Author: Nancy Munn

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This article argues that China’s National College Entrance Exam, the Gaokao, provides routinized charismatic ratification of elite merit and state authority. In his writings, Max Weber differentiates between original and routinized charisma. Whereas or…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

According to Latour, religion and science have nothing in common. The two are successful (or failing) in quite different ways. Religiousness is not aimed at fact-making, but at presence-making, he says. To critically reconsider these ideas, I discuss t…

Most ethnographers have little use for models and other formal abstractions, yet even a staunch empiricist such as Franz Boas could appreciate the “aesthetic” advantages of idealization and simplification. These advantages have been largely ignored in …

This essay radicalizes the call for foreignizing translation in anthropology by pushing translation beyond a reference to an anthropological self. What I recognize as “burning translations” responds to the abolitionist call for “letting anthropology bu…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Asking who gets to compare, this paper advocates inclusive research methodologies through a discussion of comparison and collaboration in urban anthropology. It reports on difficulties in trying to include otherwise excluded perspectives that have part…

Although so-called “psychedelic” substances have recently experienced a revival of interest in their therapeutic properties, the underpinnings of their effectiveness remain poorly understood. Based on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in a P…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Translation—both multi- and intra-lingual—is vital to anthropological method. Drawing a distinction between two opposing modes of translation (“domesticating” versus “foreignizing”), this paper considers the ontological and ethical consequences of thes…

This article considers the problem of translation and radical interpretation from a post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspective, and challenges the notion of concept, language, and difference being mobilized by Philip Swift.

Vdra-ba society in western Sichuan, China, has been represented by evolutionist Chinese scholars as a primitive matrilineal society that was in transition to a patrilineal system, and it has been likened to that of the Na/Moso. This is a misleading cha…

In the Quechua community of Coipasi (Bolivia) relations between the living and the dead (almas—souls) swing between excess and containment, remembrance and distancing. The aim of this article is to show that the emotivity of the spirits plays a fundame…

The Turkish state strictly bans funerals and other forms of public mourning for Kurdish guerrillas, considering them to be a threat to the sovereign state. Victims of honor crimes are also denied proper burials, as they are accused of “ruining” their f…

In this article I discuss the ways in which the Turkish state uses Islam as a weapon to delegitimize and render unnecessary Kurdish distinctiveness and associated rights claims. Drawing on the particular discourse employed by Turkish president Recep Ta…

This article revolves around the theoretical and ethnographic experiences of an ongoing anthropological study with contemporary Aymara families about how “education by attention” is produced throughout their cosmopraxis. At the same time, it explores h…

The emerging movement to decolonize the sciences, social sciences, and humanities has emphasized the differences between Indigenous and Western scientific ways of knowing. Paradoxically, emphasizing the difference between these systems has also been th…

This article discusses the transformative potential of Turkey’s pro-democracy movement which has emerged out of a long history of Kurdish political struggle. It looks at the development of a two-fold strategy that understands internal transformation as…

As youngsters in a Pakistani megacity participate in a reading group to discuss the end of time by looking at the eschatological prophecies in Islamic religious sources, they come to relate apparently trivial political actions such as wall-painting, pl…

This article, through various ethnographic encounters, highlights the advantages and explores the challenges of fieldwork for a female researcher studying what might be taken to be her own community. Doing a native anthropology in a marginal borderland…

In this article, I explore the role of religious discourses and practices in the diasporic Kurdish-Turkish conflict and investigate the ways in which presentations of the political conflict has been disseminated and reproduced via Turkish mosques locat…

The critique of belief as an analytical tool in anthropology has overshadowed belief as an ethnographic reality. This article short-circuits these debates over the politics of belief by elaborating ethnographically the indigenous use of the concept—lit…