John Hutnyk writing and interests - scribbles and daydreams of the collective
The anthropological project, tired and exhausted after years searching for ‘methodological absolution’, remains mired in a spiral of self-doubt and self-indulgent ‘crisis’. Anthropological teaching continues the very complicities that a self-critical reflexivity professed to avoid. Cooption and incorporation, even at the best of times. This essay asks just what would break the cycle of…
Note to self. A debate could be had as to whether the imputation of a local slave trading regime is imposed or copied from outside. No less than the Philippines’ national hero José Rizal had annotated an edition of Antonio de Morga, in which Morga explains that the Spanish, 100 years earlier than his writing... Continue Reading
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “The last hereditary Welsh prince, Owain Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, built Powis castle as a craggy fort in the 13th century; the estate was his reward for abandoning Wales to the rule of the English monarchy. But its most spectacular treasures date from a much later period of English conquest and appropriation: Powis is simply... Continue Reading
If you saw the film Injustice, about deaths in UK police custody, and then Ken s UltraViolence, or saw any Migrant Media stuff, or if you just want something that is not as BLAND and Bourgeois as Channel Four documentaries [sic we screened Injustice on Channel 4 from the street using a projector, since... Continue Reading
Anthropologists, somewhat unconsciously, remained for a long time in the position of conservative culture camp commandants—overseers of a pickled-in-aspic view of the native that was not far removed from colonial explorer adventure safari or, at best, pastoralising advocacy and brokerage. In contemporary anthropologies—for example such as the anthropology of tourism when it becomes too close...…
Your article, Contested Glories of Selective Renovation in West Bengal, has been published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Volume 49, Issue 3, and is now available for you to access via Taylor Francis Online. Woop! An eprint link to provide readers with instant access to your article (valid for up to 50... Continue Reading
Unbeknownst to each other, my much missed brother and I each got Enfield s about the same time (his a continental) and might have shared notes if he d rode on to his birthday, which would be today.
a pop up from some old search topic reports JF saying the following: In his conference presentation John Hutnyk (see this volume) indicated that even to discuss music at a time of global terror and of the demonization of the Asian minority populations across Europe is frivolous . yikes. I cannot remember this from the time,... Continue Reading
Imogen Bunting
there are many instances of sentences written to specific people love you all that are also just thinking out loud, so this here below is one of those I want to keep to remind myself to take such advice sometimes . [the context was a long overdue comment on some work sent by a... Continue Reading
Review of Madhava Prasad s 2014 book seems now more than ever Cine-Politics asserts that after a distinct period in which writers were dominant in the movies, the celebrity star system took hold, and this star persona system now acts like a contagion. In the past, and consistent with melodrama, the fragmentary and episodic form of... Continue Reading
Asian workers ‘at home’ have been organized, culturally and politically, and have provided a critique of anthropological categorisation themselves by focusing on political and organizational issues. It is salutary to find that the communist or Marxist-inspired authors and activists that should be discussed here were able to provide a critique of eurocentric models of social... Continue Reading
An outpouring of books on the Sundarbans delta and other Bengal waterways immerse us in a new ecological analytic. An amazing liquid world churns at the end of long river systems, the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Meghna and Hooghly. These rivers are sourced in the Himalaya, venerable mountains created when the shifting mass of the Indian subcontinent... Continue Reading
Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire provides commentary on the politics of the February Revolution in France (1848), leading onto an analysis of the to-ing and fro-ing of Louis Bonaparte (the nephew of Napoleon) in the aftermath of this revolution, noting as he takes the presidency that his actions prove that you can’t please all the people all... Continue Reading
The displacement of Marxist categories in the discussion of hybridity also alibis and parallels the displacement and replacement of third worldist solidarity work and internationalist politics with a cosmopolitan ‘post-colonial elite’ politics. This joins up with a stay-at-home-lecturing-from-afar approach by the white left, incapable of engaging a struggle against capital at home, co-constituted…
In Paul Rabinow s monograph Symbolic Domination (1975) the anthropologist examines the history of a Moroccan village and its dominant lineage descended from a seventeenth century saint Sidi-Lachen. A second book, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), examines the anthropologist s relationships with the informants of the first book, whose names have been changed to protect their... Continue…
Chapter 15 of Celebrating Transgression Method and Politics in Anthropological Studies of Culture: A book in Honour of Klaus Peter Köpping Edited by Ursula Rao and John Hutnyk 2005, Berghahn Books
Corpographies of Public History: The Sequester of Statues in Flagstaff Gardens, Barrackpore, West Bengal Asian Review of World Histories ISSN: 2287-9811 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/22879811-bja10107 Abstract: Public history means contested interpretations in public. Yet complicated discussion of colonial-era events can be restricted behind heritage façades. At the same time, the question of whose…
More to say on this soon as it is invaluable for the book I am working on and is so much more than the old Autnomedia version (alas, Italian was beyond me, I am guilty for not looking up the original). The new trans is like a whole new book, especially the last few chapters.... Continue Reading
Its not such a clever thing to treat trees like trinkets, but this one became a tourist attraction, and tourism, of course, often kills what it loves.