Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
This article centers on a close reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s The golden bough, showing how Wittgenstein’s Remarks offer a prescient view of anthropology. More than a critique of Frazerian evolutionism, the Remarks sit on the ver…
In this article, I describe a “magical” dimension in the work of home organizers (HOs) in Belgium. HOs, I argue, as professional organizers, not only help their clients to deal with the disorder and clutter of their homes but deliver a promise of magic…
In his essay on the cockfight, Clifford Geertz charted a now familiar course in anthropological argument. He showed how the minute details of a practice can dramatize cultural ideas about it. Many anthropologists since have been persuaded that “practic…
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
This article discusses two distinct notions of harm, wakllichishka and oil harm, and two distinct ways of shaping bodies. Following postcolonial and decolonial insights, I develop an approach that deploys two Indigenous concepts—wakllichishka, and not …
Using theoretical debates about how to deploy reflexivity in ethnographic research to contextualize anthropological knowledge, this article begins with an awkward encounter between an anthropologist from the Global South and a research participant to r…
To explain how Namibian pastoralists envision the future of the climate and the environment, I develop a phenomenological framework that uses objects and events (e.g., their livestock, people, drought) as entry points. When pastoralism structured most …
The mummy of the Altaian Princess is one of the best-known cases of repatriation of human remains in Russia. Drawing on a comparative ethnography of two Siberian museums that conserved her body before and after the return, this article approaches the m…
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
The recent anthropological focus on “ordinary ethics” emerges out of a concern to attend to the ethical aspect of social action that is intrinsic to the human condition. Ethnographic and theoretical contributions to this literature have drawn on a vari…
Economy and emulation are freighted concepts. They draw attention to universal phenomena, the forms of which vary according to social organization, and in particular the dynamics of (in)equality. Socialist modernization, which is explored here in the c…
This article examines the phenomenon of migration in India’s villages. Drawing on research in Jharkhand and Maharashtra and selected village ethnographies it illustrates how migration shapes village histories, politics, and socialities. It presents a s…
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
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
While studies of responsibility have been concerned with the ways responsibility is traced to accountable human persons or institutions, the deflection of responsibility to nonhumans that are not accountable has been neglected. Such deflections may fol…
The concept of defense-respect is elaborated here as a cornerstone of Urarina ethics and politics and an alternative to the concept of respect inherited from the Kantian tradition. While similarly expressing a kind of liberal and egalitarian ethos, it …
This essay articulates a framework for understanding radical alterity in the aftermath of the abandonment of strong claims about ontological pluralism in recent works by key figures in anthropology’s Ontological Turn. Arguing that both ontological anth…
The phrase “Roma politics” has come to designate several topics, such as the movement for Roma rights, relations between Roma and non-Roma, or the maintenance of social order in a given group, but these have rarely been addressed together. This is what…
Political subjectivities that are produced outside the realm of formal politics and activism often go unnoticed in scholarly analyses. This essay explores forms of embodied feminist testimony in the Republic of Guinea that emerge from a community of da…