HAU

June 20, 2018 8:40 PM

HAU is dead, long live OA initiatives
Open Secrets: On Power and Publication
chronology
#hautalk
meaning and pronunciation
posted by unliteral (8 comments total)

From early on there were signs that something was amiss, that I realize now I should have noticed; these signs became more salient over time. After one incident of alleged physical violence at the end of 2016, some of HAU's patrons did try to intervene, to stop power from being concentrated and abused; but we did not act firmly or consistently enough – and the end result was that workers and contributors appear to have been treated in shocking ways, the administration appears to have been grossly mishandled, due process undermined, potential supporters alienated, and the project of HAU as an open-access journal was not successful as a result.

Physical violence?

This is supposed to be something run by educated adults?

Thank you very much for this link. Not surprised, but disgusted...
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 8:54 PM on June 20, 2018

I feel like I’m missing a lot of context here. What is the HAU Journal and why did anyone care what happened to it? All I can figure out from these links is that it was an anthropological journal that had some kind of problems with its management, and it is named after a Maori word that has about a half dozen wildly different meanings.
posted by egypturnash at 10:23 PM on June 20, 2018 [7 favorites]

It sounds like the current head of the editorial board, Giovanni da Col, has been accused of really problematic management tactics ranging from sexual harassment to gas lighting. This Inside Higher Ed article outlines the issues for those having a hard time digging through the blog posts and Twitter. (It took me a while to figure out what the issue was as well.) So in addition to any of the issues HAU had with its open access policies and prices, it sounds like a horribly toxic working environment. I think their approach to OA is interesting and flawed on its own, but throw in behavior causing employees to get psychotherapy treatment, I can see why #hautalk is a thing.
posted by kendrak at 10:40 PM on June 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

I feel like I’m missing a lot of context here. What is the HAU Journal and why did anyone care what happened to it?

kendrak covers the controversy well.

I don't have an inside line on this and just read some of these links days ago, but to answer your more general questions it used to be a reputable open access cultural anthropology journal. A former editor, David Graeber, gets linked on Metafilter occasionally and even got an account here briefly. His apology for not figuring out what was going on, unobservant complicity, etc. is mentioned in the first article, and the way I recall it showing up in my Twitter feed I think it may have functioned as an announcement / expression of support for people who were affected.

IIRC the journal was joining (has joined?) the University of Chicago Press to become less accessible--a move that is a bit ironic because the title comes from Marcel Mauss's famous essay The Gift, in which Mauss talks about hau to illustrate a metaphysical bond between givers and receivers of gifts: the spirit of the gift. To anthropologists, open access falls under the heading of generalized reciprocity--giving a gift without an expectation of an immediate return.

Anyway, something I liked from HAU Journal was Graeber's "Radical alterity is just another way of saying 'reality': A reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro," a pretty good response to what's called the ontological turn in cultural anthropology (but that to me personally felt like neo-Kantianism--more Cassirer than Heidegger--and more of a thought experiment than a practical way of thinking). And something from HAU Books that's worth a look maybe even to general audiences is Jeanne Favret-Saada's The Anti-Witch.

Someone actually in the discipline these days could probably explain this all better though.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:32 PM on June 20, 2018 [8 favorites]

I have a couple of friends who work in Anthropology and this is big news there. It's really a shame this would happen to an open access project. Open Access is a very important and fragile idea; having a high profile journal fuck that up is enraging.
posted by Nelson at 7:53 AM on June 21, 2018

Somebody elsewhere raised a great question about access to the older articles that were published Open Access with a CC license. How will long term access be preserved (if at all)?

I also saw this article about HAU, anthropology and assholes float by on Twitter. It's not really comforting to know that every discipline is struggling with this.
posted by kendrak at 9:04 AM on June 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

Oo, good link, kendrak. I expect I should go read the book on assholes it links -- and crossreference to the theory of bullshit.

If every discipline, and countries around the world, and private relationships, are all struggling with assholes and their bullshit, then grand narratives of the cause seem appropriate. Me, I'm leaning towards authoritariansim as one always-available natural human strategy, and getting away with asshole-bullshittery as a unfakeable signal of having social authority, and the horribly wicked problem of Piketty economic concentration and looming ecological collapse pushing a lot of people towards -- anything that seems like it will work.

The only optimistic tactic I can pull out of this is that the real world does not care about bullshit and organizations that let themselves be run by bullshit and assholes will not be the best at dealing with the real world. So not letting that happen gives an edge in getting shit done, which we need. And lo, value-for-money and fit-for-service and at-least-don't-tell-me-it's-pudding are more common in (e.g.) cooperative businesses than not, in my experience.
posted by clew at 11:26 AM on June 21, 2018

From what I see, it's a big deal partly because the HAU project was meant to be a model for OA, non-traditional anthro publishing and associated with/ published top names in the field, and partly because it feeds into a larger movement in anthropology about sexual harassment, particularly given the fieldwork-heavy nature of the discipline, but obviously also at the level of male professors in power. There's an open spreadsheet of anonymously sourced reports of sexual harassment in the academy somewhere. HAU might be the start of a chain of other events.

Graeber is being called out on twitter, and I've also seen critical responses to Carole McGranahan's open letter.
posted by ahundredjarsofsky at 7:49 PM on June 21, 2018