Author: Nancy Munn

This article explores the interpretive and divinatory practices and strategies used in the South African street-based lottery game fafi. The game, run by the Chinese community in South Africa and played predominantly by low-income black South Africans,…

This article examines the politics of translation in Iran in order to contribute to a debate in anthropology around cultural difference and epistemic violence. It does so through a critical exposition of the forced confession of an Iranian politician, …

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…

For Lévy-Bruhl, “primitive mentality” can shed light on the “passion” that drives the casino player, gambler, or financial speculator to continue at the risk of losing everything. He draws a parallel between the divinatory practices of “primitive” peop…

This comment on Levy-Bruhl’s essay on gambling has three parts. The first raises some linguistic and analytical questions and identifies some deficiencies in the author’s use of ideal-type analysis with reference to Max Weber’s approach. The second foc…

The response addresses Lévy-Bruhl’s 1926 essay, “Primitive mentality and games of chance,” focusing on the gambler’s role as an interpreter of the present for the sake of the future. Through a discussion of Lévy-Bruhl’s articulation of the gambler’s me…

As a young ethnographer, I was weirdly obsessed with closed doors and what was going on behind them. To some extent I still am. How come? Starting from my own obsession with closed doors and secrets in a fieldwork setting particularly prone to secrecy …

Drawing on fieldwork conducted at a Chinese state-owned enterprise brought to Angola in the postwar reconstruction boom, this article devotes sustained attention to a labor dispute between an Angolan laid-off worker and his former Chinese employers. Ca…

In this article, I analyze the ontology of the African oil palm among indigenous Marind communities in Merauke, West Papua. This introduced cash crop is conceptualized by Marind as tree and person, assailant and victim, and stranger and kin. Its ontolo…

The paper addresses ritual and quotidian aspects of bathing in thermal springs at Bakreswar, a Hindu pilgrimage site in India. Ascetics, priests, pilgrims, and scientists vouch for the mineral content and healing properties of the spring waters. Drawin…

This article explores the relevance of an ostensibly unpretentious gift exchange of squirrels and eggs in order to illuminate how asymmetric kin ties among the Khmu Yuan of Northern Laos are realized. Employing the concept of mutual recognition, it wil…

This article aims to extend the current understanding of ethical practice within a dementia context, in which people living with dementia are often taken for granted as mere beneficiaries of care, rather than as co-producers in day-to-day care practice…

In a paper published in 1926, Lévy-Bruhl suggests a close affinity between the mentality of the gambler and the diviner, putting forward the role of the unseen. Such a comparison is made too quickly as gambling and divining are not that similar but sub…

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 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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…