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2018; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 8; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/698955

2575-1433

Giovanni da Col,

Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture

Previous articleNext article FreeEditorial NoteBeginningsGiovanni da ColGiovanni da Col Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreOriginal minds are not distinguished by being the first to see a new thing, but instead by seeing the old, familiar thing that is over-looked as something new.—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, II, 200In 2016, five years from the project’s foundation, three things became strikingly clear to Hau’s Advisory Board: 1) the business model of Hau-N.E.T. annual memberships and the collection of Author Processing Charges (APCs) from scholars belonging to wealthy institutions with dedicated open access funds was too volatile and dependent on departmental budget finances, subject to increasing cuts and spending reviews. The size of the project—with a journal and a book series (with commitment to authors to be taken two years in advance)—needed permanent employees to guarantee a standard of professionalism and to avoid the exploitation of honorary staff and foster academic precarity in the name of the community’s intellectual well-being; 2) the Society for Ethnographic Theory was a young and small cultural association with personal liability and entirely revolved around the production process rather than its own structural development and sustainability. It required an Executive Board of Directors and a separation of functions distributed among them (financial, editorial, human resources and diversity, staff management, institutional and public relationships, fundraising, etc). 3) the Hau project was far more than “open access”; it was a prime theory journal.We are delighted to announce a new phase of the Hau project, one that will allow us to continue our commitment to an international anthropology and the development of ethnographic theory. In May 2017, twenty members of the Hau Advisory Board were called to vote on the offer received by the University of Chicago Press: to move to a unique “free access”-cum-subscription model that would guarantee the long-term sustainability of the journal for the next twenty years and the preservation of the intellectual mission of the Society for Ethnographic Theory. The business model has been widely described in my final 2017 editorial note (da Col 2017); it includes one month free access after each issue release, green open access (and compliance of UKRI requisites for REF submission), gold open access to each issue’s key articles, and subsidized or free subscription for institutions in the Global South. Suffice it to say that for the loyal readers who can’t afford a subscription—being independent scholars with no university affiliation or living in the Global South—Hau will always be free to read. Just stay tuned and follow us closely. Send us your email address. Register on the University of Chicago Press website. Watch our social media. Yet, if you wish us to stay in business, tell your libraries to purchase a subscription. And the cherry on top is that those beautiful collections will now have a physical existence; they will circulate as hard copies. Hau Books remains the only existing anthropology open access press. While we certainly enjoy the professionalism and sustainability of our intellectual mission guaranteed by the publication of the journal by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Society, we do not plan to rest. Like other journals, we are seriously exploring ethically sustainable funding models to return to gold open access.Hau - the SocietyLast winter, the Executive Council of Hau’s Advisory Board worked relentlessly and independently to restructure the old Society for Ethnographic Theory. Unaware of how much work such commitment would take, the group put in countless hours, energy, and thought to write new bylaws and revamp the entire Hau organization in line with both the UK law and the best possible academic publishing practices. The legal incorporation provides the Society with needed protections and professional structures for our work as we grow, making it democratic, accountable, and reliable in the long term. Part of the process of legal incorporation involved dissolving the existing unincorporated Society for Ethnographic Theory. Per UK law, the new Hau - Society for Ethnographic Theory (publisher of Hau journal and Hau Books) is now a nonprofit organization governed by a collective Board of Trustees. The change in direction of the Society also required a redistribution of the editorial powers. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory and Hau Books will now be run by two editorial collectives and will continue to be marketed and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. It was also time to renew the Editorial Board and make sure it was composed of only active scholars.I wish to thank everyone who has participated in the Hau project. To the previous Hau staff—from managing editors, editorial assistants, treasurers, graphic designers, IT chiefs, social media team, and interns—should go the infinite gratitude for bringing the project to this stage. To our institutional members goes the gratitude for sustaining us through all these years and continuing to do so, according to their possibilities. To the anthropological community should go our gratitude for supporting and maintaining (through manuscript submissions and reviews!) the intellectual vitality at Hau.ContinuityLike Nietzsche’s epigraph to this note, our recourse to classics and return to the authors who first propounded something called ethnographic theory are a commitment to scholarly rigor. That is to say, you can dissect, note, criticize, and argue, but only if you have done your homework. We are not oblivious to the political economy of academia and the “dark side” of anthropology, to cite Sherry Ortner’s already classic article (2016). Hau’s ethnographic theory, like the recent collection on “Why do we read the classics?” (da Col et al. 2017), showed that it is far from being a romantic return to science and literature of colonial descent. Yet ethnographic theory respects the beauty of a sophisticated account, the finesse of the recorded variations of a week-long ritual, the strange comforts arising from documenting the most insipid detail and uneventful happenstance. Claude Lévi-Strauss ([1955] 2012) said it in his famous incipit: Why bother to face privation and weariness to record a few hours of an unpublished myth or a new marriage rule? What Lévi-Strauss hailed as the enemy of anthropology—travel literature—is now the nemesis of ethnography: the reduction of the complexity of human life to the “misdemeanors of the ship’s dog, and a few scraps of information scraps,” or the narration of the encounter with a single informant in a single evening.Likewise, the concern to document the greatest singular details and uniqueness of human beings and their mediations (with nonhumans, signs, objects, and ideas) and make any singularity valuable to study seems today accompanied by the resolution of glossing societies under the largest accommodating explanatory terms: “uncertainty,” “futurity,” “affect,” and so forth. Hau’s method has been to point out, paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein, when theory has gone on holiday. Hau pursued the ideal of forming intellectually ambitious scholars with wide ethnographic and archival erudition who would rise to the challenges of their own world by proposing comparative generalizations applicable on a large geographic scale. This journal’s achievement, the one that will last, is the recording of the astonishing records of multifariously beautiful societies and their alleged roles in the history of humanity. Are we victims of the scholastic fallacy and predicament of the lector? Perhaps not, since the intelligibility of ethnographic theory (unlike other currents for studying alterity and diversity) is predicated on a pragmatic and interactional effort. To say it with Maurice Bloch (2008), one always needs to keep an eye on the relation between the transcendental—the aspect of humanity that attributes holistic concepts, cosmologies, roles, positions, and kinship relationships capable of crossing time and space—and the instability of the transactional—the practical engagement of everyday life where roles and positions are negotiated, made, broken. If “pay attention” is the first commandment of ethnography, then observing the “point of view of the native” is a messy task, unclean, unclear, and even more contradictory when we attempt to foster the emergence of inner patterns and schemes of comparisons from even messier acts of participation.Do we intend to propound a single voice? The recent “Shortcuts” section, developed with Claudio Sopranzetti, shows the multivocal vocation of this journal. This is a trend that began with the publication of one of our most downloaded articles in the history of the journal, Tim Ingold’s “That’s enough about ethnography” (2014), an essay that argued directly against the journal’s manifesto and pulled no punches. In a time of increasing fragmentation of discourse and attention, Hau wants to keep fostering real intellectual debates and genuine critical views, at the risk of irking some authors or readers. Our Shortcuts section will still try to scrutinize contrasting biases or naïve and univocal approaches to key disciplinary or public issues. The Debates section will encourage bold statements or controversial ones, and encourage the submission of critiques or discussion pieces in later issues. A select number of Lectures and Research Articles will be followed by critical remarks and rebuttals from the authors. We also encourage the submission of brief Letters to the Journal to highlight neglected topics or academic concerns. The journal will still draw on the strength of its special sections (3–6 articles plus a preface or introduction) or special issues (10+ articles), normally awarded by annual competition and reproduced in paperback by Hau Books. We will still reserve a space for experimental theory or collective discussions in our Colloquia and host collective discussions, panels, and roundtables in our Forum, while encouraging the development of multimodal forms of anthropology (videos, images, recordings). We published our first two articles with embedded ritual songs and videos in 2012, and we would love to