At the height of the #MeToo scandal in 2018, when dozens of actresses were coming forward with sordid testimonies about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation, a much more obscure scandal was unfolding around an academic journal involving the anthropologist David Graeber. The journal—HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory—was imploding after Graeber, a former editor-at-large, alleged that members of staff had been treated in “shocking ways” and made a public apology, distancing himself from the enterprise. No specifics were given, but accusations spread like wildfire on social media. Many treated the scandal as a pretext to demand that the discipline of anthropology itself undertake a period of introspection and soul-searching. Some said that this was anthropology’s #MeToo moment.

HAU was set up as a digital publication by the Cambridge PhD student Giovanni da Col in 2011, while he was working in the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit under the supervision of Caroline Humphrey. While many students have had concerns that anthropology is a field in decline, da Col actually wanted to do something about it, by establishing an open access journal that would promote the highest quality scholarship possible. Named after the Maori concept of hau in Marcel Mauss’s book The Gift, the journal was inspired partly by resistance to the corporate publishing model, and partly by scepticism about the influence of continental theory on anthropology. Because anthropology has traditionally

been the study of human societies, their cultures and their development, the journal was to focus on ethnography, not fashionable post-modern theory, which would return the discipline to its roots. In their co-authored foreword to the first volume of HAU, Graeber and da Col explained that their chosen logo of the ‘ouroboros’—a serpent eating its own tail—was a symbol not of chaos, but of regeneration. Their journal was going to resuscitate the field.