Author: Nancy Munn

Fieldwork in philosophy amounts to a second-order philosophical anthropology. It examines contemporary forms of the human by attending to lower-level concepts and practices. It departs from Michel Foucault’s gray and meticulous approach to the history …

This short essay is a brief account of my encounters with Paul Rabinow over some thirty years, forming a close relationship although we were never in the same place for any length of time.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Rabinow turned to the study of emergent assemblages, which are rooted in the recent past and possess an uncertain future. The turn to assemblages therefore brings a distinctive temporality into view. Attending to this temp…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This essay poses the question of the timeliness of anthropological knowledge. Paul Rabinow’s writings suggest that anthropological research has a particular relationship to the demands of the present day. The role of the anthropologist is neither that …

In this paper I take the form of the fugue in music to query a contemporary dynamic. It is one where hopefulness entwines with worrisome, oppressive realities that pervade biosocial trends concerning race. Genetic ancestry testing, forensic uses of DNA…

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…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This article analyzes a certification process undertaken by Sateré-Mawé indigenous people from the Brazilian Amazon, as part of a “global localization” strategy aimed to reappropriate a plant that is both cultivated and globalized. Through their attemp…

This article examines how Guyana’s storm early warning system shapes political imaginaries of climate adaptation. Specifically, it focuses on the reactions people have to the forms of gridlock that can make intense flooding, and climate change more gen…

Taking air pollution in Copenhagen as a case of environmental change, this article discusses the different ways that data are employed in processes of witnessing this change. We distinguish between three different modes of “data witnessing”—modest, imp…

Expectations that research should not only generate real-world impacts but do so in a way that provides “value-for-money” pervade academia and the contemporary knowledge economy. In agricultural research for development, this imperative has spawned “to…

This Festschrift presents essays from a symposium organized in honor of Paul Rabinow. Our hope is that, collectively, the essays offer a sense of the evolution and range of the topics and problems Rabinow investigated, and the diverse projects of anthr…

This article re-engages with Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco, originally published in 1977, to consider the ways in which social inequalities frame the possibilities and outcomes of fieldwork. It also reflects on the ways in which bo…

In this article, I establish some reasons why neurodivergent (ND) people are unlocatable in anthropology and examine a fundamental crisis of mis/under-representing being-ND-in-the-world. I begin with a critique of anthropological ethics at large, disen…

This article compares two case studies: that of Anna O., whose hysteria helped found psychoanalysis, with that of possessed Wolof priestess Khady Fall. Questioning the psychic separation of the modern subject, I contend that cultures with a spirit idio…

This article reviews accounts of “hugging” across evolutionary paradigms to expose how understandings of gesture are shaped by scientific theorizations of the ways humans and animals differ. The divergent roles assigned to gesture in human communicatio…

In the anthropology of ethics there has been a growing interest in the concept of freedom, defined as the tool of consciousness that enables people to reflect on themselves and their circumstances, and make decisions about what they ought to do. The be…

In the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), yoyowa (consistently translated as “witches” by English-speaking Trobrianders) are a constant threat, causing illness and death to those who arouse their envy or ire. While some women are widely known…

This article investigates people’s experiences of residing close to a municipal waste facility site. Its focus is on perceived dilemmas, including odors, noises, loose garbage, and stray animals, but also on how these dilemmas were overshadowed by othe…

This article draws on Judith Butler’s distinction between censorship and foreclosure, and on Saidiya Hartman’s work about how to narrate the silences of the slave trade, to explore two photographs. The first is a dismembered and reassembled family phot…

Despite their centrality to foundational conceptions of relations in anthropology and their casual use in contemporary discourse, “connections” are only rarely problematized and reflected upon. “Connection” is a key emic concept among neoforagers who e…

Paul Rabinow’s essay “Midst anthropology’s problems,” published in Cultural Anthropology in 2001, is both a midpoint and a point of inflection in Rabinow’s intellectual trajectory. It offers a vantage on the sweep of his work as it is addressed by the …