The global subject of precarity

Peer reviewedPostprin

Anthropological investigations of vitality: Life force as a dimension distinct from space and time

In what ways do anthropologists study vitality? Located in a familiar anthropological predicament—a return to a once familiar place like a field site after a significant gap of time—this article argues that in ways ranging from the everyday question“How are you?” to the familiar research tool of the household survey, we are already implicated in the study of vitality. Rather than a precise definition of vitality, this article offers the idea of life force as a dimension, analogous to space and time that anthropologists and their interlocutors inhabit and investigate. Drawing on the ethnographic strangeness of mundane alterations over time and with help from the Henry James novel The sacred fount, this article offers three critical issues in the anthropology of life force: the desire to know and to measure life force; subsequent doubts about life force, including whether or not it exists at all; and vampirism and envy in transactions of life force

An uncritical encounter between anthropology and psychiatry

In what ways do two bodies of knowledge meet? Anthropology and psychiatry most often meet in a mood of mutual suspicion, the danger of which is that each confronts (or avoids) the other as a straw man. In this introduction I describe a refreshingly different encounter in which a group of psychiatrists from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi respond to an anthropological text, Veena Das’s 'Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty', which engages with lives and issues quite similar to those encountered by these psychiatrists in their clinical practice. Rather than rehearsing relatively predictable debates (for instance on the importance, or lack thereof, of ‘culture’, often assumed to be the sole meeting ground between anthropology and psychiatry), what is instead surprising in the psychiatrists’ engagement with Affliction is their recognition of a shared terrain of uncertainty and complexity that moves across the realms of the spiritual, the ‘vernacular’ uses of biomedical terms, and the political economy of health. I outline three domains of inquiry that this interdisciplinary discussion opens up as regards the study of mental health and illness: 1) ecologies, circuits, and tempos rather than institutions and subjectivity; 2) not-yet ontologies and etiologies; and 3) methodological consequences, beyond quantitative/qualitative divides and towards patterns, singularities, and modes of attunement

A joyful history of anthropology

Many of us, in different parts of the world, face the responsibility of teaching the history of anthropology. In what ways do we narrate this history? While there are differences in styles of teaching across cultures and contexts, there are shared assumptions that we seek to challenge, for instance, the history of anthropological thought conceived of as a teleological parade of “isms,” each one outmoded by its successor, or an Oedipal sense of “postreflexive” anthropology as if “old” anthropology had no sense of politics or subjectivity. In this Special Section of Hau , entitled “A Joyful History of Anthropology,” we ask what it would mean to enliven our relationship to the history of anthropology. By “joyful” we do not mean a simple affirmation, but an intensity of engagement, the possibility of the reemergence of the old as the new, and a sense of anthropological texts as potentially exceeding the “isms” within which they are often bound. We invited articles that sought a nonteleological way to inhabit the history of anthropology, in the mode of immersion and agonistic or convivial companionship in ways that unsettle ideas of old and new within anthropology. Among the several abstracts we received in response from scholars across four continents, we selected the following six articles and a “game” that converse with one another across three themes: 1) Canonical recreations, 2) Minor events in the history of anthropology, and 3) Ways of inhabiting a body of knowledge. We do not necessarily make a claim to newness in our endeavor. Rather, we hope that this collection intensifies a longstanding albeit often incipient, and sometimes repressed tendency within anthropology, which is to encounter our disciplinary archive not necessarily as a history of error or villainy but as a field of possibilities

Introduction: A joyful history of anthropology

Many of us, in different parts of the world, face the responsibility of teaching the history of anthropology. In what ways do we narrate this history? While there are differences in styles of teaching across cultures and contexts, there are shared assumptions that we seek to challenge, for instance, the history of anthropological thought conceived of as a teleological parade of “isms,” each one outmoded by its successor, or an Oedipal sense of “postreflexive” anthropology as if “old” anthropology had no sense of politics or subjectivity. In this Special Section of Hau , entitled “A Joyful History of Anthropology,” we ask what it would mean to enliven our relationship to the history of anthropology. By “joyful” we do not mean a simple affirmation, but an intensity of engagement, the possibility of the reemergence of the old as the new, and a sense of anthropological texts as potentially exceeding the “isms” within which they are often bound. We invited articles that sought a nonteleological way to inhabit the history of anthropology, in the mode of immersion and agonistic or convivial companionship in ways that unsettle ideas of old and new within anthropology. Among the several abstracts we received in response from scholars across four continents, we selected the following six articles and a “game” that converse with one another across three themes: 1) Canonical recreations, 2) Minor events in the history of anthropology, and 3) Ways of inhabiting a body of knowledge. We do not necessarily make a claim to newness in our endeavor. Rather, we hope that this collection intensifies a longstanding albeit often incipient, and sometimes repressed tendency within anthropology, which is to encounter our disciplinary archive not necessarily as a history of error or villainy but as a field of possibilities

Obfuscation / Decontextualization: The Limits of Critical Design

Is current design pedagogy - through its obsessions with styling, the façade, the tyranny of fashion and the cult of cool - complicit in hiding suffering that is embedded in designed goods? Is design deeply implicated in rendering whole categories of people and places invisible? Should art and design aesthetics be concerned with justice? Are there ways of making existing social relations and forms of human different more visible? How can we think about the creation of meaning, value and the creation of culture in ways that allow design to be more directly engaged with questions of social and environmental justice? The roundtable will grapple with some of these issues