Author: Nancy Munn

In the Chinese bureaucracy, where political imperatives for maintaining harmony require people to restrain negative affects, officials often express anger and aggression through silence, apathy, and other flat affects. Other times, overly positive spee…

This article rethinks the politics of fear through the researcher’s ethnography in Hong Kong. Fear is often explored as a tool of manipulation that disempowers people. In contrast, the bodies, subjectivities, and actions of the fearful people are rarel…

Under the current Xi administration, China has marked December 13 as the national public Memorial Day for the Nanjing Massacre’s victims. The reaffirmation of this historical trauma under Xi continues the official narrative of the rejuvenation of a hum…

If there is such a thing as a dominant public sphere in post-reform China, its emotional tonality has often been described as overwhelmingly positive, as evidenced by the recent focus on “happiness” campaigns or state-promoted “positive energy.” This s…

The rise of psychological counseling, 心理咨询, as part of China’s unfolding psy-boom has brought with it a new discourse of distress. In particular, this article will look at the concept of 心理困扰/困惑, which I translate as “psychological troubles.” By identi…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Beginning November 2020, over two hundred thousand farmers have gathered in a prolonged sit-in on the borders of New Delhi. The immediate impetus for the protests was the passage of three laws that ease the entry of agribusiness into the agricultural s…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Scholars, intellectuals, and left-wing activists have recently come to reflect on the hostility and exclusion of Hong Kong protesters against mainland Chinese in the city’s democratic movement. This article is a response to the critical voice. Borrowin…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This essay situates Paul Rabinow’s work on modernist planning relative to the discipline of anthropology at the end of the 1980s, recalling the significance of treating modernity as an ethos.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This essay explores touchstones in the thought and teaching of Paul Rabinow, connecting his work on biosociality and modernizing practices to deeper commitments. The theme of “experiments in form” is explored and the question of the value of a life of …

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Collaboration is a key thread in the wide-ranging experimental work of Paul Rabinow. This experimental work of giving form to a collaborative ethics of anthropology can be seen in the crucible of experience and experimentation (foyer d’expérience) know…

What matters is not what we know but how we learn. This principle of inquiry shapes Paul Rabinow’s life work. It is also an ethics, an aspiration. This principle sustains the practice of problematization, or the delineation of zones of inquiry in terms…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory