CaMP Anthropology

Jeffrey G. Snodgrass on his book, The Avatar Faculty

July 6th, 2026

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-avatar-faculty/paper

Jie Wu: Your framework draws on anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, epidemiology, communication, and game studies. How do you navigate the tensions between these disciplines, especially given their different assumptions about mind, agency, and causality? Do you see your work as integrating these fields, or more as translating between them?

Jeffrey Snodgrass: Psychologists focus on individual mental structures and processes such as attention, cognition, emotion, motivation, and personality. Anthropologists highlight the importance of culture, in the sense of socially shared and learned knowledge and practice. As a psychological anthropologist, I integrate perspectives from each of these fields to emphasize how individual minds can be more fully understood by considering their social and cultural context. So, for example, I focus in the book on the underlying cognitive capacity to temporarily visualize and embody an alternative possible self (Markus & Nurius, 1986) such as a spirit or deity (in a religious setting) or a character (in gaming contexts). However, I show how specific local cultural traditions sanction and thus shape how spirit mediums and role-players alike enact and experience these alternate and even ideal secondary selves. In these terms, I highlight the human capacity to cultivate and identify with alternative vehicles or vessels for the self that come to feel real—what I term an avatar faculty—while also showing the quite variable forms those secondary selves can take. This approach has been referred to as universalism without uniformitarianism (Cassaniti & Menon, 2017). I aim to integrate these disciplinary approaches to reveal mental and behavioral processes that are at once individual and sociocultural rather than simply translating between or across the perspectives of psychology and anthropology.

Further, I show in the book how by uniting with an avatar—that imagined vehicle that gives form to one’s secondary self—one can inhabit alternate realities and accomplish new kinds of things in ways that can be psychosocially beneficial. Thus, coming to experience oneself as a deity, and having others accept that identity as valid, can provide the possessed with new sources of social belonging and status. In the central case I describe in the book, that of Bedami of the Bhat community, this helps her to mend fractures she experienced with other members in her group, helping to re-integrate her and her husband with her natal family. That in turn helped Bedami personally, alleviating sources of stress and conflict in her life, which contributed to her overall health and well-being. For gamers, skillfully enacting an avatar identity—as a warrior, a healer, a hero—can also provide players with an elevated secondary identity and status, which, as with Bedami Bhat, could spill out into the actual world. I learned that players could come to understand themselves differently in their offline lives, for example, as more able to enact and complete projects that were important to them. In theoretical terms, their sense of self-efficacy or agency had been enhanced, which in turn could strengthen their overall sense of identity and well-being.

These additional examples demonstrate the implications this research has for health fields such as clinical psychology, psychiatry, and epidemiology and for religious and games studies. My ability to make potentially novel contributions to these fields again emerges from my integrative psychological anthropological approach. I would add that a psychologist might use a term like self-efficacy to discuss the way that internal and somewhat enduring self-representations can shape one’s capacity to make choices and act independently, while an anthropologist would more likely frame such issues with the term agency or even moral agency to emphasize how social contexts propel individuals to pursue actions that are personally meaningful and culturally valued. So, there is undoubtedly a degree of translation between these fields’ terminologies in the book, and that might help readers from different disciplines avoid talking past each other. Nonetheless, even here, my primary aim remains integrative, in the sense that I want to illuminate how individual choices, actions, and well-being are constrained both by inner self-concepts and external sociocultural contexts. Avatars illustrate such hybrid psychosocial processes in the way they allow us to project an oftentimes more idealized internal vision or concept of ourselves into external forms—spirits, characters—that are shaped and constrained by culture-specific expectations and behavioral scripts. Overall, I develop in the book a psychological anthropological framework that is ideally better able to address these and other behavioral and health questions as compared to any single disciplinary approach.

Jie Wu: You propose an avatar faculty, a general human capacity to identify with or project consciousness into alternative self-objects, expressed across culturally diverse practices such as spirit possession, shamanic trance, and immersive digital gaming. While these phenomena differ significantly in context and interpretation, you argue they share a common underlying structure involving absorption, dissociation, and identity transfer. What is gained analytically or epistemically by framing these as expressions of a universal capacity, rather than treating them as culturally specific but only loosely comparable practices?

