Papers by Hans Steinmüller
Anthropology of This Century, 2019
Back at work after the Christmas break: one student has the flu, another forgot to submit her ass... more Back at work after the Christmas break: one student has the flu, another forgot to submit her assessment essaywhile anxious partners send reminders about errands to be done and colleagues mingle personal animosities with arguments about ontology. The eternal return of the same in the world of the professional-managerial anthropologist: before ending it all, the default reaction is to ironically distance oneself from this world. Opinions on this question are divided, however. Some think we have a choice between irony and sincerity (Fernandez and Huber 2001; Steinmüller 2016), while others suggest that this choice is long gone: we are all ironists and cynics now, this is the predicament of our times (Žižek 1989; Belhaj Kacem 2009; Belhaj Kacem 2015:67ff). The philosopher of video games Ian Bogost broadly agrees with the latter, and in his book Play Anything (2016) he even coins a neologism for the problem: ironoia. If paranoia was the fear of people, ironoia is the fear of things, Bogost writes. Ironoia simply means that we can't take any thing seriously. Yet he suggests there is an alternative: to play, seriously and joyfully.
One Hundred Years of Argonauts: Malinowski, Ethnography and Economic Anthropology, 2024
Malinowski emphasised the rationality and peaceful nature of Kula gift exchanges, and downplayed ... more Malinowski emphasised the rationality and peaceful nature of Kula gift exchanges, and downplayed the role of violence and historical change. Recent archaeological evidence shows the Kula emerged about half a millennium ago, amidst major transformations, including the spread of horticulture, intensified inter-island trade, and the abandonment of megalithic stone monuments. These findings undermine functionalist assumptions about the stability and timelessness of the Kula. Rather than an instance of reciprocal "give and take", the Kula was a creative response to upheaval, and its functioning depended on colonial pacification.
How People Compare, 2022
There are a number of obstacles to sustained comparisons in the study of China, including the met... more There are a number of obstacles to sustained comparisons in the study of China, including the methodological nationalism of the social sciences, the Sino-centrism of Chinese studies, and the specialization of particular social science disciplines. All of them have to do with the supposed uniqueness of China. Even such a supposed singularity has to rely either on an implicit comparison, or on a rejection of comparison. In this chapter, we deal with the modes, motivations, and results of comparisons involving 'China'. We focus on the different ways in which scholars and laypersons have made comparisons involving China: including our colleagues, students, research collaborators, and we ourselves. In our research and teaching, we have often faced the reluctance of students and scholars to allow for comparison, as well as the tendency to self-parochialize by launching Chinese concepts. Weighing different possible comparisons against each other reveals core argumentative motivations: examples from our empirical work and our teaching demonstrate the scopes, scales, and terms of comparisons that are implied in concepts of Chinese society, Chinese empire, and Chinese civilization. Ultimately, we hold that a comparative perspective is inevitable, because implicit comparisons motivate both academic debates and everyday politics, in China and elsewhere. We demonstrate how implicit comparisons are accepted as shared fictions, and what happens when they are revealed as such: core arguments made about Chinese society and Chinese empire only function as long as the comparisons necessary to the argument are left implicit. Our first section deals with the problem of Chinese uniqueness, which ultimately has to do with the identity and essence of 'China'. The second section presents the case study of our teaching in a Masters Programme called 'China in Comparative Perspective', and specifically the challenges of comparative perspectives in teaching. The third part then deals with the implicit comparisons and shared fictions in the study of 'China', specifically in relationship to notions of 'society' and 'empire'.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2022
Sovereignty always relies on a double movement of violence and care. It requires the power to exe... more Sovereignty always relies on a double movement of violence and care. It requires the power to exercise violence as well as the capacity to care, to protect, and to nourish. In the footsteps of Foucault and Agamben, numerous scholars have rediscovered the same paradox in philosophical and legal texts. Anthropologists writing about informal and practical sovereignty pay attention to violence, but sometimes ignore the importance of care for the exercise of sovereignty. Against such tendencies to focus on texts and on violence, this article deals with sovereignty as care. The concrete examples are the relationships of care between commanders, soldiers, and villagers in the Wa State of Myanmar, a de-facto state governed by an insurgent army. In the absence of an effective government bureaucracy, popular sovereignty in this military state relies on a particular logic of personal relations, in which care is central. Subordinates have to care about leaders, whereas leaders are supposed to care for subordinates. Care provides the balance and foil for the exercise of violence, and both are necessary for the exercise of sovereignty. The combination of violence and care in personal relations is scaled up to create “the people” as the subject and object of sovereignty. The article describes the logic of personal relations that allows for the exercise of popular sovereignty in the Wa State and elsewhere.
Journal of Historical Sociology, 2022
Since the late Qing dynasty, Chinese scholars have confronted the challenges of indigenisation: w... more Since the late Qing dynasty, Chinese scholars have confronted the challenges of indigenisation: what are the limits of (Western) universalism, and how can social science, history, and anthropology become 'Chinese'? This article deals with a series of Chinese 'native anthropologies', from Republican-era outlines of ethnology and anthropology, to current anthropologies of history, urban experience, and immorality. Rather than an assessment of the merits and flaws of indigenisation in these debates, I analyse the social practices of attention management that decided which scholars and texts became influential, and which ones were ignored. These practices of attention management include the grammars, media, and institutions, within which interaction networks were established and scholarly communities formed. What held the attention of many fellow anthropologists was the aura of the local conveyed: a sense of incommensurability based on the unlikely identification of the anthropologist with the subject of study and with the intended reader. The aura of the local, I argue, appeared precisely when new grammars (such as empiricism and social theory), media (e.g. academic journals, books), and institutions (universities, government offices) made it increasingly difficult for anthropologists to construct shared understandings with the people they studied and the readers they wrote for. Since the beginnings of modern 'social science' (shehui kexue) and 'anthropology' (renleixue) in China, the problem of indigenisation has been central to Chinese intellectuals' efforts to create a new kind of knowledge appropriate to their environment, their subjects of study and their audience. The challenge of indigenisation, of the translation and
Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2022
Since the seventeenth century, prophets have reappeared periodically among the Wa and Lahu ethnic... more Since the seventeenth century, prophets have reappeared periodically among the Wa and Lahu ethnic groups of mainland Southeast Asia. Exceptionally talented, these men built on the syncretic cults of runaway soldiers, secretive Buddhist sects, and Christian missionaries and became leaders of millenarian movements. Typically, in the Wa language, such leaders are said to be very strong and blessed, or full of grace (bwan). The prophets might be understood as reincarnations of mythical 'men of prowess' or as the representatives of the peripheral situation. However, both interpretations fundamentally misread the semantics of grace in Wa and neighbouring languages: a kind of cunning and strength that is so radical that it cannot be measured or mediated. Grace, here, is neither a 'mediative concept' (as Pitt-Rivers suggested), nor is it the consequence of Christian conversion. Instead, grace is the incommensurability that emerges at the margin of a world that is being measured.
台灣東南亞學刊, 2022
在過去兩個世紀滇緬邊疆地區佤族和拉祜族的歷史中，傳奇英雄或
「千禧年先知」扮演了重要角色：他們擁有非比尋常的能力，提倡儀式創
新，並成為政治運動的領導者。有別於其他研究先知的論點，將先知視為
傳... more 在過去兩個世紀滇緬邊疆地區佤族和拉祜族的歷史中，傳奇英雄或
「千禧年先知」扮演了重要角色：他們擁有非比尋常的能力，提倡儀式創
新，並成為政治運動的領導者。有別於其他研究先知的論點，將先知視為
傳說中勇士的化身，或是對當地邊緣處境的反映，本文從當地的觀點出
發，主張應將先知理解為徹底的革新者，尤其是他們那看似狡黠的行為，
其實為當地引進了「恩典」的概念。這種從狡黠到恩典的轉變呈現在潛在
力量的語義變化、儀式演講中的創新、和測量的採用。在這三個面向裡
面，可以看到恩典作為一個具有不可測量性的特質、並相對於抽象和普遍
測量結構的概念清楚地浮現出來。不同於其他人類學對於恩典的討論，將
其理解為一種「調和的概念」，或僅是一種基督教語彙的應用，本文根據
佤族和拉祜族的歷史經驗，來論證恩典這個概念的根本創新性。
Religion and Society, 2021
In one of his last great provocations, Marshall Sahlins describes the 'original political society... more In one of his last great provocations, Marshall Sahlins describes the 'original political society' as a society where supposedly 'egalitarian' relations between humans are subordinated to the government of metahuman beings. He argues that this government is 'a state' , but what kind of state does he mean? Even if metahumans are hierarchically organized and have power over human beings, they lack two capacities commonly attributed to political states: systematic means to make populations legible and coercive means to identity the intentions of others. The nascent forms of state legibility and public mind reading that are present in Sahlins's original political society are not unified and tied to particular agents. A discussion of the limitations of state and mind legibility points to the fundamental correlations between those two forms of legibility and their co-implication in whatever might be called 'the state' .
