Author: Nancy Munn

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

After his most successful book, La mentalité primitive (), Lévy-Bruhl published in The Criterion, a journal then directed by poet T. S. Elliott, an article entitled “Primitive mentality and gambling” whose French version, “Mentalité primitive et jeu de…

In this paper I reflect on two interconnected phenomena associated with Lebanese migration: a high incidence of gambling among immigrants and the experience of migration itself as a form of “gambling with the self.” I show how both these dimensions are…

This essay reveals that infrastructure, both transit and legal, not only facilitates exchanges across distance and borders, but also creates public structures of feeling. By structures of feeling, I refer to Raymond Williams’s discussion of those emerg…

Brexit was a project shaped at the fringes of official politics. Unusually, however, it maintained its fringe-like qualities, including its lack of clarity and ambivalence, even as it took center stage in the political affairs of the country for more t…

Brexit has brought into visibility various strands of racist thinking and practice that have, for many years, simmered under the surface in British life. Discourse about Brexit reveals an enduring nativist and imperialist sentiment that calls into ques…

This Currents section provides accounts of Britain’s exit (Brexit) or departure from the European Union (EU)—a decision based on a closely won referendum in June 2016, and declared in January 2020 by the Conservative political party. With few exception…

Mass protests erupted in June 2019 in Hong Kong due to widespread anger about a proposed amendment to the extradition law. As a global project, could the goal of pursuing democratization be narrowly confined to a single place such as Hong Kong? What ca…

Anthropologists and other commentators struggle to make sense of pre-COVID-19 political developments in the postindustrial Global North. Various narratives were created to explain these dramatic events and changes, deploying an armory of social science…

The response to Brexit in Ireland needs to be considered in relation to the long-term and short-term histories of the relationship between Ireland and the UK. Brexit, or at least the farcical debate around Brexit, which coincided with the author’s fiel…

This article explores the uneasy position of Mainlanders within and in relation to the Anti-Extradition Movement amid rising anti-Mainland sentiment in Hong Kong. It shows how the continued reliance on the Chinese language, contact, and media for infor…

During the mass protest movement, Hong Kong has witnessed intense and disturbing levels of violence, intolerance, and anti-Chinese xenophobia. In this article, I reflect on the aggravation of a conflict system in which both sides are vitalized by the e…

Jarillo et al.’s attempted refutation of Malinowski’s claims as to Trobrianders’ “universally” shared belief in baloma reincarnation fails. Contrary to their claims, Malinowski’s “Baloma” article (1916) documented wide, often contradictory variation in…

Jarillo et al. have offered an insightful rethinking of the role of baloma in reincarnation and the perpetuation of the dala lineage in Trobriand cosmology, based on an innovative and collaborative methodology, that counters the prevailing wisdom first…

Reincarnation has been a fundamental tenet of anthropologists’ representations of Trobriand cosmology since Bronislaw Malinowski published “Baloma; The spirits of the dead in the Trobriand Islands” in 1916. Yet, during recent ethnographic fieldwork, ma…

The Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests have witnessed unprecedented levels, both in terms of size and violence expressed by the young protesters of Hong Kong. The outbreak of the revolt against Beijing has surprised many because i…

In the protest movement in Hong Kong in 2019, the growing influence of Mainland China was perceived to be responsible for the erosion of freedom of speech, skyrocketing housing prices, the dwindling of welfare resources, and other social issues. I sugg…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

The pursuit of world peace has long been part of the telos of modern anthropology, although this may not be particularly obvious in the discipline’s teaching on its history today. Taking Claude Lévi-Strauss’s essay on Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a key tex…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This essay analyzes the current protests in Hong Kong from the perspective of the friends/enemies dialectic. It depicts the opposed political positions involved in the protests, considers the relations of these positions to ethnic and linguistic identi…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory