Category: English

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This article weaves together major lines of inquiry in the anthropology of Christianity and Islam to consider how to approach and think about transcendence within anthropology at large. It does so by exploring one particular kind of Muslim ontology and…

Through the example of migrants staying at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in north-western Kenya, I show what art consumption and production means for people living in marginalised and restricted places in East Africa. With its 30 years of existence Kakuma re…

The autobiography of Nicco ye Mbajo (1950–2021) provides insight into the life of an artist and his experiences as a cultural producer in Tanzania from independence to recent times. Belonging to the first generation of modern cultural producers, Mbajo …

In February 2017, a poem titled “Muddici” (‘Plaintiff’) by Hargeysa-based poet Weedhsame went viral on social media. The poem accused members of Somaliland’s government of corruption and quickly elicited a series of supporting and opposing responses. T…

This paper examines the cartoons of Marco Tibasima, which portray the education system of Tanzania as dysfunctional and heading towards a bleak future. Through cartoons published in Habari Leo, NGO booklets, and on his blog, Tibasima provides a diagnos…

Artists in eastern Africa use songs, poems, fiction, cartoons, and other artistic forms to explore their lived experiences and future possibilities. Through their art they can envision alternatives to their current experiences, contest social and polit…

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. In the spring of 2023, the ninth European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) took place in Cologne. Though not unexpected (or unusual) this event sparked critical comments and questions. As the organisers, we understa…

Historically, the study of human anatomy has had a very complex relationship with race and racism in the United States. Today, BIPOC students are disproportionately excluded from the health sciences, in part because anatomy courses play the role of “ga…