CaMP Anthropology

https://www.dukeupress.edu/visualizing-latinx

Karen Mary Davalos: Visualizing Latinx could not be more timely, although I can imagine some readers thinking about the creative arts as esoteric in this current moment. As the federal government and some states are devastating Latinx families, communities, and institutions, why does this book matter?

Arlene Dávila: All this hatred we are seeing comes from the historic dehumanization of Latinx communities. So many anthropologists—from Leo Chavez and Otto Santa Ana to so many others—have documented how, for decades, this country has been unable to imagine and visualize Latinx people outside of very limited tropes: the criminal or the undocumented migrant, or the consumer or else as a homogenous political bloc. These tropes have historically pathologized our community, making it impossible for us to see or imagine Latinx agency, to think about Latinx artists, and to view Latinx people with the multidimensionality that is needed.

So, for sure, a book like this is vital in expanding the conversation, providing nuance, and humanizing Latinx people as fashion designers, filmmakers, artists, and creative human beings who are actively imagining better worlds. This is necessary not only to challenge these old tired dominant narratives but also to achieve a fuller understanding of these creative fields! 

Additionally, we are seeing an incredible attack on archives and all kinds of research, and we’re witnessing how vulnerable the digital realm has become. This is something you have also written about in your generative Dialogues on digital humanities for Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. As digital programs, projects, and initiatives can be so easily dismissed with the touch of a button, erasing decades of research, we need more documentation, more research, more writing! This is yet another reason why a physical book that creates lasting documentation of the creative work of the Latinx community is so important.

Karen Mary Davalos: One of the values of Visualizing Latinx is your methodological insistence. You document and elevate the filmmakers’, the designers’, the public artists’ and the South Texas artists’ “own terms” for creativity and success. Can you discuss the implications of “their own terms” for filmmakers and fashion designers and other artists?  

Arlene Dávila: We have been making this shift for decades, as those who have come of age in the U.S. have had the unique opportunity to observe. Having witnessed changing racial ideologies, evolving social movements, and shifting attitudes toward race and Latino identity, we can truly appreciate this moment—and it is exactly what I most wanted to highlight in the book.

The racism we grew up with structuralized a pressure to mainstream, to fit into dominant canons, and to shape our image to please the dominant eye. We see this play out in the art world through tendencies that historically embraced whitewashed definitions and downplayed vernacular, rasquache aesthetics. In fashion, it often meant ignoring the everyday, popular culture that contemporary designers like Luar and Willy Chavarria now boldly center.

Ultimately, I wanted to write this book to highlight how exciting it is that new generations of artists and creators working in visual culture industries–from fashion to independent filmmaking and public art–are no longer creating in reference to a dominant culture. Instead, they are drawing from vernacular culture, popular traditions, and their own family histories—and doing so with incredible pride, ingenuity, and enthusiasm. We have always had examples of artists making these kinds of bold statements in their work. However, seeing this approach cross over into the mainstream—and witnessing artists achieve greater recognition of work that is deeply informed by personal and vernacular references—is a new development that is worth highlighting as proof to younger generations that it is entirely possible to gain wide visibility while producing work that remains true to our communities, our histories, our creativity. To me, this represents a deeply exciting, empowering development that signals how art can be so powerful in embodying new anti-racist projects within our communities.

Karen Mary Davalos: Visualizing Latinx is an important argument for paying attention, seeing, and valuing Latinx filmmakers, designers, public artists and creatives in South Texas, a region largely overlooked in Chicana/o/x art history. I see this book as building a discourse for visibility and your work at The Latinx Project at New York University as the infrastructure for that visibility. Can you talk about why you wanted to include TLP in this book?

Arlene Dávila: I decided to write a chapter about The Latinx Project at NYU to highlight the importance of creating institutions and structures for validating, archiving, and documenting Latinx culture, history and art in all its generous forms and expressions. The lack of infrastructure to learn about independent film, the scarcity of university courses teaching about our artists, and the near-total absence of archives and collections focusing on Latinx design were all findings that made one thing clear: we need dedicated, specialized archives, databases, and research collections to address this profound void. There is still so much work to be done. We cannot simply ask, ‘How is it possible that we don’t know about Latinx art?’ when it is completely missing from the canon of most traditional disciplines, our curricula, and our syllabi. This underscores how vital it is to have dedicated spaces to nurture this research, especially in the political and cultural climate we are living in today.

In particular, the book was inspired by the work of so many individuals and groups who are actively building these archives, support networks, and collections to combat this lack of documentation. In South Texas, in particular, I found so many exciting projects dedicated to recovering history and changing the dominant script—a script that seeks to marginalize this community and present it as devoid of value and history. Ultimately, we are at a moment where we must all pay close attention to the alternative ways our communities are fighting back. By documenting these histories, we are ensuring that future generations can recognize there is a rich history that can advance the conversation. Ultimately that’s what so many Latinx scholars have historically done – your own work on Chicana artists and Mexican American art included- and why Latinx Studies and ethnic studies is so vital more than ever. At a moment when we see so many attacks on these fields, I hope readers will learn what a massive difference an initiative like The Latinx Project can make—and how little it takes to make an impact when there are so many voids left to fill in the field. In particular, this chapter highlights the importance of collaborative and interdisciplinary work. I know these are issues your own research and practice evoke so beautifully, which is why I was so happy to be in conversation with you, and why I am so excited about the brilliant work being produced by contemporary scholars working at the intersection of Latinx studies and anthropology.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/language-work-of-speechwriters/935FF2C17010D71BC33C9BA0C9603779

Adam Jaworski: Why is it useful to conceptually distinguish between elite language workers (Thurlow’s 2020 “wordsmiths”) and low-salaried ones, despite your claim in the final chapter that all language workers, no matter how privileged or not, are subject to neoliberal precarity?

Gwynne Mapes: Foundational scholarship on language work in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology focused entirely on contexts which were markedly low-paying and low status. Cameron’s (2000) study on call center workers in the UK, for example, demonstrates the exploitation of workers’ linguistic labor, while others explore similar processes unfolding in multilingual contexts (for example, Heller 2003). Relatedly, recent work in applied linguistics documents the precarious working contexts of irregular employment (for example, Park 2022) and online teaching (such as Curran and Jenks 2023). Thurlow’s (2020) turn to more high-end examples of linguistic labor and thus represents an important step for understanding a different dimension of people’s working lives and language. Wordsmiths are not only well-remunerated, but their work is also prestigious, and thus laden with symbolic (social, cultural) capital. That said, throughout my research on speechwriters I was mindful of Duchêne’s (2020) concern that our scholarly labeling of these hierarchies in language work must not be approached uncritically. While I did not set out to draw a specific parallel between the various precarities experienced by lower-status language workers and high-status speechwriters, I think the book neatly exposes how the structures of neoliberal capitalism necessarily foster exploitation and inequality across a wider range of contexts than we might expect.

In the final chapter of The Language Work of Speechwriters, I discuss elite precarity. This phrase is meant to capture how those who benefit from the material privileges of capitalism are still subject to the rather damning effects of commodification. In other words, just as a call center worker is alienated from the products of their labor and estranged from their peers, so too are speechwriters, and other high-end language workers like academics, for that matter (see Chun 2022: 26-27). However, I don’t wish to downplay the differences between a person who struggles to feed their children or pay their bills, and someone whose metadiscursive reflections reveal the impacts of competitive (dis)empowerment. The degree to which lower-salaried workers experience inequality and suffering is certainly a world apart from the exploitation of speechwriters. But my point is that all this reflects the ultimate failure of the free market – while capitalism sells individual prosperity and meritocratic achievement, even its most successful workers are reduced to “bundles of skills” (see Gershon 2011) whose personal worth is alarmingly blurred with their market value. Ultimately, neoliberal capitalism breeds discontent across the full hierarchy of language workers.

Adam Jaworski: Your book can be considered a genre analysis of political speechwriters’ professional discourse oscillating around three keywords: invisibility, craft, and virtue. What are the profession’s dominant or distinguishing language ideologies and emblematic (meta)discourses?

Gwynne Mapes: I use invisibility, craft, and virtue to describe the primary rhetorical strategies speechwriters orient to when describing their work, but importantly, these motifs also crop up in speechwriting texts (such as archives and drafts) and education materials (such as courses and textbooks), as well as in their naturally-occurring talk (that is, a virtual happy hour meeting). While invisibility, craft, and virtue serve as thematic categories to structure the book, I ultimately argue that they are key for establishing value, representing ideological positionings which are avowed and disavowed strategically in the service of status production.

Invisibility is rooted in the classic tension which speechwriters must always manage in their work – they are the authors, but never the animators nor necessarily principals of their labor (see Goffman 1981 on “production format”). This unique professional context demands their self-erasure, which speechwriters routinely reclaim as a point of professional pride and skill. Their ability to remain backstage and disappear behind the façade of the speaker not only signifies an admirable sense of humility; it is also an act of power, and key for establishing their overall success and advancement in the profession.

Likewise, speechwriters’ particular craft is rooted in their role as exceptional creatives. On the one hand, this entails a metadiscursive orientation towards poetics – speechwriters see their writing as beautiful and refined. On the other, their expertise relies on skillful language use (for example, an ability to distill difficult material) as well as persuasion (such as constructing a compelling story). Their work is thus complicatedly caught between rhetorical responsibilities and the principles of artistry – skills which are wielded for claiming professional and personal worth. Following Thurlow (2012), speechwriters’ markedly creative labor thus guarantees their status vis-à-vis other kinds of more undervalued language workers.

Lastly, virtue, or behavior deemed especially ethical or moral in the context of speechwriting, serves as a “moral meaning-making” strategy for practitioners (Montiegel 2021). This was showcased by one speechwriter’s use of the phrase “quiet power” to describe his work: speechwriters may receive no public credit, but their linguistic labor is uniquely positioned to influence. In other words, the cultural indexicalities associated with so-called impact mark speechwriters’ work as especially beneficial – both politically and socially. Here, micro-linguistic details (such as word choice and prosodic cues) assist speechwriters in actively moralizing their profession amidst the complicated task of asserting their own status and prestige.

What comes to the fore is how invisibility, craft, and virtue serve as discursive resources for engaging in the status competition characteristic of contemporary capitalism. Speechwriting discourse of all kinds articulates practitioners’ real value in terms relevant to the commodification of knowledge and linguistic skill.

Adam Jaworski: I was particularly taken by your approach to the redacted archives of speech drafts by President George W. Bush, housed at the George W. Bush Library and Museum in Dallas, Texas (Chapter 3). In your analysis, you – of necessity – relied on what Genette (1997) calls “paratexts”. Are paratexts an underappreciated and understudied genre in sociolinguistics?

Gwynne Mapes: The story which precedes Chapter 3 is this: I attempted to gain access to speech production materials through the archives of George W. Bush, which were the most recent presidential records available to the public. I was helped by various library staff members in my selection of materials from the archive website. As I was primarily interested in seeing how final, delivered speeches differ from the initial writing produced by the speechwriting team, I chose an archival box that was described as containing speech drafts.  However, when I received the files by email, nearly all the speech production texts were redacted. In their place I found official lists of items that had been removed (for example, “Labor Day Remarks [Draft 2]”), along with the specific reason for redaction according to the Presidential Records Act. In most cases the coded restriction was labeled P5: “release would disclose confidential advise between the President and his advisors, or between such advisors”. In other words, speech drafts qualify as presidential counsel, and were therefore prohibited from public view. These lists, as paratexts, thus effectively ensure that the speaker (George W. Bush) retains all rights to ownership of his speeches, despite the existing record of their being authored by various others.

Genette’s (1997) literary terminology is new to me, but I do find it useful here for conceptualizing the more secondary pieces of discourse which surround a primary text, and which thereby guide readers toward specific interpretations. In this sense, paratexts are integral to a holistic understanding of the language context – and yes, for this reason I believe they are probably understudied in sociolinguistics. For example, what one gains from analyzing the material redaction of speechwriters’ linguistic labor from public record is a more accurate understanding of their discursive orientations to invisibility and erasure; the paratext provides important ethnographic insight into these processes. Linguistic anthropologist Jillian Cavanaugh has advocated this sort of approach, as well (2017). For example, her work concerning  Bergamasco salami production outlines the various documentary regimes which collectively attribute value to certain practices (and linguistic-cum-material objects) while also ensuring neoliberal worker surveillance. All of this is to say that what we traditionally understand as language in use is often scaffolded by these more peripheral texts which are nonetheless integral for understanding the social role of discourse.

Adam Jaworski: It could be argued that speechwriters act as ventriloquists remotely manipulating their so-called dummies (speakers) in acts of performance (that is, while giving political speeches). Would it be useful for Bakhtin’s concept of ventriloquism to be part of your analytic toolbox?

