Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
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…
Seeing landscapes change seems to be an inevitable and ubiquitous experience in times of global warming. Yet, landscape change is often underestimated, depending on how that change is perceived, experienced, and articulated over time. Like other agricu…
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
This introduction to a special section, “Revisiting the Azande,” summarizes the historical context and theoretical insights of the classic ethnography Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande, by E. E. Evans-Pritchard. It describes developments …
Rereading Evans-Prichard’s classic fifty-five years later turned out to be a confusing experience. On the one hand, it confirmed the admiration I always had for the author’s clarity and the quality of his ethnography. On the other, there seemed to be a…
Colonial rule in Sudan altered kingship and ended the kingdom among the Azande and neighboring groups. Yet the ruling clan, the Avongara, and the lineage of the precolonial Azande kings and chiefs continued. A century elapsed before a new institution, …
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
La complejidad del desarrollo humano sustentable contiene imbricados una multiplicidad de factores convergentes, coincidentes y divergentes en el tiempo presente, que conllevan ciertas tendencias o proyecciones a medio y largo plazo. Los ele…