John Hartigan
John Hartigan's recent book, Shaving the Beasts, is an ethnography of wild horses in Galicia, Spain. Focused on the annual rapa das bestas (a ritual shearing of these horses), Hartigan examines the impact of this ritual on the social organization of bands captured in the mountains. Combining ethological techniques of observation and analysis with ethnographic perspectives, Hartigan generates a detailed account of the social lives of these horses and how they respond to the trauma of an annual roundup and shearing.
In Hartigan's previous book, Care of the Species, Darwin meets Foucault in an engrossing ethnography of plants, race, and biodiversity. Care of the Species: Cultivating Biodiversity in Mexico and Spain (Minnesota, 2017) contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, examining infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists grapple with the complexities of evolution and domestication. In tackling the racial dimension of efforts to go “beyond the human,” this book reveals a far greater stratum of sameness than commonly assumed.
His current project, Social Theory for Nonhumans, aims to rethink forms of social analysis by tapping natural sciences research on other social species. The basic idea is that we have a skewed understanding of sociality from focusing strictly on its human manifestations. This work is being published in serial (theory in progress) via University of Minnesota’s new Manifold series: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/social-theory-for-nonhumans
In Aesop’s Anthropology (2015), Hartigan reflects on multispecies dynamics broadly, theorizing culture across species lines, principally by considering nonhuman forms of sociality. This is an ebook published under a Creative Commons license from University of Minnesota Press.
Hartigan’s first book, Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, 1999), is an ethnography of whites in Detroit, primarily focusing on poor whites from Appalachia living in the inner city. Hartigan found that the way whites think about race is keenly tied to their class identity and their location within in the city.
His subsequent book, Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Duke, 2005), is a study of “white trash,” tracing the cultural history of this charged epithet and examining the ways some whites today identify with this term while others still use it as a degrading insult.
Hartigan next developed a textbook, how-to manual on the ethnography of race. Race in the 21st Century (Oxford, 2010) surveys the efforts of sociologists and anthropologists to study racial dynamics in everyday life. Hartigan describes the emerging view in such research that see race as a performed identity.
Hartigan also pursued an "ethnography of media" approach in What Can You Say? America's National Conversation on Race (Stanford, 2010). This book takes a year’s worth of race stories in the news (from MLK Day 2007 to the subsequent one in 2008) to analyze the active ways Americans make sense of race.
Hartigan also edited Anthropology of Race: Genes, Biology, Culture, the product of a seminar at the School of Advanced Research, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This book confronts the challenge of formulating an effective rejoinder to new claims and data about race and genetics, articulating new conceptualization of race as a biosocial fact.
Address: 1 University Station, C3200
University of Texas
Austin, Texas, 78749
In Hartigan's previous book, Care of the Species, Darwin meets Foucault in an engrossing ethnography of plants, race, and biodiversity. Care of the Species: Cultivating Biodiversity in Mexico and Spain (Minnesota, 2017) contributes to debates about the concept of species through vivid ethnography, examining infrastructures of care—labs and gardens in Spain and Mexico—where plant scientists grapple with the complexities of evolution and domestication. In tackling the racial dimension of efforts to go “beyond the human,” this book reveals a far greater stratum of sameness than commonly assumed.
His current project, Social Theory for Nonhumans, aims to rethink forms of social analysis by tapping natural sciences research on other social species. The basic idea is that we have a skewed understanding of sociality from focusing strictly on its human manifestations. This work is being published in serial (theory in progress) via University of Minnesota’s new Manifold series: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/social-theory-for-nonhumans
In Aesop’s Anthropology (2015), Hartigan reflects on multispecies dynamics broadly, theorizing culture across species lines, principally by considering nonhuman forms of sociality. This is an ebook published under a Creative Commons license from University of Minnesota Press.
Hartigan’s first book, Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit (Princeton, 1999), is an ethnography of whites in Detroit, primarily focusing on poor whites from Appalachia living in the inner city. Hartigan found that the way whites think about race is keenly tied to their class identity and their location within in the city.
His subsequent book, Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Duke, 2005), is a study of “white trash,” tracing the cultural history of this charged epithet and examining the ways some whites today identify with this term while others still use it as a degrading insult.
Hartigan next developed a textbook, how-to manual on the ethnography of race. Race in the 21st Century (Oxford, 2010) surveys the efforts of sociologists and anthropologists to study racial dynamics in everyday life. Hartigan describes the emerging view in such research that see race as a performed identity.
Hartigan also pursued an "ethnography of media" approach in What Can You Say? America's National Conversation on Race (Stanford, 2010). This book takes a year’s worth of race stories in the news (from MLK Day 2007 to the subsequent one in 2008) to analyze the active ways Americans make sense of race.
Hartigan also edited Anthropology of Race: Genes, Biology, Culture, the product of a seminar at the School of Advanced Research, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This book confronts the challenge of formulating an effective rejoinder to new claims and data about race and genetics, articulating new conceptualization of race as a biosocial fact.
Address: 1 University Station, C3200
University of Texas
Austin, Texas, 78749
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to think about multispecies relations that unfold in institutional settings located in dense urban zones. This article theorizes multispecies publics as distinctive cultural assemblages that distinctly combine and align humans and nonhumans in relations of care. These publics combine deep historical roots with considerable current transformative potential for reimagining urban space and the nation.
number of species through efforts targeting biodiversity, revising various
lines between humans and nonhumans. This book examines that dynamic via a series of ethnographic settings in Mexico and Spain—scientific sites where biodiversity is a shared subject of interest and concern but that offer divergent perspectives on the constitution of species. In Mexico, the focus is on centers of maize research where genetic techniques are both revealing and manipulating the interiority of species; in Spain, the sites are a series of botanical gardens where similar forms of genetics-based plant science are transforming pressing questions about where species belong. In both countries, biodiversity is invoked to characterize institutional missions and research objectives, but with rather different emphasis. In Mexico, its connotations
cover a range of domesticated species whose genetic diversity
holds great potential for responding to threats posed by climate change; in the Spanish botanical gardens, biodiversity is helping reframe centuries-old taxonomic sensibilities regarding the place of untamed plant species. But in all these settings, care, as an alignment of interests and practices, applied across species boundaries, is developed and promulgated through advances in genetic procedures and techniques.
Papers by John Hartigan
networking, but they’ve yet to impact how we understand sociality. This is because of the notion that culture uniquely characterizes us as a species—much like racial and classed conceits equated culture and cultivation with the highest achievements of European society in the last millennium.
This is also attributable to the dependence of social theorists on the notion of social construction. In this view, we only ever engage nonhumans through representations, reflections of our cultural conditioning and social order. But the usefulness of social construction—along with certainty about the uniqueness of humans—has eroded. It’s time to recognize that sociality, in its origins and elaborations, begins with nonhumans. We’re late to the game of culture, and it’s time to catch up in our thinking about the social.
Without some understanding that our experience of the world is culturally contoured, it is difficult to regard racism as more than just an individual failing or a vaguely perceived ‘‘institutional’’ by-product. Without a recognition
of the interlocking aspects of cultural perceptions and categorical identities, race appears as just another isolated subject of political correctness. But by starting with basic cultural dynamics, it is easy to show how race both inflects and is shaped by judgments Americans make about whether
or not certain people appear to be nice, or friendly, or hardworking—each reflecting crucial categorical demarcations that ostensibly make no mention of race but that certainly operate at times in racial registers. A cultural perspective allows us to place race simultaneously in the mix of everyday
life, shaping perceptions that ostensibly do not appear racial, but without reductively asserting that everything is about race.
examining genomic practices at two national institutes in Mexico—one focused on people
and aimed at sampling “the Mexican genome,” the other focused on plant biodiversity
and “razas de ma´ız” or races of corn. The human genome project emphasizes admixture
in ways that seem to confound claims about the racialization of genomics research in
the United States; the biodiversity project highlights the broad extent to which “race”
is also about nonhumans. Taken together, these projects suggest a greater breadth and
depth to racial thinking than is typically considered in U.S.-based accounts. Grasping
this wider scope to race involves, first, foregoing a strict delineation of the social and
the biological and, secondly, recognizing that uses of race on nonhumans indicate that
racial thinking entails profound questions concerning the nature of species. “Razas de
ma´ız” suggest that racial thinking is both older and more deeply engrained than the
modern forms with which we have been most concerned; it may well derive from processes
of domestication that are quite ancient and encompass a range of contradictory, complex
ideas and practices concerning the relations of humans and nonhumans.
baseline reality; they function in interaction with environments and biologies, and variously bear the imprint of cultural practices and institutions.
The better question regarding genes and race is, so what? How can that linkage with self-identification have any bearing on the far more powerful ways that encounters with racism generate low birth rates, which then can impact subsequent generations without being transmitted genetically? In this regard, what anthropology brings to the study of race is not a motto or a claim about what “it is” or “is not”; rather, we provide for people a broader understanding of the dynamic interplay by which genes, biology, and culture intertwine through processes that bear manifold points of inflection. This is, at least, what we came up with as we struggled to characterize an anthropology of race.
to think about multispecies relations that unfold in institutional settings located in dense urban zones. This article theorizes multispecies publics as distinctive cultural assemblages that distinctly combine and align humans and nonhumans in relations of care. These publics combine deep historical roots with considerable current transformative potential for reimagining urban space and the nation.
number of species through efforts targeting biodiversity, revising various
lines between humans and nonhumans. This book examines that dynamic via a series of ethnographic settings in Mexico and Spain—scientific sites where biodiversity is a shared subject of interest and concern but that offer divergent perspectives on the constitution of species. In Mexico, the focus is on centers of maize research where genetic techniques are both revealing and manipulating the interiority of species; in Spain, the sites are a series of botanical gardens where similar forms of genetics-based plant science are transforming pressing questions about where species belong. In both countries, biodiversity is invoked to characterize institutional missions and research objectives, but with rather different emphasis. In Mexico, its connotations
cover a range of domesticated species whose genetic diversity
holds great potential for responding to threats posed by climate change; in the Spanish botanical gardens, biodiversity is helping reframe centuries-old taxonomic sensibilities regarding the place of untamed plant species. But in all these settings, care, as an alignment of interests and practices, applied across species boundaries, is developed and promulgated through advances in genetic procedures and techniques.
networking, but they’ve yet to impact how we understand sociality. This is because of the notion that culture uniquely characterizes us as a species—much like racial and classed conceits equated culture and cultivation with the highest achievements of European society in the last millennium.
This is also attributable to the dependence of social theorists on the notion of social construction. In this view, we only ever engage nonhumans through representations, reflections of our cultural conditioning and social order. But the usefulness of social construction—along with certainty about the uniqueness of humans—has eroded. It’s time to recognize that sociality, in its origins and elaborations, begins with nonhumans. We’re late to the game of culture, and it’s time to catch up in our thinking about the social.
Without some understanding that our experience of the world is culturally contoured, it is difficult to regard racism as more than just an individual failing or a vaguely perceived ‘‘institutional’’ by-product. Without a recognition
of the interlocking aspects of cultural perceptions and categorical identities, race appears as just another isolated subject of political correctness. But by starting with basic cultural dynamics, it is easy to show how race both inflects and is shaped by judgments Americans make about whether
or not certain people appear to be nice, or friendly, or hardworking—each reflecting crucial categorical demarcations that ostensibly make no mention of race but that certainly operate at times in racial registers. A cultural perspective allows us to place race simultaneously in the mix of everyday
life, shaping perceptions that ostensibly do not appear racial, but without reductively asserting that everything is about race.
examining genomic practices at two national institutes in Mexico—one focused on people
and aimed at sampling “the Mexican genome,” the other focused on plant biodiversity
and “razas de ma´ız” or races of corn. The human genome project emphasizes admixture
in ways that seem to confound claims about the racialization of genomics research in
the United States; the biodiversity project highlights the broad extent to which “race”
is also about nonhumans. Taken together, these projects suggest a greater breadth and
depth to racial thinking than is typically considered in U.S.-based accounts. Grasping
this wider scope to race involves, first, foregoing a strict delineation of the social and
the biological and, secondly, recognizing that uses of race on nonhumans indicate that
racial thinking entails profound questions concerning the nature of species. “Razas de
ma´ız” suggest that racial thinking is both older and more deeply engrained than the
modern forms with which we have been most concerned; it may well derive from processes
of domestication that are quite ancient and encompass a range of contradictory, complex
ideas and practices concerning the relations of humans and nonhumans.
baseline reality; they function in interaction with environments and biologies, and variously bear the imprint of cultural practices and institutions.
The better question regarding genes and race is, so what? How can that linkage with self-identification have any bearing on the far more powerful ways that encounters with racism generate low birth rates, which then can impact subsequent generations without being transmitted genetically? In this regard, what anthropology brings to the study of race is not a motto or a claim about what “it is” or “is not”; rather, we provide for people a broader understanding of the dynamic interplay by which genes, biology, and culture intertwine through processes that bear manifold points of inflection. This is, at least, what we came up with as we struggled to characterize an anthropology of race.
Why use the term “postracial”? Because it signals a significant break with the previous order, one in which it was practically inconceivable that a black man could be elected president. “Post,” here, works much like “postmodernism,” a word scholars used to characterize a broad rejection of modernism but one that acknowledged its enduring presence or relevance in architecture, the arts, urban design, and social theory. Postracial does not signal the end of race; rather, that its fundamental logic and codes, its unity and singularity as a form of identity, and its power as a master narrative have been knocked off-kilter and disrupted in profound ways.