Racial Burdens, Translations, and Chance 

Autumn 2020, Volume 10.2

Editorial Note Call: Currents, Colloquiums, and Festschriften in future issues

Currents considers our responses to the flows of the contemporary, as well as the resurgence of historical forces. We have invited the organization of a Currents section devoted to racialized institutional violence and policing in the United States and elsewhere for an upcoming issue, and welcome inquiries from scholars with expertise on these topics to contact us (journaleditors@hausociety.org or individually) if they are interested in joining the project.

We also will be devoting a Colloquium in our next issue to repatriation and iconoclasm, occasioned by dialogues between President Emmanuel Macron and African intellectuals over the repatriation of objects taken from the continent and housed in French museums.

In a future issue, we will be inaugurating a new occasional section dedicated to Festschriften, honorific collections for distinguished anthropologists, by and large organized by former students and colleagues. In these, we expand our commitment to keeping in view the history of our discipline—already exemplified by our reissue or translation of early, difficult-to-find publications in the field. We invite our readers and authors to rethink this form, perhaps opening it up to debate and having a more critical bent than the traditional celebratory festschrift, and contact us with suggestions of anthropologists to whom we might dedicate such a collection in future issues.

We are also pleased to welcome back Deborah Durham as Deputy Editor of the journal. She is already doing the bulk of our copyediting for the final issue of the year, which is well under way, and her return to the Hau project will bring needed consistency and predictability to this aspect of the journal’s production.

Acknowledgement of the origin of our journal's name in Māori cosmology, rather than in Marcel Mauss’s book, The Gift

We have revised the introductory language in the journal’s homepage to reflect its current configuration and aspirations (see our website here). Māori scholars themselves often leave this concept untranslated, to underscore its dense polysemy, while using it in a range of contexts. Hau’s meaning approximates “vitality” or (vital) “winds of growth and life” (Salmond 2012: 120), more familiar to anthropological readers, reinventing it as a concept that can “hyphenate” Māori and western knowledge production, following the genesis of the diverse understandings and (mis)translations of the term in the written exchanges between Tamati Ranapiri and Elsdon Best (Stewart 2017: 8), and its importance in the conceptual history of our discipline. Indigenous Pacific Islander anthropologists have also enriched the dialogue by discussing the semiotics of hau in other, non-Māori Polynesian languages (e.g., Tengan 2018). May we indeed move forward to future exchanges with Māori scholars inspired by what Georgina Stewart called “the hau of research” (Stewart 2017), in the spirit of those earlier dialogues, with respect for reo tūpuna and kaupapa Māori.

Salmond, Anne. 2012. “Ontological quarrels: Indigeneity, exclusion and citizenship in a relational world.” Anthropological Theory 12 (2): 115–41.

Stewart, Georgina. 2017. “The ‘hau’ of research: Mauss meets kaupapa Māori.” Journal of World Philosophies 2: 1–11.

Tengan, Ty. 2018. “Regenerating anthropologies with hau.” Cultural Anthropology Hotspots, September 26, 2018.

Letter to the Editors of The Chronicle of Higher Education by the Directors of the Society for Ethnographic Theory

Dear CHE Editors

We were dismayed that the Chronicle decided to publish Jesse Singal’s article on our publication HAU (How One Very Prominent Journal Went Wrong, Oct. 5, 2020) in such an inchoate state – not to mention its unfortunate timing. Given the role of CHE in upholding the importance and integrity of higher education, we would have expected to see greater insistence on situating HAU in the wider context of academic publishing. Instead, the article merely reprised the developments of a turbulent period simply in terms of a conflict between two individuals. It gives the false impression, casually smuggled in towards the end, that HAU remains substantially unchanged. Nothing could be further from the truth.

HAU came into being as a radical departure from established ways of publishing academic journals. Created by a handful of young scholars, most of them graduates and post-docs in precarious situations, it was affiliated neither with an academic institution or university nor with any professional or subject association. Its independence was its strength, enabling the journal to produce high-quality, original scholarship and very productive re-readings of older anthropological accounts. Unfortunately, that very independence also proved a temporary weakness, that sustained an informality beyond when it was healthy for the journal. This was pointed out in the report drawn up by the Executive Council headed by Carole McGranahan. When we took over as the Board of Directors in September 2018, it was clear to us that this informality had to be the first thing that had to be addressed to re-establish trust in the journal and its workings, following the media campaign launched against HAU and its founder Giovanni da Col. The world of HAU described in Singal’s piece bears absolutely no resemblance to the new organisation of the journal or the ethos of its current structure of editorial collectives.

Singal reached out in November last year to individuals working in various capacities with the journal. We read some of his earlier pieces, developed a good impression of his abilities and rigour, and became hopeful that he would produce a fair and more up-to-date account of the vicissitudes and state of HAU. We assumed that he would report on his discovery of new material about the past as well as the new developments at HAU itself. Equally, our confidence also stemmed from knowing where the piece was being published. But rather than situate the events of the past within the broader concerns of contemporary publishing and its fraught relationship with academia, the article dwelled on gossip, email exchanges, and innuendo, shallow in its ethical judgement, and betrayed its informants. Its analytical value as a sociological analysis of academic practices is underwhelming and not up to the standards of CHE.

On all counts, this was a missed opportunity.

Yours

Kriti Kapila, Anne-Christine Taylor, John Borneman, and Carlos Londono-Sulkin
Board of Directors, Society for Ethnographic Theory