Jeffrey Snodgrass: The book’s central comparison is between what we might call sacred role-play of Rajasthani spirit mediums and secular role-play as we might find in digital or tabletop role-playing games. Both allow for the temporary transformation of players into culturally sanctioned identities—spirits or characters—who confront and resolve challenges, thus providing rehearsal spaces for meaning making, identity formation, and the transmission of culturally scripted responses to adversity into everyday life. However, as I show extensively in the book, the specific transformations that occur are constrained and shaped by cultural expectations and scripts that in the end, yes, mean that a spirit medium’s compared to a gamer’s avatar transformation can look quite different (for my team’s latest on this line of thinking, see Snodgrass et al., 2026).

As alluded to above in my response to your first question, and as echoed here, universal does not mean uniform or completely the same. Rather, developing the idea of an avatar faculty implies there are features that are shared across contexts that can be productively compared to each other. The pragmatist in me asks: Is this abstraction useful or productive in some way?

So, yes, the notion that there is an avatar faculty is an abstraction, which identifies a parallel between spirit possession and gaming. But that’s the role of theory and analysis, as I understand it. In this case, I hope the abstraction is a useful one, which might help readers see these and other phenomena in new and even parallel ways.

In fact, one aim of the book is to develop avatar as an analytical categorythat highlights how a general human capacity to cultivate alternative representations of the self (avatars) can help religiously minded persons and gamers alike to enact the good life. This highlights how non-western categories of thought can usefully ground analysis outside of their original ethnographic and historical contexts.

This is to say that one response to your question would be to turn it back on you and ask: Why resist using avatar in this abstract analytical manner, when we (as psychologists or anthropologists) might commonly employ other abstract terms such as consciousness, identity, mind, self-efficacy, agency, community, culture, power, religion, ritual, trance, play, or games?

Yes, we can—and many have—similarly critiqued each of these terms as well. Yet, these ideas still can prove themselves to be analytically useful, and I would hope this might also be the case with my use of avatar. That is, my analysis might encourage readers to think in new ways about their relationships to secondary selves or identities in their own lives, along with the benefits they might enjoy from enacting those alternate identities.

Jie Wu: You describe a shift from your earlier ethnographic work in Rajasthan, conducted largely as a solo researcher, to later work on World of Warcraft carried out collaboratively with students and co-researchers. How did this transition shape your research design, particularly in terms of data collection, participant observation, and interpretation?

You also mention the Ethnographic Teaching and Research Laboratory (ERTL), where students were trained to conduct repeated fieldwork in gaming environments over multiple semesters. How did this structured training model affect the consistency and comparability of data across different student cohorts, and how did you maintain coherence in multi-researcher ethnography?

Jeffrey Snodgrass: Let me address these questions by telling you how the book’s research came about.

I have a longstanding interest in the power of stories, for example, beginning most fully with my dissertation research on the Rajasthani Bhat community, who were professional poets, puppeteers, and storytellers (Snodgrass, 2006). The seed for this book was planted when as a new professor I was brainstorming creative ways to teach anthropological research methods to my students. I came up with the idea of leading a research team inside World of Warcraft, an online game that some in my tabletop roleplaying group were playing at the time. The idea was that we would conduct field observations and interviews, interacting with other players’ characters or avatars, inside this game-world.

I thought of games like World of Warcraft as dynamic, living stories, where players actively take on character roles rather than just reading about or viewing them as one might in a novel or film. In fact, that’s in part how I thought about spirit possession, something I had earlier studied (and continue to study) in India. In part because of my relation to the Bhat community, I thought of spirit possession as performances of a kind, and stories, where the possessed would strongly identify with gods and spirits and then act out those identifications in ritual contexts.

The deeper I delved, the more I became interested in the relationships and exchanges a person might have with such secondary (performative) selves. In spirit possession, the possessed person comes to think of themselves as the avatar or vehicle-vessel of some spiritual entity. But still the god or spirit is a second self of a kind. In games like World of Warcraft, the character or avatar is the vehicle or vessel of the player’s consciousness. The player projects themselves into the character.

So, to answer your questions more directly, bringing student collaborators into the research process and developing my lab changed how I thought about research. The heart of my research remains ethnographic, relying on participant-observation and interviews. That’s where I continue to make big discoveries and have my “aha” moments, like seeing health and wellbeing parallels between spirit possession and gaming.

Those discoveries follow what the American pragmatist philosopher CS Peirce referred to as a logic of abductive inference: When encountering perplexing new observations, what concept might we posit to explain those phenomena or data? In my case, I thought that enhanced social status or prestige helped explain the health and wellbeing benefits of identifying with avatars in both ritual and gaming contexts (for more on abductive logic, see Snodgrass, Dengah II, et al., 2024; Snodgrass, Lacy, Dengah II, et al., 2024).

To my mind, there is no better mode than ethnography to discover new things about the world. But I am now more committed to the idea that we anthropologists, who are so keen to discover things about the world via our largely qualitative methods, should and can also put our ideas at risk and attempt to further confirm or even falsify them (in the language of philosopher of science Karl Popper (2005)) with alternate modes of inquiry. Quantifiable field survey results, which are presented in greater detail in the book’s appendices, can prove helpful here. Ethnographically sensitive counting helps one clarify the wider distribution within a group of a certain pattern like a relationship between gaming immersion and stress relief. One can also check for whom, and with what qualifications those patterns hold, again using quantitative analyses that include covariates like gender, socioeconomic status, and age. These larger patterns and distributions can be very difficult to detect via qualitative methods alone.

This is why I follow a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach to ethnographic analysis (Snodgrass, Lacy, Wutich, et al., 2024). Approaching a phenomenon through various analytical avenues increases my confidence in a particular finding. Yes, there is the risk of loss of coherence, as you allude to. However, careful documentation of the relevant cultural contexts associated with each dataset helps my various teams avoid that. So, it is ultimately the ethnographer’s sensitivity to context that helps preserve the integrity of the analysis, in a mode of inquiry we might call ethnographic science (Aunger, 2003).

References

Aunger, R. (2003). Reflexive ethnographic science. Walnut Creek. CA: AltaMira Press.

Cassaniti, J. L., & Menon, U. (2017). Universalism without Uniformity: Explorations in Mind and Culture. University of Chicago Press.

Markus, H., & Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41(9), 954.

Popper, K. (2005). The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge.

Snodgrass, J. G. (2006). Casting kings: Bards and Indian modernity. Oxford University Press.

Snodgrass, J. G., Dengah II, H. J. F., Sagstetter, S. I., & Zhao, K. X. (2024). Causal inference in ethnographic research: Refining explanations with abductive logic, strength of evidence assessments, and graphical models. PLOS ONE, 19(5), e0302857.

Snodgrass, J. G., Lacy, M. G., Dengah II, H. J. F., Zhao, K. X., & Sagstetter, S. I. (2024). Sharpening causal reasoning in applied ethnographic research. Human Organization, 83(4), 389–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/00187259.2024.2412986

Snodgrass, J. G., Lacy, M. G., Wutich, A., Bernard, H. R., Oths, K. S., Beresford, M., Bendeck, S., Branstrator, J. R., Dengah II, H. J. F., Nelson, R. G., Ruth, A., Sagstetter, S. I., SturtzSreetharan, C., & Zhao, K. X. (2024). Deep hanging out, mixed methods toolkit, or something else? Current ethnographic practices in US anthropology. Annals of Anthropological Practice, 48(1), 20–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/napa.12213

Snodgrass, J. G., Sagstetter, S. I., Chakrabarti, C., Branstrator, J. R., Zhao, K. X., Lacy, M. G., DengahII, H. J. F., Wagner, A., Giardina, A., & Billieux, J. (2026). Tabletop Role-Playing Games as Drama Therapy in the Wild: Developing Personal Bonds with Characters Improves Players’ Self-Concepts. Transcultural Psychiatry, 13634615261418363. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634615261418363
Chelsie Yount on her book, Selective Solidarity

June 29th, 2026

https://www.pennpress.org/9781512827569/selective-solidarity

Ashley McDermott: Selective Solidarity looks at how children are socialized into economic moralities, or as you write, “normative expectations regarding material circulation.” Over the course of the work, you foreground children’s agency in economic and kin relationships but also demonstrate the ways their moral-economic behaviors reflect adult anxieties over their family’s future and maintaining middle-classness in shifting political-economic conditions. Could you tell us what brought you to researching moral-economic behavior through the lens of language socialization? Did you set out to study children, and their transnational networks, from the outset of the project?