Gwynne Mapes: Bakhtin’s (1984) conceptualization of texts as dialogic and multivoiced is important for a general understanding of all socially-situated language, I think, and you are right that it is especially fitting for thinking about the material products of speechwriters’ language work. Public speeches are indeed a perfect example of how a multiplicity of voices come to be rather complicatedly tangled together. It is not simply a matter of author (that is, the speechwriter), animator (that is, the speaker), and principal (that is, the larger institution, such as a political party) – rather a whole host of people contribute to the production of a speech, including additional staff members, legal consultants, policy experts, and even historical figures via quoted material. In this sense, the public performance of a speech is intricately polyphonous from its very conception.

However, I find ventriloquism to be less clear in terms of its applicability to the speechwriting context, because of its association with a lack of emotional investment on the part of the speaker. While there were many moments in my fieldwork when speechwriters referred favorably to seeing their own beliefs or political positions come through in speeches, not everything they write is wholly representative of their personal experiences and opinions. A public speech is certainly a performative act, but ideally it is one which captures the authentic voice, character, and genuine intent of the speaker over all else.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics; ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cameron, Deborah. 2000. “Styling the Worker: Gender and the Commodification of Language in the Globalized Service Economy.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(3): 323-347.

 Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2017. “How the Sausage Gets Made: Food safety and the mediality of talk, documents, and food practices.” In Jillian R. Cavanaugh and Shalini Shankar (eds.) Language and Materiality: Ethnographical and theoretical explorations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.105-124.

Chun, Christian W. 2022. A World without Capitalism: Alternative discourses, spaces, and imaginaries. London: Routledge.

Curran, Nathaniel Ming and Christopher Jenks. 2023. “Gig Economy Teaching: On the importance and dangers of self-branding in online markets.” Applied Linguistics 44(3): 442-461.

Duchêne, Alexandre. 2020. “Unequal Language Work(ers) in the Business of Words.” In Crispin Thurlow (ed.) The Business of Words: Wordsmiths, linguists, and other language workers. New York: Routledge. 23-35.

Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation; trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gershon, Ilana. 2011. “Neoliberal Agency.” Current Anthropology 52(4): 537–555.

Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Heller, Monica. 2003. “Globalization, the New Economy, and the Commodification of Language and Identity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4): 473-492.

Montiegel, Kristella. 2021. “Use Your Words”: Vocalization and Moral Order in an Oral Preschool Classroom for Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Children.” Language in Society 52 (1): 107-127.

Park, Joseph Sung-Yal. 2022. The Perceiving Subject of Irregular Employment: Applied linguistics, precarity, and capitalism. In Christian W. Chun (ed.) Applied linguistics and politics. London: Bloomsbury. 109-129.

Thurlow, Crispin. 2012. Determined Creativity: Language play in new media. In Rodney H. Jones (ed.) Discourse and creativity. London: Pearson. 169-210.

Thurlow, Crispin, ed. 2020. The Business of Words: Wordsmiths, linguists, and other language workers. New York: Routledge.

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/experimental-times/paper

Aditi Surie: Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India (University of California Press 2025) is a compelling and contemporary story and articulation of what is happening in the economy around us, and I’ve had a delicious last few days with this book. Reading the book has made me pause and reflect because you’re not only writing about the city of Bangalore that I live in, but also about how the economy is shifting under our feet very quickly. This book is for anyone who has encountered startup thinking in their day-to-day lives. That is to say, if you’ve ever gotten the message to do what you love, to learn how to experiment at work, to stay up to date, to stay agile, or to think about how to change the world around us through business, to refashion yourself to become part of the culture around you: this is the kind of story that the book tells, and the book is an anthropological unpacking of what happens when business and organizational forms are agile, shifting and experimental.

The book could have very well just been about technology and the startup economy, but it’s not. Instead, it unpacks what it is to be part of startup capitalism, which is an anchoring thread that you offer us, so this book is about what the technology economy has done to Bangalore over the decades, but specifically about this moment of startup capitalism and the kind of cultural production it requires us to be part of.

Maybe you can start, for those who haven’t read the book, by helping us understand some of the fundamental arguments you’re putting forth in the book? This comes through in the structure itself: the first part centred around the key figure of the entrepreneur and how he is produced, and the second exploring how his visions shape everyday worlds of work. Can you tell us who the main figures are in the book, and your approach to studying start up capitalism? Why did you choose to study management and employees?

Hemangini Gupta: Thank you, Aditi. I think the way you set the book up is fantastic! The cover art is by London-based artist Shehzad Dawood, and it is a tapestry piece that’s called Ambiguous Relationships. The reason that I mention this is because I think that many of the relationships that people in the book have with the startup economy and with entrepreneurship are really ambiguous. There’s pleasure, there are friendships, there are job cuts, there is precarity, and so there’s really a shifting structure of feeling towards this form of capitalism in answer to your question.

The first part of the book looks at Bangalore’s transformations into an aspiring startup city from a center of backend software work and the call centers that it was known for in the 1990s. It draws on fieldwork at different accelerator labs, incubation centers, and small entrepreneurial companies. I show the production of the entrepreneur as a hyper visible figure to understand who this figure is, and how this figure is not just about his products and his innovations, but also about caste and access to networks, gender, class, and how these forms of identity and advantage come together to shape value in this new economy. Entrepreneurs were very keen to tell me that their work is not the work of “cyber coolies”, they don’t do “backend work”, they’re not doing projects that have been sent to them from the Global North. They emphasized that they were inventing and innovating from here in Bangalore, and I understood that as a particular kind of postcolonial remaking of one’s place and one’s work to situate oneself differently in the world. The book makes the argument that startup capitalism is also a remaking of a city and urban spaces, and a particular coming together of race and caste and class and gender to form value. So, even as I was hearing around me, “it doesn’t matter what your gender is, it doesn’t matter what your caste is”, I was finding that these things were in fact very important in producing value. So that’s the first part of the book. It looks at how startup capitalism is fabricated through racial constructions of the human, through how caste and class ideas of risk circulated and are funded, and how elite entrepreneurial masculinity is built through circulation across time and space in the city.

As I finished this fieldwork, I became interested in what happens after an entrepreneurial company is formed. Someone has a fantastic idea, they get funded, they start a company, then what? How does that company scale? How does it grow? Who is employed there? The second half of the book —The Entrepreneurial Everyday— is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a company that I call Captivate Travels. From the vantage point of being an ethnographer at work here (known as a “Marketing intern”) I asked: what is the everyday work of life under startup capitalism like? The people employed here were mostly young women, and many of them had moved to the city for work.

The second half of the book draws on my experiences working alongside them to explore how we might craft feminist futures within this world of startup entrepreneurship. The company underwent a lot of technological restructuring, and about 30% of workers lost their jobs. So I was able to witness what happens when people who are very invested in this idea of the company family lose their jobs and don’t have any control over the conditions of their work. Even as employees traffic in this idea that we’re a part of the same family, or you can bring your good ideas to work to be implemented, they don’t own company shares, they don’t really make decisions at the managerial level. So, studying people at different rungs of the economy gives you some situated lenses into how this dream that startup capitalism can provide social good for everyone really unfolds across different sectors of the economy.

Aditi Surie: You describe your approach as “labor as method,” and draw from feminist ethnography to center bodies, feelings, and infrastructures. This methodological stance is key to the book’s intervention. Can you walk us through how this approach shaped your fieldwork? What kinds of spaces, conversations, and relationships did it open up?

Hemangini Gupta: There were dense concentrations of startup work and entrepreneurship in particular parts of the city of Bangalore where this book is based that we would call startup hubs, so I came up with “labor as method” as a way to approach the field work. I lived with an entrepreneur when I was doing field work, and I call her Naina in the book, and discovered from Naina’s life that when you study startup entrepreneurship, you don’t study it at a particular site. There’s no single office that I could go to. So, Naina would wake up early in the morning, she’d go for a run to Cubbon Park, then she’d meet people in the morning for coffee, she’d go to different meetings, coffee outings with clients, and then evening drinks with someone who was also potentially a client or a collaborator. Startup capitalism is threaded through the sites and streets of the city, and so I wondered: how, as an anthropologist, would I be able to study this? How do you study forms of labor that are not always explicit? Labor as method is an invitation to track the different sites where value is produced, because it also helps you see who’s being left out so to interview women creating their businesses at the fringes of the city and witnessing what they understood as networking downstairs in the apartment building while their children were playing was also a reminder of how reproductive labor shapes the production of value and the possibilities for entrepreneurial success.  Witnessing women struggle with the late-night networking and calls of the startup world or the expectation that they would be continually on and available was a reminder of how labor is sometimes hyper invisibilized and at other times invisibilized. Labor as method helps me work through these disparate and variegated worlds that comprise startup capitalism.

Aditi Surie: This also takes us back to another compelling word of our time, when it comes to the relationship between technology and work in the contemporary age, which is flexibility. This is a term that is academically really important, and politically also important, because in this moment we are told that flexible jobs are good because it brings women into the workforce. Entrepreneurship creates flexibility for time, but in the book you talk about flexibility quite frankly. The bodily subjectivity of an entrepreneur requires a different kind of flexibility from that which is promised to the workers. Can you help us understand what you mean by flexibility in the time politics that you see in startup capitalism? I study the gig economy, and flexibility is constantly mentioned as part of a narrative of why gig jobs are good compared to formal jobs. Formal jobs, where you have very particular working conditions, where you work from nine to five, you know when your day is going to end, you know when the day begins, and there’s routinization of work that has been seen as an ideal, so can you help us understand how startup capitalism breaks that down?

Hemangini Gupta: I found the promise of flexibility to be so misleading, because women were able to be flexible, but what was happening was that their work was just doubling and tripling. They were expected to do so much more under the guise of flexibility. One of the chapters of my book tracks a few entrepreneurs through a day in their lives and this chapter illuminates the limits of the discourse of flexibility under startup capitalism by showing how it plays out. My example is an entrepreneur whom I call Ruhanna, who lives in a small two-bedroom apartment in a massive gated complex over an hour away from the city’s startup hubs.

I’m in her house interviewing her, because she doesn’t have time to meet me elsewhere. I pull out my recorder and began talking to her in between her infant baby’s gurgling and occasional high-pitched wails. This is the flip side of flexibility: that she’s working in her house with her children. Just as I asked my first question, the doorbell rang, and her older son returned from school. Our interview had barely begun but it was already constantly punctuated by different things happening. After it finished, I ended up taking her son and his friends to the library, just opposite, because she needed some time with the baby. This interview and exchange gave me a material sense of how this promise of flexibility for women, that they could do entrepreneurial businesses on their own time, was lived in reality because of the amount of reproductive labor they were also doing that was not being subsidized or taken away from them.

At the company where I did fieldwork, the founder said to me, “I hate this idea that when you go to work, you have to swipe in and out. Here, you work when you can, and you leave when you need to!” I was quite interested in how it would actually work at the office, and I found that for some of the women who’d been employed at that company for longer periods of time, they were having actual physical breakdowns, because they were working at work, and then they were working when they got home. One of them said to me that she had injured her wrist so she just propped herself up in bed, placed her laptop on her lap, and called a friend who made notes for her. Flexibility allowed work to seep into all kinds of spaces that in an earlier economy might have just ended when you got home. I found this, especially in the case of women, to be very pronounced in terms of them beginning to embody work in a way that led to actual physical breakdowns, and required them to extend work in unimaginable ways, because the imagined figure of flexibility is the entrepreneurial man who doesn’t have the same commitments or care work.

Aditi Surie: For women employees in an entrepreneurial firm, even though they are not the entrepreneurs we think about, they are very much driven by the same opportunistic idea that just by working hard they can get what they need. Yet they are met by structural barriers, and we see that in the case of the women in your story, that reproductive work and other factors play into that. They might have had solidarity and friendship at the workplace, where they were able to muddle through it together, but with the automation of jobs, what happens then to the entrepreneurial mindset? What have these women’s lives looked like after those job losses, and what kind of message do we take away? Because I think all of us are now implicated in some of these forces, not just the women in your story.

Hemangini Gupta: When I first began fieldwork there was so much interest and commitment in the small Indian entrepreneurial company with the feeling that it could do things differently. There was none of the stigma that’s sometimes associated with call center work, instead there is a sort of respectability and a professionalism attached to entrepreneurial companies, and the feeling that if you have an idea for a new project, well, it’s all yours, you can do it. You don’t get extra money for it, you’re not rewarded materially, but it’s the sense that you’re building something. That’s a very compelling fiction. Women workers were really compelled by the idea that you can build the company family. In response to the job losses the idea of the company family also shaped how they responded, which was in personal terms, through a sense that particular members of the management let workers down.

