People, plants, plantations: Responses and reflections
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Category: English
An anathema for memory loss
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Grey zones of the imagination
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Of sago, songs, and stories
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
If oil palm is an agent in West Papua, it is a White agent
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Practicing restraint
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Materiality, caring, and body memory in Bellido Valdivia’s Perpetual Person
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Plantation capitalism as categorical violence
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Avatar, personified: Split personhood on an ethical online support group
Studies of digital life have theorized the heuristic value of theoretical and emic boundaries and/or the interconnectedness of online and offline selves, often with a focus on the curation of an online self whose distinctiveness must be methodologicall…
Gillison’s gift
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Invention and grace: Taking turns in a streetcorner bureaucracy
This article analyzes the styles of work and conflict of a group of electrical contractors who congregate across the street from a power utility office in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Drawing on a rich tradition of urban Africanist ethnography, as well as …
Learning about “human”
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Islam L.A. style: Talking back to America through Islamic discourses
In this article, I explore distinct ways in which Iranian American mosque-goers in Southern California understand and define Islam. I argue that rather than relying on authoritative Islamic sources and discourses, Iranian Angelenos primarily characteri…
On Gillian Gillison’s primal aggression
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Portrayal of the vital world of a person living with Alzheimer’s, drawing on a close and intimate case
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
“Today, we teach the kids where we are from”: Event filmmaking and diasporic home-making among Indian Muslims in North America
How do people make themselves at home in situations of movement, dispersal, and marginalization? Migration scholars have destabilized the idea that a home is bound to a dwelling, and developed more processual ways of conceptualizing home. In this artic…
Facets of charity: Muslim ethics, postcolonial dynamics, and community-making in Portugal
This article examines the networks of charity developed by Muslims to discuss community-making in Portugal. Giving allows donors to create affective and moral spaces of communal life with recipients of aid that move beyond the ethical and pious dimensi…
The Egyptian communities in Milan: Ideas of home, home-making, and care at the time of COVID-19
The Egyptian communities in Milan are among the oldest and largest migrant communities in Italy, their history dating back to the 1970s. Following in-depth ethnographic research, this article explores their members’ representations and understandings o…
Can the umma replace the nation? Salafism, home-making and the territorial nation-state
Engaging with contemporary literature on migration and home-making, in this article I examine Salafi concepts of home and its relationship to the idea of nation-state. I discuss how Salafism, a transnational Islamic proselytizing movement, strives to c…
“What does the heart want?”: Being seen, “heart ethnography,” and knowledge through surrender in a Bashkir Sufi circle in Russia
Drawing on fieldwork in a Bashkir Sufi circle in Russia, this article explores my interlocutors’ mode of experiencing the world and transcendence. By letting myself be seen in the field, I let them shape the terms of our encounter as a way of glimpsing…
Introduction: Movement, faith, and home in Muslim communities in the diaspora
Here we introduce a special section that spans this and the next issue of Hau. The articles in the section focus on home and home-making and all that this entails for Muslims who have left their homes or cannot be fully at home in their home places. Ac…
Staying behind: Divine presence, virtuous emplacement, and sabr at the end of life among older Kyrgyz Muslims
Drawing on fieldwork among older Kyrgyz people who become old in the absence of their relatives, this paper explores the afterlife as a horizon of possibility which intersects with the everyday in ways that collapse distinctions between the transcenden…
Dreaming the path: Ontological shifts in a Sufi order in Afghanistan
This article examines dream practices among a Sufi community in present-day Afghanistan. The main argument revolves around the question of how preparing for, expecting, and communally negotiating the veracity of dreams stands in a process of individual…
Rethinking the anthropological enterprise in light of Muslim ontologies: Secular vestiges, spiritual epistemologies, vertical knowledge
Because of the difficulty anthropology continues to face in relinquishing its secular vestiges, field encounters with not-immediately-perceptible reality, the realm of God, the invisible, and the otherworldly have usually been removed or deemed insigni…
Voicing God’s presence: Qurʾānic recitation, Sufi ontologies, and the theatro-graphic experience
This article examines Qurʾānic recitation as a modality of divine presence among Bā ʿAlawī Sufis in Tarīm (Yemen) and Jakarta (Indonesia). It engages with Sufi ontologies that have shaped Bā ʿAlawīs’ understanding of Qurʾānic recitation as capable of e…