Brotherhood at times of war: Reviewing the film Unwritten Letters
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Category: English
Reflections on Unwritten Letters and the neorealism of contingency
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Reflections on the healing power of collaborative filmmaking: The case of Unwritten Letters
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Time, grief, and hope on film
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Catharsis after the hangover: A focus on Unwritten Letters
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Deflecting responsibility: Spirits in Southeast Asia and “systems” in Western modernity
While studies of responsibility have been concerned with the ways responsibility is traced to accountable human persons or institutions, the deflection of responsibility to nonhumans that are not accountable has been neglected. Such deflections may fol…
Amazonia by steam: Vicissitudes of a geometric revolution
In the 1890s, at the height of the rubber boom, steamboats dominate the rivers of Bolivian Amazonia. The technophile discourse of the period presents the steamer as a revolution that changes everything: it allows social progress and economic developmen…
In defense of the heart: An Amazonian politics of respect
The concept of defense-respect is elaborated here as a cornerstone of Urarina ethics and politics and an alternative to the concept of respect inherited from the Kantian tradition. While similarly expressing a kind of liberal and egalitarian ethos, it …
Introduction: Evidence, ambiguity, and expression in Big Mouth
This Forum brings together a group of interdisciplinary scholars who reflect with us about our film-in-progress, Big Mouth, about defamation, sexual violence, and advocacy in Guinea. In this introductory essay, we lay out the complex constellation of e…
Living in a world of others: A politics of grace and favors in a Romanian mahala
The phrase “Roma politics” has come to designate several topics, such as the movement for Roma rights, relations between Roma and non-Roma, or the maintenance of social order in a given group, but these have rarely been addressed together. This is what…
Multimodal feminist testimony: On ambiguity, embodiment, and evidence in Guinea
Political subjectivities that are produced outside the realm of formal politics and activism often go unnoticed in scholarly analyses. This essay explores forms of embodied feminist testimony in the Republic of Guinea that emerge from a community of da…
From parasitic feudalism to responsible hierarchy: The emergence of a “political” vocabulary among the Sora of Tribal India
The Sora language reveals a sharp division between the vocabulary of command and rule, with no terms of indigenous origin for such positions or procedures, and an indigenous vocabulary of intimate negotiation among horizontal equals to regulate daily l…
Failures of being: The Christian promise of acceptance in Sinja, Nepal
“Being” can be a heavy burden to carry in Sinja, Nepal. The lack of a given self comparable to the Christian soul makes the struggle for being a potentially life-threatening affair, especially when circumstances impede the fulfillment of social expecta…
At the track: Gambling on the science of anthropology
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
“Again you will plant vineyards”: Prophecy, Jewish settlement, and temporal dissonance in the occupied West Bank
Studies of prophecy in the context of Judaism have predominantly attended to how messianic sects react when prophecies fail to be fulfilled; they have drawn on the concept of cognitive dissonance to explain how such setbacks tend to bolster rather than…
A perspective on science, ontology, and reflexivity
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Life-giving and death-dealing powers
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Media witnessing and the feminist labors of making survivors believable
This article examines the work survivors of sexual violence and abuse do to assert their credibility and the labor, in turn, that feminist journalists and activists do to help make victims and survivors believable. Drawing on a video clip made by the s…
Filming as being, images as evidence
When is film taken as evidence of the past and of truths in the world and when does the content become less significant than the practice of making images itself? The meaning of moving images change as the material and cultural logics and technologies …
Witnessing, refusal, and the conditions of investigation: Negotiating promises and pitfalls in interwoven projects of judicial truth-telling and documentary filmmaking
The contested evidentiary status and supposed ambiguity of a survivor’s video points to a central challenge in the making of our film, Big Mouth, which addresses a broader context of risks to journalists reporting on sexual violence. We believe and sup…
The tone of justice: Voicing the perpetrator-as-victim in sexual assault cases
Social and legal disputes around sexual violence commonly involve a pattern in which those alleged to have committed violence instead portray themselves as victims, often successfully so. As part of the Forum on evidence and ambiguity in the Big Mouth …
Marshall Sahlins, where are you? From the intellectual to the existential
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Untamed Amazonia: Comments on an enchanted book
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Not “multiple ontologies” but ontic capaciousness: Radical alterity after the ontological turn
This essay articulates a framework for understanding radical alterity in the aftermath of the abandonment of strong claims about ontological pluralism in recent works by key figures in anthropology’s Ontological Turn. Arguing that both ontological anth…
A treasury of ideas
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory