Böcker utgivna av HAU Society Of Ethnographic Theory

The first book to explore the deaths of explorer Jules Crevaux and his crew from an Indigenous perspective. In 1882, the celebrated French explorer Jules Crevaux and his crew were killed by Indigenous people in the Bolivian Chaco, a fiercely contested region on the border between Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay. The event sparked an international uproar. The scene of the crime was embroiled in clashes among various Indigenous peoples, rubber tappers, and missionaries. Official investigators sent from France and competing newspapers ended up mired in a morass of equivocal, ambiguous, false, and contradictory information. To make sense of this event, Isabelle Combès is the first researcher to consult the local archives and to include the perspective of Indigenous peoples. In search of who killed Crevaux and why, Combès unearths the power struggles and social imaginaries behind the incident and its aftermath. Readers will find not only an engrossing story in these pages but also an exemplar of historical inquiry that questions the very nature of truth-telling.

A formative ethnography of the relationship between markets and social life, back in print.   Originally published in 1979, Clifford Geertz's essay on the Moroccan bazaar is a classic ethnographic account of the interplay of economic, social, and religious lives in the bustle of transaction. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the Middle Atlas town of Sefrou, Geertz explores how actors from diverse backgrounds assess the worth and meaning of other people's wares, words, and ways of doing business. He shows how the search for market information, so central to the theorization of markets by economists, is here based on careful appraisals of social relations, embedded in understandings of the broader institutional environment of the market town and its hinterlands. With a richness of insights procured for generations of readers, Geertz's essay on the suq is a model of and for the craft of ethnographic theory. Long out of print, it is republished here in a stand-alone edition introduced by Lawrence Rosen.

A classic text that develops one prong of Dumézil's tripartite hypothesis of Indo-European tribes: the sacred sovereign.   Georges Dumézil's fascination with the myths and histories of India, Rome, Scandinavia, and the Celts yielded an idea that became his most influential scholarly legacy: the tripartite hypothesis, which divides Indo-European societal functions into three classes: the sacred sovereign, the warrior, and the producer. Mitra-Varuna, originally published in 1940, concentrates on the first function, that of sovereignty. Dumézil identifies two types of rulers, the first judicial and worldly, the second divine and supernatural. These figures, both priestly, are oppositional but complementary. The title nods to these roles, referring to the gods Mitra, a rational mediator, and Varuna, an awesome religious figure.    Stuart Elden's critical edition, based on the 1988 English translation by Derek Coltman, identifies variations between the first and second French editions and completes-and in places corrects-Dumézil's references. The editor's detailed introduction situates Mitra-Varuna within Dumézil's career, outlines how his treatment of its themes developed over time, and relates the book to the political controversy around his ideas. Two new appendices contain passages that did not appear in the second French edition.

Shamanic Techniques of Imagination. A lively exploration of the Indigenous traditions of shamanism in the Far North of Eurasia and North America.

Caribbean and Mediterranean Counterpoints. Cross-regional scholarly dialogue inspired by the work of the pioneering Cuban scholar.

A sympathetic examination of the failure of anti-corruption efforts in contemporary Indonesia. Combining ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kupang with an acute historical sensibility, Sylvia Tidey shows how good governance initiatives paradoxically perpetuate civil service corruption while also facilitating the emergence of new forms of it. Importing critical insights from the anthropology of ethics to the burgeoning anthropology of corruption, Tidey exposes enduring developmentalist fallacies that treat corruption as endemic to non-Western subjects. In practice, it is often indistinguishable from the ethics of care and exchange, as Indonesian civil servants make worthwhile lives for themselves and their families. This book will be a vital text for anthropologists and other social scientists, particularly scholars of global studies, development studies, and Southeast Asia.

For people and governments around the world, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to place the preservation of human life at odds with the pursuit of economic and social life. Yet this simple alternative belies the complexity of the entanglements the crisis has created and revealed, not just between health and wealth but also around morality, knowledge, governance, culture, and everyday subsistence. Didier Fassin and Marion Fourcade have assembled an eminent team of scholars from across the social sciences, conducting research on six continents, to reflect on the multiple ways the coronavirus has entered, reshaped, or exacerbated existing trends and structures in every part of the globe. The contributors show how the disruptions caused by the pandemic have both hastened the rise of new social divisions and hardened old inequalities and dilemmas. An indispensable volume, Pandemic Exposures provides an illuminating analysis of this watershed moment and its possible aftermath.

A pathbreaking study of Yagwoia cosmological concepts. In Imacoqwa's Arrow, Jadran Mimica draws on decades of field research to bring us a rich ethnographic account of myth and meaning in the lifeworlds of the Yagwoia of Papua New Guinea. He focuses especially on the relations of the sun and the moon in Yagwoia understandings of the universe and their own place within it. This is classic terrain in Melanesian ethnography, but Mimica does much more than add to the archive of anthropological accounts of the significance of the sun and the moon for peoples of this part of the world. With extraordinary rigor and reflexivity, he grounds his understanding of Yagwoia concepts in psychoanalytic and phenomenological methods that afford a radically new and revealing translation of these seminal themes in Melanesian mythology and its poetics. This is a major contribution to the hermeneutics of ethnographic translation and theorization.

In this powerful new work, Simone Toji reconsiders ethnography as a form of appreciation of the contradictions inherent in the making of life itself. Recovering Bronislaw Malinowski's idea of the "imponderabilia of actual life" as an inspiring ethnographic attitude, she shows how lives are composed through moments of indecision, opacity, and incongruity that make them irreducibly open ended. The singular lives of four migrants, from Paraguay, South Korea, and Bolivia, are rendered as journeys across the city of São Paulo, interspersed with resonant explorations of the power of life's invention and reinvention as part of the human condition. This important new book is a major contribution to migration studies, social and cultural anthropology, and the social sciences as a whole, and will appeal to readers from the undergraduate level through the doctoral.

First published fifty years ago, Émile Benveniste's two-volume Problèmes de linguistique générale revolutionized the study of linguistics and remains among the most influential texts in the field. This expanded edition of the first volume presents the original English translation by Mary Elizabeth Meek, produced in close collaboration with Benveniste himself, along with his hitherto untranslated articles on play, translation, singular and plural forms, and Indigenous North American languages. These works are contextualized by an introduction by editor Jordan K. Skinner and a preface by Roland Barthes. This new edition will delight linguists and philosophers already familiar with Benveniste and introduce his work to a new generation of students. Benveniste studies are going through an enthusiastic revival in Europe; after reading this book, readers elsewhere will understand why.

From 1971 to 1972, William E. Mitchell undertook fieldwork on suffering and healing among the Lujere of Papua New Guinea's Upper Sepik River Basin. At a time when it was not yet common to make colonial agencies a subject of anthropological study, Mitchell carefully located his research on Lujere practices in the framework of a history of colonization that surrounded the Lujere with a shifting array of Western institutions, dramatically changing their society forever. This work has been well known among anthropologists of Oceania ever since, but the bulk of it has remained unpublished until now. In this major new work, Mitchell revisits his earlier research with a three-part study on: the history of colonial rule in the region; the social organization of Lujere life at the time; and the particular forms of affliction, witchcraft, and curing that preoccupied some of the people among whom he lived. This is a magisterial contribution to the ethnography of Papua New Guinea and it is sure to be an invaluable source for scholars of Oceania, of medical anthropology, and of the anthropology of kinship, myth, and ritual.

Through a rich narrative ethnography of domestic life, this book explores the philosophy of social relations among the Guna (Cuna), an Amerindian people of Panama. This intimate study brings us into the heart of the family economy, describing its nuanced interactions among coresidents through two dimensions: an aesthetic of production resting on the gendered division of labor and an ethic of affects informing the language and enactment of kinship. By exploring local techniques of nurture‿child-rearing, singing, feeding, and care practices‿the book shows how the Guna create kinship and inhabit gender. The acceptance the Guna show for same-sex relationships and cross-gender roles‿which they accorded to the author himself‿allows kinship to be both subverted and affirmed at the same time. Subverting kinship does not undermine the structure or dynamics of residential interrelations; on the contrary, it dramatically foregrounds kinship as a lived experience of reciprocal nurture, thus enabling gender to be modulated, and inhabited in multiple ways.

"The present volume stems from a workshop that the editors organized at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge from May 31 to June 2, 2017."--Preface.

Nullius is an anthropological account of the troubled status of ownership in India and its consequences for our understanding of sovereignty and social relations. Though property rights and ownership are said to be a cornerstone of modern law, in the Indian case they are often a spectral presence. Kapila offers a detailed study of paradigms where proprietary relations have been erased, denied, misappropriated.The book examines three forms of negation, where the Indian state de facto adopted doctrines of terra nullius (in the erasure of indigenous title), res nullius (in acquiring museum objects), and, controversially, corpus nullius (in denying citizens ownership of their bodies under biometrics). The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of questions of property, exchange, dispossession, law, and sovereignty.

"In his 1978 Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, unpublished until now, Gilbert Lewis takes on essential problems for medical anthropology. Has there been progress in medicine? Consider what it was like to be ill in a Gnau village in the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea in 1968 and compare it with the experience of illness fifteen years later, after they gained independence. The changes involved some loss of self-reliance. Or consider Bregbo, a community in the Ivory Coast whose prophet offers healing through confession and, in some cases, long-term care in a therapeutic setting. What does this offer that psychiatric approaches to healing do not? Drawing on these and other cases, Lewis conveys the importance of the ethnographic comparison of medical beliefs in dynamic spaces of knowledge to do with illness, health, and healing, especially as these change over time and intersect with others. Capturing debates during a key moment in the development of medical anthropology, these lectures also inspire us to look with new eyes at contemporary problems in the field."--

Writing has been invented four times in human history, by the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, and the Mayans. Each of these peoples developed a restricted set of symbols capable of recording any possible discourse in their spoken language. Much later, between 1700 and 1900, prophets and shamans of the Native American tribes developed “boundedâ€? writing methods, designed to ensure the transmission of ceremonial rituals whose notational principles differed profoundly from more familiar forms of writing. Pierre Déléage draws on a deep and comparative study of historical and ethnographic evidence to propose the groundbreaking thesis that all writing systems were initially bounded methods, reversing the accepted historical perspective and making it possible to revise our conception of the origin of the other great writing systems. The Invention of Writing offers new conceptual tools for answering a simple question: Why have humans repeatedly expended the immense intellectual effort required to invent writing?

"'The Mafia? What is the Mafia? Something you eat? Something you drink? I don't know the Mafia. I've never seen it.' Mafiosi have oftern reacted this way to questions from journalists and law enforceent. Social scientists who study the Mafia usually try to pin down what it 'really is,' thus fusing their work with their object. In Mafiacraft, Deborah Puccio-Den undertakes a new form of ethnographic inquirey that focuses not on aswering 'What is the Mafia?' but on the ontological, moral, and political effecs of posing the question itself. Her starting point is that Mafia is not a readily nameable social act bu a problem of thought produced by the asence of words Pccio-Den appraoches covert activities using a model of 'Mafiacraft,' which inverts the logic of witchcraft. If witchcraft revolves on the lethal power of speech, Mafiacraft deponds on the deadly strength of silence. How do we write an ethnography of phenomena that cannot be named?"--Back cove

Essays in Ethnographic Theory. This collection highlights a key metaphor in contemporary discourse about economy and society. The contributors explore how references to realityand thereal economyare linked both to the utopias of collective well-being, supported by real monies and good economies, and the dystopias of financial bubbles and busts, in which peoples own lives crash along with the reality of their economies. An ambitious anthropology of economy, this volume questions how assemblages of vernacular and scient