Showing papers in "Hau: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory in 2011"

Foreword: The return of ethnographic theory

Abstract: Take an ethnographer. She has spent more than thirty months in the Bocage in Mayenne studying witchcraft. ‘How exciting, how thrilling, how extraordinary...! Tell us all about the witches’, she is asked again and again when she gets back to the city. Just as one might say: tell us tales about ogres and wolves, about Little Red Riding Hood. Frighten us, but make it clear that it’s only a story; or that they are just peasants: credulous, backward and marginal. Or alternatively: confirm that out there there are some people who can bend the laws of causality and morality, who can kill by magic and not be punished; but remember to end by saying that they do not really have that power. . . . Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly words ([1977] 1980)

Ethnography as theory

Abstract: Ethnography is never mere description, rather it is a theory of describing that has always been controversial as to the what and how thus inspiring a dynamic intellectual process. The process has been methodologically eclectic and innovative, governed by both consensual and outdated rules. Throughout more than hundred years of Anglo-American ethnography, observation has been combined with a wide variety of theoretical outlooks from structured-functionalist to critical writings.

Mixing methods, tasting fingers: Notes on an ethnographic experiment

Abstract: This article reports on an ethnographic experiment. Four finger eating experts and three novices sat down for a hot meal and ate with their hands. Drawing on the technique of playing with the famil...

The divine kingship of the Shilluk: On violence, utopia, and the human condition, or, elements for an archaeology of sovereignty

Abstract: Since Frazer’s time, Shilluk kingship has been a flashpoint of anthropological debates about the nature of sovereignty, and while such debates are now considered irrelevant to current debates on th...

The place of grace in anthropology

Abstract: Prologue In the introduction to this book we observed that the word “honor” had entered anthropology only in the 1960s and we gave some considerations to account for this, to my mind curious, lacuna. The word “grace” is today in a condition somewhat comparable to “honor” in the 1960s and it is one of the aims of this essay to endow it with the recognition it deserves. I have found only three authors who have called attention to its existence as a general anthropological concept briefly only 1 and none who has undertaken a detailed examination of its logic and potential usage. This, despite the enormous importance of a concept of this order in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the huge theological literature on the subject — (surely the anthropology of religion can no more ignore Western theology than the anthropology of law can ignore Western jurisprudence?) — and the fact that a large number of Christian heresies were provoked by disagreements as to the nature of grace, from the Pelagians onwards. But blindness in this matter can hardly be attributed simply to the parochialism of modem university disciplines or the social

Some muddles in the models: or, how the system really works

Abstract: Part one. Alliance I. The phrase ̳alliance theory‘ and its opposition to what has been called ̳descent theory‘ was first suggested by Dumont (1961a). Alliance theory, with roots clearly in Durkheim and Mauss, has specifically arisen out of Levi-Strauss‘s Structures élémentaires . . . (1949) and has been developed by Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Leach, and Needham. Descent theory also has its roots in Durkheim and Mauss, but its development has been through Radcliffe-Brown to Fortes, Goody, Gough, Gluckman, and, in certain respects, Firth.

What is a parent

Abstract: Drafted in 1991, this paper lies at an intersection of interests in debates following the UK Human Fertilization and Embryology Act (1990), academic discussions about interpretation, first sightings of fractal imagery, then recent modelings of Melanesian sociality, and in the role of knowledge in English kinship thinking. Inspired by questions about parenthood and kinship posed of West African materials by Houseman, it explores certain comparisons—and the possibility of comparison—between motherhood and fatherhood.

Skinship: Touchability as a virtue in East-Central India

Abstract: In "What kinship is" Marshall Sahlins (2011) provides a new and provocative answer to an old and much-debated question, defining it as the "mutuality in being." For the Halbi speakers of the Bastar Plateau in East-Central India kinship is defined by touch: juniors greet seniors with tactile gestures of familial respect that are reciprocated by tactile gestures of familial love. On certain ritual occasions these salutes are adorned with colorful flowers, tasty food, purifying water, sweet-smelling incense, nice-sounding words, and heartfelt sentiments. Non-kin, by contrast, are defined by non-tactile gestures of mutual respect. The general implication of this case for the study of kinship as "mutuality of sensible being," to give Sahlins‘ formulation a slight twist, involves a move away from the study of kinship as the abstract semantics of reference terminologies to a consideration of the pragmatics of face-to-face sensible relations between people. Little ethnographic research has been done on the latter; the Japanese word "skinship," evoking as it does the coming together of touch and kinship, signifies a fresh approach to the analysis of kinship.

Twin-born with greatness: the dual kingship of Sparta

Abstract: This article examines the comparative configurations of diarchy by means of an extended analysis of the Spartan dual kingship in ancient Greece. Twinned and inseparable, both human and divine, the Spartan kings were themselves descended from celestial twins, hence it is argued that the Spartan diarchy is an empirical instantiation of the king's two bodies – the dual kingship as an expression of sovereign twinship. The essay goes on to consider other royal twins of Greek mythology, one of whom was usually descended from a god, and argues that such myths of dynastic origin constitute a cosmology of sovereign right in which the Spartan myth of stranger-kings of divine descent was opposed to the Athenian ideology of autochthony.