The last chapter follows some of these women to ask, so where did they go after the job losses? What are they doing now? Where are they employed? Many of the young women got married and moved to where their husbands got work, and they don’t work right now because of racialized borders and their visa rules and regimens. Several of them are taking care of their kids, and performing other forms of labor. So, I made with Shreya K., a filmmaker, a series of short video essays with many of these women, tracking them during COVID and after they’d left the company to experiment with the idea of “labor as method” through filmic/ media practice, collaborating with the workers to create fragments and storylines of their work and after-work (in the sense of after job loss and after work hours) lives.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/how-data-need-people/776A73CBBE3EAA67243A4830514F1F62

Grey Gundaker: Although sociology and history of science have been around a long time, it took a while before anthropologists moved into this arena. What, if anything, do you think anthropology adds to or tackles differently from other disciplines?

Götz Hoeppe: This is a great question. One of my favorite quotes is Tim Ingold’s notion that “anthropology is philosophy with the people in.” It goes a long way and explains its difference to much history and sociology that deal with people, too, but often not with the real life of their practical reasoning and acting. Sociologists of science had long focused on bibliometrics and, following Robert Merton, on the normative structure of science. Back in the 1970s, when sociologists Bruno Latour and Karin Knorr Cetina first ventured into scientific laboratories to study knowledge-making practices there, they declared to follow an anthropological approach and did ethnography. Knorr-Cetina, for example, wrote that this meant to look at laboratories with the “innocent eye of the traveller in exotic lands.” Of course, anthropology has much more to offer than ethnography as a method. (And, like linguistic anthropologist Jan Blommaert, I think of ethnography less as a method than as a paradigm that is imbued with its own epistemology and ontology.) But anthropology’s openness toward surprises that Knorr-Cetina alludes to continues to be important. Facing unknown domains, anthropologists are often wary that diverse actors, agencies, and objects may matter to a social setting, not all of which are human. They cannot know in advance which forms social life may take, and if these actors and agencies are members of a culture or community. In the book I focus on what I call data-centric socialities: forms of social coordination unfolding in the making, use, publication, and reuse of digital scientific data. These involve scientists and technicians, students and their supervisors, teams that collaborate and compete, makers and users of data – and always also the technologies and media that they use together.

In putting data and social practices at the center my study, I draw on another strength of anthropology: its attention to sensemaking, embodiment, materiality, and language as essential to a community’s social and cultural life. By focusing on interactions of data makers and data users, I discovered a subtle ethical landscape that is consequential for those affected, but unrecognized by earlier studies. And I noticed that I was not the only ethnographer around: scientists and technicians undertook social inquiries themselves. This is an important practice that novice scientists need to learn. What also fascinated me was how scientists use diagrams as sites for cultivating data, and how their collaborations are organizational experiments for managing their work with large datasets. Probing into the conversations among members of a research team helped me to gain insights into the normative expectations of what people call open science. In this way I also learned that scientists commonly presume what Alfred Schütz called a “reciprocity of perspectives”: they assume that data users act like themselves as they seek to encode their knowledge in a dataset and design it for others to use it properly.

This focus on language and social action led me to matters of social accountability. In fact, accounting practices became my book’s central thread. These practices are implicated in everything I told you so far. The social study of accounting practices begins with a classic ethnography, Edward Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. It sounds like an odd inspiration for a study of contemporary scientists, but how the Azande used their oracles and dealt with their often-contradictory outcomes is, in fact, very productive for making sense of scientists’ data practices. Both the Azande and contemporary scientists are concerned with securing membership in their communities and living in a shared world. Another study that I found enormously useful is Larry Wieder’s classic account of the convict code that commits the residents and staff of a half-way house for convicted narcotics offenders to certain ways of communication. This may sound a bit curious as well, but I hope it all makes sense when you read it in context. Scientific data that are good to be used, circulated and reused emerge from accountable social relations.

Grey Gundaker: The main approach you use to study astronomers at work is ethnomethodology, which Harold Garfinkel pioneered to investigate astronomy as a “discovering science.” Why did you choose this path as well? And what additions, changes, or amplifications did you make during your own research in order to make a good fit with current practices in astronomy?

Götz Hoeppe: I discovered ethnomethodology only after my main period of fieldwork. I should add that I am an astronomer-turned-anthropologist: I did a Master of Science in physics with a thesis on radio observations of galaxies and then a PhD in environmental anthropology with an ethnography of a fishing community in Kerala (India). Among fishers and astronomers, I followed people around as they pursued their business and made sense of what they encountered, often collectively. In doing so I documented what ethnomethodologists call “member’s methods.” Only later, when I wrote up my first paper on the project, did I discover that I had adopted elements of an ethnomethodological approach without realizing it.

