We are unhousing people and so are obliged to rehouse them: The moral economy of squatting
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Category: English
Ethics and the spacetime discontinuum
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
When we were modern
This essay situates Paul Rabinow’s work on modernist planning relative to the discipline of anthropology at the end of the 1980s, recalling the significance of treating modernity as an ethos.
Concept-work: In its passions and throes
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.
Empathy, solidarity, and the work of law and humanitarianism
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Risky business: Temporal vulnerabilities in contested spaces
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
If only there was a Department of Fieldwork in Philosophy
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 …
From ethics to politics
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Between justice and goodness
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Everyday forgiveness: The practice and politics of mercy
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Sentiment and pragmatics in Teheran
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Law, society, and the anthropology of noncontemporaneous contemporary
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
The work of uncertainty: Relational aesthetics in contemporary Iran
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Born again, again: Witchcraft, Pentecostal conversions, and spiritual rebirth in the Trobriand Islands
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…
Situated inconveniences and short-term temporalities: Experiences of living close to a waste facility site
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…
Censorship, foreclosure, and the three deaths of Fengzhen
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…
Connectionwork: “Connection” in the practices and perspectives of Israeli neoforagers
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…
Found again in translation? Standardizing the authenticity of guaraná among the Sateré-Mawé people (Brazilian Amazon)
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…
Data witnessing: Making sense of urban air in Copenhagen, Denmark
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…
Gridlock: Vigilance and early warning in the shadow of climate change
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…
Tools for an efficient witness: Deskilling science and devaluing labor at an agro-environmental research institute
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…
Preface: An anthropologist of the contemporary
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…
Fieldwork: Problems we are still required to think
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…
Paul Rabinow, midst anthropology’s problems
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 …
“I like you being here”: To understand and be understood through illustration
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…