continue this tradition by publishing quality multimodal work. We also welcome submissions from the Global South or in languages other than English (French, Spanish, Portuguese). Loyal to the “reverse anthropology” that motivated the foundation of the journal, we are delighted to hear that an increasing number of graduate degrees in anthropology are awarded to Tibetans, Mongolians, and Bhutanese, Melanesians, or Amazonian Xingu, or that the Achuar are becoming interested in what anthropologists “misunderstand” about them. We would be delighted to receive critical contributions from these colleagues. Our Book Symposia section, possibly the most copied section of the journal, will keep questioning field-setting—or mysteriously popular—monographs, and gather a mixture of junior commentators and eminent ones. Translations and Reprints will still conclude our table of contents, as they have been a distinctive and pedagogic component of the journal since its inception. What we cannot accommodate in the journal will be published online, on either our new hauproject.org website or under the umbrella of the EASA Network of Ethnographic Theory, which is planning a series of new initiatives, including book reviews (excluded from the journal) and an online “author meets a reviewer” feature.This issueIn memoriam of Saba Mahmood you’ll find her last touching essay with a comment by Danilyn Rutherford and with rejoinders by comparative philosophers of the caliber of Geoffrey Lloyd and Helen Verran, the inaugural Lévi-Strauss lecture by Aparecida Vilaca, Webb Keane’s Daryll Forde lecture, and an exhilarating debate between the author and Tim Ingold on the concept of affordances. In the guise of debate, you will find a reverse anthropology of the relation between anthropologists and Bolivian monsters. You will find four major articles: two commented pieces on the place of faith in anthropology (Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr), and technologies of divination vs. AIDS (Susan Whyte, Michael Whyte, and David Kyaddondo), followed by a critique of the ethical turn via an anthropology of conscience (Tobias Kelly), and a witty analysis of the social life of lies and mistrust in repetitive electoral patterns in India (Radhika Govindrajan). You will find three groundbreaking special sections; each would normally make up an issue of other disciplinary journals. One special section (edited by Thomas Schwartz Wentzer and Cheryl Mattingly) rethinks humanism and the interface between philosophy and anthropology in the age of the posthuman. You get real philosophers to engage with anthropological literature: when was the last time you dreamed about this kind of interdisciplinarity? The following section (edited by Federico Neiburg and Jane Guyer) is the second part of perhaps the most exciting project in economic anthropology in recent years, the question of the “real” in political and popular ideas of the “real economy.” A third special section (edited by Laura Menin and Alice Elliot) scrutinises the concept of destiny (rather than mulling over fuzzy ideas of “futurity”), one with a distinctive anthropological pedigree, and asks: what do humans do to creatively react to an allegedly determined life?Our translation section is more than thirty thousand words, and it presents a much-awaited translation of a key essay for the development of contemporary theories of kinship by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. En pendant with our last special section, we conclude with one of the most memorable Frazer lectures: Meyer Fortes’s Oedipus and Job. The republication of this long essay, originally released as a book, is a project kindly sponsored by the Lafayette College University Library, with the coordination of Robert Blunt.This is our 19th issue.ReferencesBloch, Maurice. 2008. “Why religion is nothing special but is central.” Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363 (1499): 2055–61.First citation in articleGoogle Scholarda Col, Giovanni. 2015. “Incomplete regularities: Comparison, values, personhood.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): i–vii.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 2017. “Free gifts that must be invented.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): i–vii.First citation in articleGoogle Scholarda Col Giovanni, Claudio Sopranzetti, Fred Myers, Anastasia Piliavsky, John L. Jackson, Yarimar Bonilla, Adia Benton, and Paul Stoller. 2017. “Why do we read the classics?,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 1–38.xFirst citation in articleGoogle ScholarIngold, Tim. 2014. “That’s enough about ethnography!” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–95.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarLévi-Strauss, Claude. (1955) 2012. Tristes tropiques. London: Penguin.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarOrtner, Sherry. 2016. “Dark anthropology and its others:Theory since the eighties.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarSloterdijk, Peter. (2004) 2016. Foams. spheres III. California: Semiotext(e).First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 8, Number 1-2Spring/Autumn 2018 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/698955 © 2018 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.