The chess of kinship and the kinship of chess

Abstract: The real comparison between the anthropological study of kinship and the game of chess is not immediately apparent from their formal properties, and only becomes relevant when they are viewed as strategies, or patterns of events occurring in time. The single "proportion" that both share in common is a kind of cross-comparison between dualistic variables called a chiasmus, illustrated in kinship by the classic cross-cousin relationship, and in chess by the asymmetric double-proportion between the king and queen, the only gendered pieces on the board, and the moves and tokens of the other pieces in the game. The difference may be summed up in the word "mating." Chess may be described as the "kinship" of kinship. Failure to understand the chiasmatic, or double- proportional essence of both has resulted in many dysfunctional models of cross-cousin marriage, and many very quick games of chess.

Copernican kinship: an origin myth for the category

Abstract: In many traditional mythologies, kinship constitutes the privileged idiom of both unity and diversity in the cosmos. In "post-mythological" thought, categories logically conceived attempt to take over the cosmic role of kinship. I compare two accounts of the nature and genesis of categories—those by Durkheim and Mauss on one hand, and by Lakoff and Johnson on the other. Neither account severs ties with mythology or kinship; moreover, the structure of the category, like kinship, offers a mode of projecting the human as the cosmic. To the long-standing anthropological concern with the ways in which humans impose their diverse categories on the world, we should add a concern with the ways category-theorists impose their diverse worlds on the category.

Bodies, kinship and power(s) in the Baruya culture

Abstract: The themes developed in the present text, written in 1998, appeared in conclusion to an earlier piece of work on the relationship between the sexes and the different forms of power and hierarchy among the Baruya, a population living in the interior highlands of New Guinea (Godelier 1982; 1986). This was the theme of the ―sexed‖ body, which functions as a ventriloquist‘s dummy, constantly invited to speak about and to testify for (or against) the prevailing social order. The idea was that the way the body is represented stamps each person‘s innermost subjectivity with the order or orders that prevail in his or her society and which must be respected if the society is to be reproduced. A body is made of flesh, blood, bone, breath and one or more spirits, all of which are possessed by everyone, male or female; but there are also organs – a penis, a clitoris, a vagina, breasts – and substances – semen, menstrual blood, milk – which not all people have and which make individuals different or alike. All cultures have answers to the questions of where the bones, the flesh, the blood, the breath or a person‘s spirit come from: from the father, from the mother, from both, from neither and in that case, from where? But not all cultures bother to account for every component of the body: some say nothing about semen, others pass over blood, or bone, … and these silences speak volumes. Among the many representations of the body, those having to do with the making of children – conception, intra-uterine growth, development after birth – occupy a strategic position because it seems that they usually fulfill two important functions for a society. First of all they legitimize the appropriation of each child that is born by a group of adults that regards itself as the child‘s kin. And secondly, they assign this child a future destiny and position in society according to its sex, male or female, which it has from birth. It is specifically this category of representations that we will address in the following pages.

Daribi kinship at perpendicular angles: A trompe l'oeil anthropology

Abstract: What are the contours of such "knowledge" that does double duty both as a public good or commons and as a source of individual empowerment and liberty? This article offers an analysis of the epistemological organisation of the "knowledge economy" by shooting ethnographic work on Free Software through a playful trompe l‘oeil of Roy Wagner‘s classic piece on Daribi kinship. It offers a preliminary template for thinking of Euro- American knowledge as itself a trompe l'oeil device.

Kingship and divinity: The unpublished Frazer Lecture, Oxford, 28 October 1982

Abstract: This is the final published article. It first appeared at http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau1.1.012/17.

Begetting ordinary humans

Abstract: Another look at the Inuit Let us take again the example of the Inuit to complete it and to introduce the analysis of a few other representations of what it is to ―make a baby.‖ For the Inuit, to make a baby, the parents must have sexual intercourse. The father makes the child‘s bones, its skeleton, with his sperm. With her blood, the mother makes its flesh and its skin. The child takes shape in the mother‘s womb. It will resemble its father or its mother, depending on the strength of the life force of each. Its body will be nourished by the meat from the game killed by its father and eaten by its mother. At this stage of intrauterine life, the child is a foetus with no soul.

Begetting extraordinary humans

Abstract: We are very grateful to Verso Books for giving us the permission to publish this version of Chapter eight (Fifth component 2), The metamorphosis of kinship, Verso (2012).

Von Hügel’s curiosity: Encounter and experiment in the new museum

Abstract: In April 1875, Anatole von Hugel, natural historian and committed Catholic, arrived in Fiji on the John Wesley, a Methodist missionary ship. The south Pacific archipelago had, only a year earlier, become a British Crown Colony; the first governor was yet to arrive; the nature of the administration and hence the future of Fijian societies were uncertain. Von Hugel, who was just twenty years old, was missing his fiancee, and unsettled by an acrimonious row with the veteran missionary Lorimer Fison. What had brought him to the islands in the first place was the long sea voyage often recommended to the affluent by physicians of the period, an improbable remedy one might have thought for afflictions such as the rheumatic fever that the patient in this case suffered from. But the young man also travelled out of filial piety: he was of mixed aristocratic Austrian and Scottish descent; his father, Karl—who, the son acknowledged, had inspired all his own tastes and interests—himself travelled widely in Asia and the Pacific, made extensive botanical, zoological, and ethnographic collections, and written a book on the geography of the great ocean. He had died in 1870; Baron Anatole, as he became, had indeed been ill, but his voyage was something of an act of homage, indeed a re-enactment. 1