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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…

What explains the wide support for the invasion of Ukraine in Russia in the first months after it started? Many alleged that this support reflects an imperialist ideology permeating Russian society and culture. Based on a large set of in-depth intervie…

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

This special section approaches “politics” from a specifically ethnographic point of view. It does this by privileging ethnographically derived political concepts rather than more familiar preestablished and supposedly universal categories of political…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which came on the heels of violent domestic protests in January 2022, elicited powerful reactions in postsocialist Kazakhstan. For the past thirty years Kazakhstan has been a close economic and political ally of Russia but…

The Russo-Ukrainian war raises the question about the utility of ethnography in understanding interstate war. As anthropology and sociology have historically punched below their weight when it comes to understanding interstate war and warfare, much of …

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is occupying the minds of pundits, scholars, and politicians worldwide and across the political spectrum. In the midst of these discussions, Eastern European voices have mobilized around claims to sovereignty as the ability…

This article explores the emergence and transformation of the concept of good governance in contemporary Thailand after the 1997 economic crisis to reveal how it morphed from a technocratic category to a moral one, central to conservative and anti-demo…

Increasingly over the past five years, the Russian government has been expanding its spheres of influence in Africa, chiefly via the operations of Wagner Group mercenaries. The Central African Republic has been a Wagner testing ground, a place where th…

This article takes up the question of “Russia’s influence in the world” by focusing on the impact of Russian state policy and military action on ethnographers working in Ukraine. Bringing foundational theories about psychological trauma into conversati…

This article takes up the loaded topic of “Russia in the world of Ukraine.” Now an object of official Russia’s aggressive attention, contemporary Ukraine presents a pressing case for reconsidering colonialism which, I propose, requires reconceptualizin…

People marching in the streets in Burma in 1988, infuriated by twenty-six years of military dictatorship, demanded the return of democracy. What they meant by the term reflected a hierarchical understanding of politics: elections would enable them to r…

The essays in this collection look into daily life in changing Russian spheres of influence, including Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan, the Central African Republic, and within Russia itself. They explore how the markers of sovereignty, nationalism, autono…

The state of most current political anthropology tends to be the modern nation-state, and relatively few works address questions posed by other state formations. Focusing on the Moroccan makhzan and the non-state institutional environment in which it o…

This article argues that political anthropology has never had a version of the substantivist/formalist debate that shaped economic anthropology. Instead, political anthropology tends to rely rather unselfconsciously on Western notions of power and indi…