Chelsie Yount: Thank you for this question that gets at the different themes woven together in the book. To answer I need to add one more thread: food. I came to examine how language mediates economic moralities by way of studying food and eating practices in Senegal. Before starting my PhD, I had done fieldwork in Dakar for a master’s at the EHESS (Paris), where I noticed that the metapragmatic language surrounding food sharing – whether at family meals shared around a communal dish or moments of children divvying up snacks – regularly centered on the ways one supposedly ought to redistribute resources. Across social classes, households tended to prepare roughly the same dishes each week. My interlocutors focused less on food as identity marker and more on food as index of generosity and on questions of who was feeding, cooking, providing for whom. Senegalese routinely use food sharing as a metaphor for other, money-based forms of solidarity, and speakers illustrate Senegalese values of generosity and hospitality (teranga) through reference to the social expectation to invite anyone who so much as sees you eating.

I initially set out to understand how language surrounding food sharing mediates moral-economic relations in Senegal and its diaspora. Semiotics got me far, especially Irvine and Gal’s “semiotics of difference,” in describing how interdiscursive connections are made between talk around food sharing and exchanges of money, gifts, or other forms of material support. But after reading work on language socialization (Ochs, Schieffelin, Kulick), especially through food sharing (Paugh, Cavanaugh, Karrebæk, Berman), I decided to focus specifically on how children come to understand the normative expectations that underpin material exchange.

Children growing up in the diaspora, specifically, seemed like a group that could tell me a lot about the ways children are socialized (or not) into the economic moralities that animate transnational kinship relations. By thinking about food sharing as bound up in broader moral-economic expectations, my research came to focus on questions at the heart of Selective Solidarity: How do children raised in Paris come to understand the financial responsibilities of migrants vis-à-vis those at home? How do they experience expectations to give? How do they learn things like how, in Senegal, when a person sings your praises (like a griot), you are expected to hand over some cash?

Ashley McDermott: One poignant example for me was when Aminata “played crazy” or feigned ignorance of others’ expectations during trips to Dakar to avoid giving. Throughout the book you provide myriad examples of how children understand moral-economic behaviors, and their relationships with kin, in ways that differ from older generations. Could you speak more on how adults view these moments when they are faced with the ways that youth are participating in economic practices differently than they themselves would?

Chelsie Yount: For my Senegalese interlocutors, Aminata’s choice to “play crazy” or even pretend not to speak Wolof to avoid requests for money is one of the most troubling vignettes in the book. In 2019, I did a theater workshop in Dakar, where children acted out scenes from the book. When I described Aminata’s admission of “playing crazy” to them, they lowered their eyes, unable to look at me as I described behavior they saw as shameful. I think what hits a nerve in this example is Aminata’s admission of the intentionality of her strategy. Unlike strategies of delay, furthermore, “playing crazy” impedes any future relationship and future requests, distancing Aminata from networks of reciprocity.

The moral-economic behaviors of children growing up in the diaspora diverge from those of older generations and of children in Senegal due to both naiveté and intentional refusal, like Aminata’s, and whether something appears to be the former or the latter matters substantially in people’s reactions to children’s practices. In Wolof, people say xale xamul dara (children know nothing) to brush off children’s gaffes as inoffensive. This is often the attitude people in Senegal take with they meet young relatives growing up in the diaspora whose (moral-economic) practices diverge from their own. Dakarois commonly know (Senegalese) people who live in Europe and the U.S. and when they encounter Senegalese children raised abroad, many are able to recognize when a child simply does not yet understand how redistribution works in Senegal. Children raised in the diaspora are rarely expected to behave or to work for their elders like children their age in Senegal. But stories of intentional refusal to engage, like Aminata’s, tend to be judged more harshly and cause many Senegalese to write her off as a tubab (white person) whose childhood in Paris turned her into a European.

Parents, like Aminata’s mother, shook their heads at rebellious teens, chuckling at her determination not to give to the relatives she meets on their next trip to Senegal. Older people know that whatever French-born children say about giving, when they go back to Dakar, they will inevitably meet pressures to give that no one can control, regardless of what the rebellious adolescents announce to their mothers about the moral (il)logic of giving when you know you will never receive in kind. It’s worth noting, however that over the years, I have watched many of these rebellious teens become regular remitters once they begin to receive a regular salary.

Ashley McDermott: I appreciated your approach to semiotics; It felt accessible to a non-specialist audience, especially with your gentle introduction to signs and typification in the beginning, and you maintained this clarity as you built on various theoretical strands in linguistic anthropology. How did you conceive of the theoretical framing of the book, and what audiences did you envision yourself engaging with as you wrote?

Chelsie Yount: When I was first initiated into semiotics in grad school, it felt like a secret language that one could apply to any ethnographic case and reveal important insights. But the price of this robust analytical toolkit was the risk of alienating those uninitiated into the specialized vocabulary of Peircean semiotics and Silverstein’s metapragmatics.

As I set out to revise the dissertation into book form, I aimed at an undergrad audience, so non-experts, uninitiated into semiotic language. But the theoretical core of the book, and my dissertation before it, hinge on explicit semiotic theory, articulating my approach to economic moralities relative to theories of semiotic/language ideologies. The clearest way to articulate the book’s argument seemed to be by way of semiotics, but using specialized vocabulary sparingly, so that I might take the space necessary to develop each concept in a way that makes intuitive sense without bogging down the narrative with jargon that makes the reader wonder whether they really understood.

The book was the first time I was able to draw on semiotic theory in a text aimed at an audience of non-experts, challenging me to provide an ongoing meta-narrative that defined and unpacked semiotic concepts progressively, in a way that you can’t do in an article. Article writing is aimed at experts, so the density of semiotic terms and the sorts of definitions you need to provide is quite different than what made sense for the book. I took this new (to me) register of academic writing, drawing on and simultaneously explaining semiotics, as a challenge in writing the book. When I struggled to know how much jargon to include or whether I had unpacked the theory enough, I would imagine writing for my grandma’s sister, my great aunt Jackie, a retired high-school librarian in Missouri, who was kind enough to read several chapters of the book to help me clarify for non-specialists.

The theoretical framing ended up being both very much the same as what I had initially developed in the dissertation (especially on economic moralities). But simultaneously it took on a new form, presented in a way that was guided by this goal of presenting complex concepts bit by bit.

Ashley McDermott: In chapter five you discuss how children maintain relationships with relatives in Senegal through social media, particularly Facebook, using data from Facebook tour interviews. What was a typical Facebook tour like, and what were the most surprising insights you gleaned from the method? I’m also curious about how social-media mediated relationships have changed over the course of your research due to platform preferences.

Chelsie Yount: Facebook tours are a research method I developed during my dissertation research, in which I asked youth in Paris to take me on a tour of their Facebook page, to show me how they use the site to connect with their relatives in Dakar. I developed this tactic when I noticed, first, that children were often immersed in tablets or phones, and second, that children’s Facebook profiles and ease at using Facebook messenger could render them message carriers in their transnational families. When I arrived at a family’s home in Dakar, carrying an overflowing shopping bag of clothes, perfumes and other gifts from their relatives (my interlocutors) in France, for example, I received a message from the high-school aged son in Paris, less than an hour after I had arrived. He communicated his mother’s thanks for bringing the gifts to her family, while I was still sitting on the rooftop of the boy’s grandparents’ home in Senegal.

Some of the most surprising insights from these tours were also the most banal: observations about how my young interlocutors were using the site versus the ways their elders, in Senegal and France, were using social media at that time. Different generations used the site at different paces, with varying levels of ease. This meant that children growing up in the diaspora could sometimes take up important roles in transnational exchanges, by maintaining digital connections with transnational relatives, which I show in the book, could sometimes lead to youth receiving real trips to Dakar and gifts. One thing that touched me was to see that youth would sometimes have sent a number of messages to transnational relatives that went unanswered, happy birthday messages or hellos that got no response. While this detail seems sad, youth never seemed particularly touched by unresponsive relatives, since you could never really know who used the site regularly. Then, like now, people varied greatly in their engagement with the site and some never check Facebook messenger. I think these unanswered messages sent by bored kids on their tablets in Paris are actually a sweet reversal of the common trope of the spoiled second generation children raised in the diaspora or of selfish migrants who supposedly forget their family, to show how transnational youth were actively reaching out to their relatives in Senegal and elsewhere in the diaspora, using the media that made most sense to them.