Ethnos, 2021
State legibility is an extended metaphor of writing, but does not have to be based on writing its... more State legibility is an extended metaphor of writing, but does not have to be based on writing itself. In the Wa State of Myanmar – a de-facto state with high levels of illiteracy
– state legibility is produced through a centralisation of information in military government and a grid-like re-organisation of settlement patterns. This article explores two correlations between projects of state legibility and ways of addressing others’ intentions: First, centralisation of information forces subordinates to consider the intentions of the centre. Second, living in a grid forces people to consider each other’s minds. State legibility, through the use of media that reference the results of action, enables verbalising others’ intentions as their ‘minds’, that is, as the inner source of action. In a society where public mind reading has historically been discouraged, these projects have facilitated a regime of intention management in which public mind reading is central.
Ethnos, 2021
The intentions of others are ultimately opaque: we can never know exactly the mind of someone els... more The intentions of others are ultimately opaque: we can never know exactly the mind of someone else. Yet humans continually attempt to ‘read’ the mental states of others and throughout history have created institutions that attempt to do so by managing intentions and thus addressing the opacity of other minds. The contributors of this volume argue that the form in which we meet the fundamental challenge of the opacity of mind is decisive for the kinds of government we are able to imagine. Our introduction provides the framework for the exploration of the correlations between the management of opacity and the forms of government humans create. We draw attention to different ways of creating legibility, and corresponding practices of accountability, thus linking particular forms of intention management with particular ways of doing and imagining politics.
L'Homme, 2020
If human collectives live in freedom and autonomy, know nothing of command and obedience, and val... more If human collectives live in freedom and autonomy, know nothing of command and obedience, and value spontaneous sharing and flexible mutuality—can we call such collectives ‘egalitarian’? Even when there are no states, no legislations and no social sanctions that would make everyone equal, can we identify egalitarianism avant la lettre, that is, as a lived social practice in places where no notion of ‘egalitarianism’ exists? Real-existing egalitarianism of this kind has been central to the anthropological imagination and hunter-gatherer societies are commonly described by anthropologists as ‘egalitarian societies’. This themed section engages critically with the concept of egalitarianism in anthropology, emphasising how this concept misrepresents particular forms of sociality from an external point of view. It suggests that anthropologists should be wary of using the term to describe the perceived freedoms and shared welfare—that is, the autonomy and mutuality—of small-scale, decentralised societies.
Nations and Nationalism, 2021
If nationalism is defined as a claim to sovereignty based on authenticity, para-nationalism is na... more If nationalism is defined as a claim to sovereignty based on authenticity, para-nationalism is nationalism in the state of war: urgent, yet ultimately futile. Modern warfare makes it particularly urgent for historical latecomers to national unity to claim their national sovereignty. Those claims, however, sometimes have to be postponed for the very same reason of military pragmatism. The double bind of nationalism at war is illustrated with the case study of the Wa State of Myanmar: Persistent military threat imparts great urgency to the promotion of authentic culture, the purification of a shared language and the rationalisation of violence. Yet at certain moments and places, the same objectives are put aside, in favour of working with what is at hand. Rather than a semiotic circle, it is suggested that the entanglement of para-nationalism and war is primarily a pragmatic bond, which is accessible to ethnographic analysis.
Social Anthropology, 2021
The characteristic mobility of highland populations in Southeast Asia relied to a large extent on... more The characteristic mobility of highland populations in Southeast Asia relied to a large extent on their particular adaption to an ecological environment: swidden cultivation of tubers on mountain slopes. This ecology corresponded to cosmologies in which potency was limitless, or at least had no fixed and delimited precinct (as did the rice paddies and Buddhist realms in the valleys). Military state building, modern transport, and new crops and agricultural technologies have effectively ended swidden cultivation. In this article, I follow the pioneers of the plantation economy in the Wa State of Myanmar, who dispossess local populations of their land and employ them as plantation labour. The limits of growth and potency they encounter are (a) in the natural environment and (b) in the resistance of local populations. Yet, even though there are such limits, the potency to which these pioneers aspire is still limitless. It is however channelled through a new economy of life, epitomised in the plantation, nourished in excessive feasting, and maintained by the kinship dynamics of capture and care.
Social Anthropology, 2020
If the moral economies of underprivileged communities are defined in opposition to the rationalit... more If the moral economies of underprivileged communities are defined in opposition to the rationality of political economy, it is easy to overlook the moral justifications of market and state. War economies and military states, however, force us to look at the nodes of moral and economic action that connect the powerful and the powerless. The Wa State of Myanmar, a de-facto state governed by an insurgent army, represents the making of such a moral economy of militarism. Examples from the peasant economy, the military state and Chinese capitalism demonstrate the articulation of different work ethics, moral frameworks and economic arrangements. Moral and economic values are combined specifically in codes of honour, military discipline and raison d'état, that is, the value entanglements that are at the core of the moral economy of militarism.
Critique of Anthropology
If there are any charitable, philanthropic, or welfare-state activities in the de facto states of... more If there are any charitable, philanthropic, or welfare-state activities in the de facto states of insurgent armies, they are generally interpreted in terms of utilitarian motives and the self-legitimation of military elites and their business associates. However, development and philanthropy in the Wa State of Myanmar have more extensive purposes. We argue that a framing of care rather than of governance allows for ethnographic attention to emerging social relations and subject positions-'our people', 'the vulnerable', and 'the poor'. In this article we describe 'communities of care' by analysing public donations, development assistance and independent philanthropy in the Wa State as categories of care that each follow a different moral logic, respond to different needs, and connect different actors and recipients. Zooming in on the ways in which communities of care reproduce moral subjectivities and political authority allows a re-imagining of everyday politics in the de facto states of armed groups, no longer wedded to notions of control, legitimacy, and 'rebel governance'.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2019
Capturing people, sometimes by taking relatives hostage, is a common practice for purposes of con... more Capturing people, sometimes by taking relatives hostage, is a common practice for purposes of conscription and law enforcement in the Wa State of Myanmar. Given the unreliability of the local census, as well as the relative weakness of civil government, and registration in a de facto state governed by an insurgent army, the personal politics of capture provides a functional equivalent to state legibility. This personal politics operates based on the reorganization of personal networks between representatives of the military state and ordinary people: first, circles of acquaintances within the military state that provide access to local knowledge, and second, relationships of patronage formed on the basis of those new acquaintanceships, as well as connections of kinship and co-residence. Conscription by capture, however, also requires anonymity; that is, the passive non-recognition of mutuality with strangers and the active refusal of mutuality with acquaintances. This article describes the historical emergence of networks of acquaintances and relationships of patronage as a combination of Maoist state-building and local institutions of war capture and adoption. It demonstrates how conscription by capture relies on relationships of acquaintances and non-recognition, as well as on patronage and the refusal of mutuality. The politics of conscription by capture are contrasted with conscription in imperial states and contemporary nation-states.
Positions, 2022
The Wa State of Myanmar is often called 'shanzhai China', that is, a lesser imitation of China. T... more The Wa State of Myanmar is often called 'shanzhai China', that is, a lesser imitation of China. This essay unpacks the material and symbolic implications of creative imitation at the Chinese periphery, embodied in shanzhai practices. Literally 'mountain fortresses', shanzhai refers to creative and ironic brand imitation in contemporary China. Until the 1950s, the inhabitants of the Wa hills did indeed live in mountain fortresses-both a pragmatic necessity as well as a miniature repetition of Chinese imperial rule. The pragmatic limitations and creative potential of imitating China is shown for the cases of Maoism, authoritarian capitalism, and contemporary nationhood. Rather than an essentialised feature of Chinese cultural practice, the practices of shanzhai reveal that material and symbolic re-combination are essential to creative imitation.
Critical Asian Studies, 2020
In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács wrote that the impact of commodification on huma... more In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács wrote that the impact of commodification on human consciousness can be seen most clearly in journalism. He argues that not just the act of writing, but also the gathering of information, even the perception of the world itself, are governed by the commodity principle: only those pieces of experience that can be packaged and sold as information are processed. As the mind of a journalist gets used to filtering out information that can't be exchanged, commodification changes subjectivity and reduces thought into abstract mechanisms: … divorced both from the personality of their "owner" and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist's "lack of convictions", the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification. 1
Körper Technik Wissen: Kreativität und Aneignungsprozesse in Afrika., 2016
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Papers by Hans Steinmüller
「千禧年先知」扮演了重要角色：他們擁有非比尋常的能力，提倡儀式創
新，並成為政治運動的領導者。有別於其他研究先知的論點，將先知視為
傳說中勇士的化身，或是對當地邊緣處境的反映，本文從當地的觀點出
發，主張應將先知理解為徹底的革新者，尤其是他們那看似狡黠的行為，
其實為當地引進了「恩典」的概念。這種從狡黠到恩典的轉變呈現在潛在
力量的語義變化、儀式演講中的創新、和測量的採用。在這三個面向裡
面，可以看到恩典作為一個具有不可測量性的特質、並相對於抽象和普遍
測量結構的概念清楚地浮現出來。不同於其他人類學對於恩典的討論，將
其理解為一種「調和的概念」，或僅是一種基督教語彙的應用，本文根據
佤族和拉祜族的歷史經驗，來論證恩典這個概念的根本創新性。
– state legibility is produced through a centralisation of information in military government and a grid-like re-organisation of settlement patterns. This article explores two correlations between projects of state legibility and ways of addressing others’ intentions: First, centralisation of information forces subordinates to consider the intentions of the centre. Second, living in a grid forces people to consider each other’s minds. State legibility, through the use of media that reference the results of action, enables verbalising others’ intentions as their ‘minds’, that is, as the inner source of action. In a society where public mind reading has historically been discouraged, these projects have facilitated a regime of intention management in which public mind reading is central.
「千禧年先知」扮演了重要角色：他們擁有非比尋常的能力，提倡儀式創
新，並成為政治運動的領導者。有別於其他研究先知的論點，將先知視為
傳說中勇士的化身，或是對當地邊緣處境的反映，本文從當地的觀點出
發，主張應將先知理解為徹底的革新者，尤其是他們那看似狡黠的行為，
其實為當地引進了「恩典」的概念。這種從狡黠到恩典的轉變呈現在潛在
力量的語義變化、儀式演講中的創新、和測量的採用。在這三個面向裡
面，可以看到恩典作為一個具有不可測量性的特質、並相對於抽象和普遍
測量結構的概念清楚地浮現出來。不同於其他人類學對於恩典的討論，將
其理解為一種「調和的概念」，或僅是一種基督教語彙的應用，本文根據
佤族和拉祜族的歷史經驗，來論證恩典這個概念的根本創新性。
– state legibility is produced through a centralisation of information in military government and a grid-like re-organisation of settlement patterns. This article explores two correlations between projects of state legibility and ways of addressing others’ intentions: First, centralisation of information forces subordinates to consider the intentions of the centre. Second, living in a grid forces people to consider each other’s minds. State legibility, through the use of media that reference the results of action, enables verbalising others’ intentions as their ‘minds’, that is, as the inner source of action. In a society where public mind reading has historically been discouraged, these projects have facilitated a regime of intention management in which public mind reading is central.