Author: Nancy Munn

The essays in this collection look into daily life in changing Russian spheres of influence, including Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan, the Central African Republic, and within Russia itself. They explore how the markers of sovereignty, nationalism, autono…

This article takes up the loaded topic of “Russia in the world of Ukraine.” Now an object of official Russia’s aggressive attention, contemporary Ukraine presents a pressing case for reconsidering colonialism which, I propose, requires reconceptualizin…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

In the acknowledgments to the English translation of “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism,” Eduardo Vivieros de Castro (: 484) cryptically states that “After this article has reached its present form, I read an essay by Fritz Krause … whic…

Rosie used to say that there was nobody else like her. Her idiosyncratic way of living was an aesthetic recreation of the social that was partly informed by normative sociality while transgressing many aspects of it. She was an eccentric street fashion…

Given the predominantly secular approach towards religion by anthropologists and sociologists, we contend that a discussion of the researcher’s positionality with regard to faith and belief, as well as the autoethnographic approach in pilgrimage studie…

Activities undertaken during everyday commutes have often been studied to prove the inherent value of travel time to the commuters. Women commuters using the ladies’ compartments of the Mumbai local trains use this time to eat and share food, shop, chi…

This brief biography of the German ethnologist Fritz Krause (1881–1963) sketches his life story, some of the intellectual influences that impacted his work, and elucidates the scholarly context in which the article “Maske und Ahnenfigur: Das Motiv der …

This article draws almost exclusively from Chinese-language social media sites with connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to present the grim reality faced by Uyghurs and Kazakhs. Applying a “research search” approach to digital ethnography,…

This paper seeks to explore the epistemic role of testimonies in the ongoing Uyghur crisis, as well as their development in patterns and focus. It first unfolds the metanarrative of the Uyghur genocide and shows how it has increasingly shaped individua…

This article proposes an analysis of local politics through an ethnographic exploration of headship. It approaches the experience and enactment of politics by describing a day in the life of a headman in rural lowland Myanmar to show how an individual …

Discussions of embodiment in the virtual world mostly focus on online games and virtual reality technologies. By taking the case of Indonesian buzzers—persons employed to propagate opinions on certain issues or products—we argue that social media platf…

Since 2017, it has become increasingly undeniable that crimes against humanity are occurring in the area now known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. This article examines the particular ethical dilemmas posed to China-focused academics by these…

Contemporary life across the globe is awash with enterprises, programs, and practices that purport to foster self-alteration. Developing the self; self-care; transcending the self; self-actualization; expressing the self; empowering it: the myriad of t…

The confusions, intimacies, and distress of war are common to the experience of journalists reporting from war zones, yet the professional conventions of war reportage erase these experiences from the commodity journalists produce. Journalists are left…

This article asks whether Uyghurs should be considered an Indigenous people. In doing so, it highlights the contested issues this question raises and seeks to initiate a more comprehensive debate on the question among Uyghurs themselves, who ultimately…

Building on anthropological observations of the Chinese state’s specific strategies and practices in the field of international diplomacy and engagement with the media, this article describes how the Chinese state aims to influence and shape the intern…

This article reflects on relations between individual and cultural experience to illuminate how anthropologists and political scientists approach Uyghur narratives of genocide. Uyghur perspectives are often overlooked in global media coverage that repr…

Theories of the gift agree that social relations are (re)generated through gift-giving between groups and individuals. Landscape studies have also shown how people weave relations between humans, nonhumans, and their environment through walking. This a…

In 2021 state statistics demonstrated that for the first time in modern history the Uyghur population itself has begun to recede. This demographic shift is the result of both endemic family separation and the implementation of systematic gynecological …

This article draws on two examples of encounters with the limits of fog capture in Lima to frame limitations as creative resources for ethnographic inquiry. In both examples, fog capture rendered speculatively conceivable previously backgrounded urban …

Scholars of life in Xinjiang have faced unprecedented stakes and uncertainty in recent years. Access to the region and its people is curtailed, and the information coming out of it is limited both by state efforts to obfuscate the details of conditions…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

In his analysis of the frontier genocides waged against the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia, Benjamin Madley () identified three phases. The first is initiated by colonial invasion: economic and political fricti…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory