Hizi Anthropology

ETHICAL CHALLENGES IN CAPITALIST WORLDS
Several of my side projects and writing endeavors deepen my interest in lived ethics today. This is intended to highlight concerns that are not centered on theoretical debates.

I. Complicity and ethical politics
Complicity is a word increasingly uttered by political movements, but it is also a structural condition that shapes our consumption practices, digital tools, and communication systems. Much has been discussed by social scientists about how neoliberalism makes us a-political, but the fact is that our entanglements with tech companies, state projects, and polluting activities undercut even the most committed political projects. This condition also produces discrepancies between local community life and global connectivity. I am interested in conversations that confront this reality, open up room to rethink activities and instruments that we tend to see as ‘inevitable’, as well as envision collective collaborations beyond predefined symbolic categories.

“Living with Complicity: Critical, Cynical Political Subjectivities in Troubled Times“(co-convenor Peter Lockwood), Biennial Conference of the German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne, 2025.

II. Digital media, free labor, and alternatives
Despite the expansive dissatisfaction of the effects of digital media in both mainstream and academic circles, the systemic condition of this reality often remains in the shades. We often talk about privacy and bullying, or the specific harm produced by specific platforms, but do less to tackle the fact that much of our conversation and ‘publics’ are commercial. Every ‘like’, ‘share’, and new content is an unpaid contribution that we make to platforms and the users to whom we respond. Even critical academics seem to see digital tools as means for many possible ends rather than a serious problem in itself. I am interested in endeavors that address this problem, both by considering the best alternatives (short and long term) and by educating ourselves and the youth about the nature of digital interactions (for better or worse). At minimus, it seems to me, we must direct us to resist the temptation to interact with hateful and polarizing content, or elevating the brand of problematic figures.

III. Alarm and virality in populist and academic discourse
Free speech means being able to speak out against worrying tendencies that we identify in policy, speech, and activity. But what happens in a system where ‘alarming’ and ‘shocking’ are inherent tools for producing virality, popularity, and value? What happens when politicians and influencers employ our honest concerns in order to gain attention and enhance their brand? I find that we academics, despite are critical sensibilities, tend to succumb to our fear and concerns to the command of the attention economy. Moreover, we sometimes produce our own fetishes by reducing all aspects of life to a state of emergency (that is indeed experienced in sites of atrocity). We need ways to address this problem and promote ways to maintain critical concerns without adding fuel to pyromaniacs’ fires.

“Indifference as a Virtue of Social and Academic Practice” (co-convenor Maria Nolan), 18^th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, 2024.

Anthropological self-explorations
Another interest of mine is the application of anthropology in processes of self-understanding. While psychological anthropology already bridges well between anthropology and psychological concepts, it tends to preserve psychological concepts (ego, unconscious, repression, etc.) and, when converted to therapeutic settings, largely overlaps with critical and cultural psychology. It seems to me that another possible direction is to develop tools for self-exploration through anthropological and sociological concepts all the way down, understanding the interactive properties of emotions, the social roles that we perform, and the properties of our social environments. We should also consider how the requirements for cultivating coherent identities and realizing ‘inner selves’ can be a source of distress as much as a path for empowerment. I am influenced by some insights of C.W. Mills’ ‘sociological imagination’ and Xiang Biao’s ‘self as method’, but would be happy to learn additional perspectives.

Literature ethnography
I am looking into options to treat certain work of realistic fiction as ethnographic material. If we genuinely apply post-structural perspectives, then texts are not just a product of an author’s absolute design or projections; they also convey voices, encounters, and realities that tells us something about social worlds. This interest is not so much about creative ethnography or examining the audience reception of literature, as it is about the insights that emerge in particular texts.

Post-structural humanism
I seek to systematize and apply in my work an approach that I see as ‘post-structural humanism’. Post-structural theories help us understand how conceptions of truth and identity have become malleable and manipulated in the contemporary world, but at the same time, these theories risk reducing life to the abstract processes that they criticize. My approach seeks to draw insights from post-structuralism on certain processes and tendencies, but in dialogue with lived findings. In addition, I draw on specific post-structural theories to assist ethnography in recognizing the dynamic compositions of social life and changing behaviors, thus redeeming relevant concepts to describe human richness rather than deterministic processes.  This is not a matter of choosing between ‘dark’ versus ‘good’ aspects of societies, but simply finding a way for our critical alarms to coexist with the more generative and collaborative realities in our worlds.