Them-you-us
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Author: Nancy Munn
What’s in a family?
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Dancing, singing, and ethnography as political acts
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
People who live in glass houses: Author as subject, Subject as author
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
On fuzziness
This article is a consideration of the conceptual power of Verdery’s concept of “fuzzy property.” “Fuzzy property” has helped me understand the phenomenon of lupiaje in Guanajuato, Mexico—where men enter silver-gold mines at night to extract ore—by fol…
Suspicion, empathy, and the archival imagination
This article celebrates Katherine Verdery’s impact on the discipline of cultural anthropology through an exploration of the intersection of suspicion, empathy, and the archival imagination in ethnographic research, drawing on Verdery’s experiences duri…
Writing kinship from within
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Introduction to the Hau film symposium on The Thirty Boys
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
What was fascism?
In her influential monographs and essays, Katherine Verdery transformed understandings of state socialism and the command economy at its heart. I reflect here on how scholars might similarly reframe understandings of Italian fascism through renewed att…
Writing family: Diaspora and self-representation in autoethnography
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Beneath a modernist roof: A critical autoethnography
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
The Thirty Boys: The filmmaker’s reflections
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Spying and doing fieldwork in the East
This article reflects on the anthropological scholarship of Katherine Verdery, especially her last book, My life as a spy, to explore the conditions of doing fieldwork and producing knowledge in the European East during the Cold War and onwards. In par…
One hundred years of habitude: Reflections on Michael Lambek’s Behind the glass
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Katherine Verdery at Hopkins 1977–1997
The article describes Katherine Verdery’s intellectual contributions and interactions with her colleagues at the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University from 1977–1997.
On critical African postsocialisms
Relative to Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, scant attention has been paid to the fate of formerly socialist states in Africa. One reason is that postcolonialism has served as the default analytic frame for everything Africa-related. Another re…
Urban anthropology or anthropology in the city Does Lefebvre hold the key to escape this cul-de-sac?
Urban anthropology is a discipline that emerged only with great difficulty. Its origin in the Chicago school of sociology made the discipline dependent upon urban sociology. The ethnographic focus of the Chicago school was short-lived, overtaken by a s…
Law as ritual: Evoking an ideal order
In the modern state most laws enshrine practical social norms in a way that everyone can be aware of. Laws take a legalistic form, as generalizing rules and abstract categories. But turning to historical and ethnographic examples, we find legalistic ru…
An appreciation of Katherine Verdery’s My life as a spy: Investigations in a secret police file
As a foreign anthropologist in Romania in the 1970s and ’80s, Katherine Verdery was under observation by the secret police. Later, having obtained her files, she put the secret police under her own ethnographic observation. Her analyses are examined in…
Erotic apprehension in Syrian and German encounters
The presence of new arrivals from the global South has provoked shifts in Stimmungen (collective moods) and a political backlash against social incorporation in Germany. This long-term study explores erotic apprehensions between Syrian refugees and Ger…
Time and space in the work of Katherine Verdery
Katherine Verdery is often thought of as a theorist of time and temporality. In “The ‘etatization’ of time in Ceauşescu’s Romania,” Verdery looked at how the socialist regime placed time itself in shortage. Yet, it is Verdery’s often critical geography…
Desiring home: A long-term ethnography of a mosque in Lisbon
The recent literature on home has focused on the importance of imagination and performativity in the making of places. In this article, I bring together the imagined and the material dimensions of home-making, to show how people (re)attach themselves t…
Introduction
This article introduces thirteen reflections on the scholarly contributions of anthropologist Katherine Verdery, Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center’s Department of An…
“I feel like we skipped a social class”: The role of social class in the hijra of Dutch and Flemish Muslim women to Morocco
This article examines the role of social class in the hijra (Islamic migration) of Dutch and Flemish Muslim women (born and converted) to Morocco. Through an ethnography of their home-making practices, I argue that analyzing social class is crucial to …
The affective economy of democracy: Women’s adverse incorporation in party politics in Dehradun, North India
Party politics is an affective economy in which the generation and accumulation of positive sentiments achieve electoral success. In Dehradun, North India, party workers undertake activities to build and maintain affective relationships with voters, an…