Category: English

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

The presence of new arrivals from the global South has provoked shifts in Stimmungen (collective moods) and a political backlash against social incorporation in Germany. This long-term study explores erotic apprehensions between Syrian refugees and Ger…

Party politics is an affective economy in which the generation and accumulation of positive sentiments achieve electoral success. In Dehradun, North India, party workers undertake activities to build and maintain affective relationships with voters, an…

Katherine Verdery is often thought of as a theorist of time and temporality. In “The ‘etatization’ of time in Ceauşescu’s Romania,” Verdery looked at how the socialist regime placed time itself in shortage. Yet, it is Verdery’s often critical geography…

In the modern state most laws enshrine practical social norms in a way that everyone can be aware of. Laws take a legalistic form, as generalizing rules and abstract categories. But turning to historical and ethnographic examples, we find legalistic ru…

This contribution highlights one of Katherine Verdery’s strengths as an anthropologist: her ability to recognize and penetrate foundational ideological formations to analyze the sociocultural dynamics at play. The ideological formations she has deciphe…

One measure of a scholar’s work is how long it continues to be relevant and useful. This article shows how The vanishing hectare and Transylvanian villagers, books written by Katherine Verdery twenty and forty years ago, respectively, help us make sens…

The article examines the impact of Katherine Verdery’s work on gender under socialism as exemplified by her article “From parent-state to family patriarchs: Gender and nation in contemporary Eastern Europe.”

This article examines the role of social class in the hijra (Islamic migration) of Dutch and Flemish Muslim women (born and converted) to Morocco. Through an ethnography of their home-making practices, I argue that analyzing social class is crucial to …

The socialist systems relied on particular flows of information, goods, and connections that not only enabled them to function, at least for a few decades, but also became intrinsic to the ways people living in these societies envisioned and experience…

Relative to Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, scant attention has been paid to the fate of formerly socialist states in Africa. One reason is that postcolonialism has served as the default analytic frame for everything Africa-related. Another re…

The recent literature on home has focused on the importance of imagination and performativity in the making of places. In this article, I bring together the imagined and the material dimensions of home-making, to show how people (re)attach themselves t…

Urban anthropology is a discipline that emerged only with great difficulty. Its origin in the Chicago school of sociology made the discipline dependent upon urban sociology. The ethnographic focus of the Chicago school was short-lived, overtaken by a s…

Drawing on Katherine Verdery’s Transylvanian villagers and fieldwork in Latvia, this article discusses triangulation as an imperial power device whereby one actor makes an alliance with another to influence a third. The social and political field withi…

As a foreign anthropologist in Romania in the 1970s and ’80s, Katherine Verdery was under observation by the secret police. Later, having obtained her files, she put the secret police under her own ethnographic observation. Her analyses are examined in…

The article describes Katherine Verdery’s intellectual contributions and interactions with her colleagues at the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University from 1977–1997.

This article introduces thirteen reflections on the scholarly contributions of anthropologist Katherine Verdery, Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center’s Department of An…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This is the introduction to the second part of a special section that spans two issues of Hau (14 [1] and 14 [2]). The articles in the special section focus on home and home-making and all that this entails for Muslims who have left their homes or cann…

The spiritual home of Ahmadiyya Muslims and physical home of their leader has moved from India to Pakistan to London in under a century. These relocations signal the communal dislocation and diasporic spread of Ahmadis. Some collective experiences of m…

This article focuses on home-making practices in a Turkish Muslim community in Brazil. Following their religious leader’s exhortations to make hicret (migration) to spread their worldview and expand their religious movement, committed Muslims decided t…

This article attempts to delineate what it means to be Shia in relation to home-making in Sunni-majority Bangladeshi society. Unlike longer established Shias, those primarily settled in Old Dhaka and who are integrated into Dhakaiya culture and linguis…

Following up on Steve Gudeman’s insight that economic categories are fundamentally cultural, this lecture juxtaposes different perspectives on money that transcend the conventional society/nature divide. It considers money as a unique semiotic phenomen…