of Aihwa Ong’s classic …

Departing from Aihwa Ong’s influential analysis of citizenship as a Foucauldian cultural project of subject-making, this contribution examines three global development citizen-subjects: transnational high-tech companies, marginalized women, and everyda…

This contribution argues that Aihwa Ong’s approach to the urban as problem-space is a powerful and underutilized conceptual tool for studying contemporary urban worlds. Drawing on fieldwork with an environmental nongovernmental organization in Dalian, …

Over the past forty years, Aihwa Ong has invented a remarkable collection of powerful concepts, delivered in compact and vivid terms, that have become essential instruments of a global anthropology. These concepts—which she crafted in response to anthr…

From post-World War II Germany to contemporary contexts beyond Europe and the United States, this contribution considers the extent to which “Blackness” has become a universal claim. It thinks through this claim in relation to Aihwa Ong’s discussion of…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

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…

This contribution uses a comparative racialization framing to revisit Aihwa Ong’s notion of ideological blackening as applied to Southeast Asian refugee youth. Examining a case study of a Hmong teen in Wisconsin who received a long adult sentence based…

This essay explores the paradox of how Aihwa Ong’s classic work on Chineseness managed to remain in but not of China. Identifying the central importance of Edward Said’s notion of “contrapuntal analysis” to Ong’s approach to both Chineseness and modern…

This article demonstrates that a long history of iconoclastic struggles exists in numerous countries of sub-Saharan Africa and extends into the present. Exploring a range of motives and messages, I argue that iconoclasm targets people and their emotion…

This essay polemicizes against contemporary anthropology’s ubiquitous moralism and its demand for engagement. It does so by trying on the glasses of evolutionary theories of moral behavior. If we take Homo sapiens to be a moralistic ape and consider th…

The anthropology of morality continues to be met with resistance. Opposition rests on the perception that one cannot study morals without moralizing or advocating which makes it both epistemologically and professionally questionable. This blinkered vie…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This essay examines Zoë Strother’s efforts to historicize recent debates about the repatriation of cultural heritage while also situating contemporary protest movements, such as “Rhodes Must Fall,” in the long and varied history of iconoclasm on the Af…

This collection of essays seeks to reinvigorate ethnographic investigation of the contemporary global. At a moment afflicted by transnational pandemic, political chauvinism, and disciplinary retrenchment, they offer a model for reengagement with the gl…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Inspired by the thoughts of Zoë Strother, in this short piece I rethink my previous work on iconoclasm in West Africa, saluting her invitation to consider iconoclasm as part and parcel of African culture and her methodological combination of history, a…

This response to Zoë Strother’s “Iconoclasms in Africa,” specifically its attention to the historical entanglement of museums and iconoclasm, reflects on the notions of collection, curation, and heritage. I pay special attention to the idea of curation…

The destruction or loss of objects belonging to African cultural heritage, usually the result of historical antecedents, has had a serious impact on communities and their way of life. Burned, stolen, or destroyed, the images targeted by iconoclasm have…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory