Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
This article follows Mihnea Tănăsescu’s (2022) call for critical scholarship on rights of nature to examine empirically how and why such rights are used. It does so using the example of resistance to mining in the Ecuadorian Íntag region. Drawing on fi…
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Book review of “Haller, Tobias, Karina Liechti, Martin Stuber, François-Xavier Viallon, and Rahel Wunderli (eds.). Balancing the Commons in Switzerland. Institutional Transformations and Sustainable Innovations. 2021. London: Routledge.
This special issue of the Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology focuses on assembly practices as a tool for collective decision-making within human groups that claim multiple forms of political autonomy from States. The aim of this dossier is to …
In Spain, the 15M movement organised itself into self-managed assemblies in public squares, going beyond the militant circles to which these practices had hitherto been confined. Based on an ethnographic study conducted over a ten-year period in Madrid…
In the Peruvian Amazon’s lower Marañón basin, the prospect of an indigenous assembly appears unlikely: how can previously semi-nomadic groups, historically immersed in recurrent warfare, come together in a cohesive political entity? This transformation…
In 2010, following the approval of the constitutional right of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples and nations to political autonomy, the new Ministry of Autonomies is rushing to enforce it in various pilot indigenous municipalities. One of the candidates is …
The article provides an empirical insight into urban initiatives that advocate for better urban mobility infrastructures and outlines a theoretical perspective of commoning infrastructures as a terrain for political struggles. Rather than constructing …
This article draws on participant observation in a legal battle at the Quebec Superior Court in 2022, where the Kanien’kehá:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) sought an injunction to halt excavation work around a hospital where Indigenous victims of med…
This article focuses on attempts by inhabitants of the island of Samothraki, in North-Eastern Greece, to make sense of rapid soil erosion and degradation. Through the use of ethnographic vignettes, collected during my first fieldwork on the island in A…
El reciente auge del ciclismo urbano en Santiago ha convertido la movilidad y planificación urbana en un tema central para pensar los espacios públicos. La adaptación de la morfología de la capital chilena en función de las necesidades del a…
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
This article examines the flux and reflux of commitment to jihad among immigrants to Syria. Contrary to a linear and often teleological view of commitment to jihad—radical individuals joining the most radical contemporary organization—migration to Syri…
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
This article unpacks the different trajectories of a once-unified Zande people through a focus on their respective positions in the nation-states of South Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR). While the Zande people live at the margins of their…
Benge, the famous chicken poison oracle that Evans-Pritchard vividly described in his classic ethnography, subsequently disappeared from Zande lore. While contemporary Azande still talk about the vanished benge sorrowfully, the society turned to a neig…
Mangu, what Evans-Pritchard translated into English as “witchcraft” and around which he built his landmark ethnography, has disappeared among the South Sudanese Azande. But other kinds of witchcraft and magic (ngua) arise continuously. Drawing on anthr…
In Western Equatoria, South Sudan, witchcraft accusations enable a narrativization of the material processes of predation that undergird the state, in a sphere adjacent to that of formal politics. These accusations critique the political economy of the…
This photographic essay presents material and findings from a documentation project on the gugu (slit drum) carried out in Western Equatoria State of South Sudan between 2021 and 2023. These wooden drums, which can stand up to five feet high, are often…
Although some Kakataibo women say that their elders did not know romantic love and that they learned it only recently by going to the city, that romantic love is actually having a hard time taking root in Indigenous Amazonia. This article explores some…
Standard Euro-American ideas of sincerity revolve around an idea of the transparent alignment of one’s outer acts with the inner self, such that the audience can clearly deduce the latter from the former. The development and spread of such ideas has be…
This article investigates the affective vitality of the technical in Japanese android-making through the creation of the android Alter and its artistic performance in the “android opera” Scary Beauty. By following the technical processes invested in Al…