Books published by HAU Society Of Ethnographic Theory

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.

"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.

"'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