Incidentally, by having been trained in the science that I then examined I fulfilled what Garfinkel called the “unique adequacy requirement.” He argued that this is needed for studies of expert work. But I also discovered Garfinkel through the anthropologist Mary Douglas, a student of Evans-Pritchard, who took him seriously in the study of accounting practices. Garfinkel and Douglas both learned a lot from Durkheim.

For me, discovering ethnomethodology was a stunning experience. It surprised and fascinated me like no other anthropological or sociological writing before or since. It is an incredible tool to discover how people make sense, how social practices unfold and how we produce social order. But not everything that I witnessed can be seen through an ethnomethodological lens. When you call astronomy a “discovering science” you hint at Garfinkel’s famous pulsar paper, in which he examines a scientific discovery by scrutinizing an audio tape recorded by Steve Woolgar during part of their work. Reading this fascinating article felt as if my brain was being rewired. It is an amazing text. But I do not agree with Garfinkel’s claim that the discovery was constituted and accepted only through the local work that he describes. Historical context often matters in ways that Garfinkel ignored. This is one thing I add in my study. In addition, I pay more attention to documents and media and adopt a more inclusive understanding of accountability. These are some means to bring the local and the distant into a singular account, which I wanted, given that data made at one site are often used at diverse other sites.

Grey Gundaker: “Observation” and “discovery” are terms that the public generally associates with astronomy, physics, and other sciences. Yet these terms can suggest an overly simplistic view of the process– as if the scientist merely sets up and experiment or designates a space or entity to observe and… bingo… new information emerges.  Discuss some of the ways that technological and human interactional mediation shape the process of investigation as it actually occurs.

Götz Hoeppe: Indeed, textbooks often describe scientific observation as a sequence of calibrating your equipment, next experimenting or observing, then analyzing what you measure and, eventually, comparing it with the theory. But, in practice, science does not quite work like this. In my book, it is Nadine (pseudonym), who experiences this painfully. I describe her training as a graduate student in Chapter 3. Nadine was meant to combine data from different sources for analysis. This is a common problem of data-rich science, but often also a challenge. Nadine had been meticulous with her data calibrations and when she moved to her analysis, she was thrilled, thinking that she had made an important discovery right away. But Otfried, her supervisor, remained skeptical and asked her to re-calibrate her data. This is what Nadine did – and her discovery disappeared. As she moved on, this happened again. This back-and-forth between calibration and doing science eventually produced a dataset that Otfried and other scientists were happy with and that did, in the end, produce new results. So, Nadine had to suffer through moments of exasperation and frustration. But along this way it was not only her dataset that got calibrated: Nadine herself became a member of a community and culture. Nadine learned to laugh about jokes that only insiders get and to talk about science in ways that outsiders would find as lacking important details. Calibrating data and doing science are essential to becoming a scientist.

Grey Gundaker: Your book also vividly portrays the many layers of contingency involved in astronomers’ work. These include dependence on outside funding and limited telescope time, the hierarchy and distribution of roles among the astronomers, and the complex checks and balances involved in making sense of data sets and rendering them comprehensible to other users. Tell us about how some of this works.

Götz Hoeppe: You are right. Well, in our daily lives we all deal with many contingencies. We miss the last bus and must find another way home. We go shopping, but our favorite salad dressing is out of stock. Likewise, scientists cannot but live in a less-than-perfect world, even though descriptions of science rarely say so. Nadine and her fellow graduate students had to abandon the confidence they had as undergraduate students: that there always is an exact solution to every problem. As elsewhere in life, they now had to find answers to the question, “what is good enough?” and “is this good enough?” Things like working toward a deadline, technical malfunctions or clouded out observing nights lead to smaller datasets than desired, forcing scientists to make hard decision. There are often several contingencies at the same time. What I describe in the book is scientists’ social practice – one may say: social art – of dealing with such contingencies, and doing so creatively and resourcefully. Of course, data may be lacking and projects may fail, but in the work that I witnessed, good enough also means that their work, which is open for criticism and reassessment, remains accountable to others, and is often successful because of people’s artful accommodation of social accountabilities.