I was also impressed to see the ways that, at that time, on Facebook, youth could be passive observers of others’ interactions. Youth who did not really speak (or read) Wolof would nonetheless be familiar with a genre of Wolof-language memes and cartoons about finding your sheep for the Tabaski festival (Eid), for example, the common space on Facebook giving them a means to passively consume media their transnational relatives shared. I was also impressed and incredibly grateful for how willing people were to talk to me about their use of the site. Giving the interviewee the tour guide status empowered them to take me to whatever parts of their social media usage they felt comfortable sharing, avoiding anything they preferred to avoid.

In the time since, many of my interlocutors in Senegal, of all ages, continue to use Facebook quite a bit. In France, like the US, younger generations’ usage of Facebook began to taper off as older generations became more (the most) active on the platform. Some of my (then child, now young adult) interlocutors migrated to use mainly Instagram, posting moments of their lives in France and, occasionally, a trip to Senegal, or old photos of a trip years prior with nostalgic captions about returning to their country. This migration from Facebook to Instagram has had only limited effects, however, on communication in Senegalese families, in which WhatsApp is by far the most important way that people, children and youth included, exchange messages daily with groups of relatives near and far. Senegalese family members also actively use their WhatsApp statuses (and Instagram statuses and Snapchat, to a lesser degree) sharing prayers on widely circulated memes, photos of themselves dressed up for an event, and birthday wishes with all their contacts. Each of these sites have their own affordances in terms of the forms of relationality they encourage and allow. Perhaps what has impressed me the most, in working with the ways Senegalese use (social) media over the past decade, is how willing and ready people in Senegal and its diaspora are to take up new media through which to communicate and otherwise exchange with their relatives and friends abroad. People engage in a variety of different platforms and adapt accordingly as usage shifts from one to the next.

Ashley McDermott: The families you work with are caught between spending in ways that match French middle-class sensibilities (in a time when it is getting increasingly more difficult to do this) and redistributing wealth in accordance to rank and kin relationships as is expected by their families in Dakar. In the conclusion, you offer a longitudinal perspective, showing how the transnational networks are changing in the decade since the primary research. How do you see the tension between economic moralities shifting as children begin to pursue opportunities in Canada and their kin remain in both France and Senegal?

Chelsie Yount: I saw tensions between economic moralities as shifting, not necessarily related to the geographic distribution of the Senegalese diaspora, so much as relative to the opportunities that people see as available in specific places, which shape the investment people made in various economic moralities. The investments my interlocutors made in the economic moralities of the French middle classes varied relative to the stability they were able to achieve in France. For those who were the most precariously employed, struggling to get by on short-term contracts, investment in the economic moralities most important in Senegal tended to grow in importance, sometimes to the point that they appear a more urgent priority than investment in moral expectations in France.

This shift often appears counter intuitive to French audiences, who often presume that financial pressures will sooner or later push immigrants to abandon their perceived responsibilities to their country of origin. French immigration policy is based on the presumption that immigrants should or will inevitably, integrate into French culture. French families tend to see financial responsibilities as limited to the nuclear family-unit and the tacit assumption is that immigrant integration will eventually entail freeing oneself from financial responsibilities to those in their country of origin. But rather than abandoning their investments in Senegal, growing economic precarity in France appears to encourage Senegalese to invest further in their connections in Senegal, in the hopes of moving back or finding opportunities elsewhere in Senegal’s diaspora.

I pulled this transition out for a couple reasons: first to highlight the fact that France is often the easiest way abroad for educated Senegalese, but not necessarily their end goal, and French citizenship and diplomas can provide means to further migration later. French colonial ties are alive and well, but France isn’t necessarily the goal. Senegalese have contacts in many different countries, so as people are thinking about their children’s futures, France is not the only path, nor is it a definitive destination for everyone.
Noël Um-Lo takes the page 99 test

June 22nd, 2026

Page 99 of my dissertation, Diasporic Bodies in Unification Time, falls in a chapter tracing the migration journeys of North Korean women and their children before their arrival in South Korea. Many of these children are born from coercive reproductive arrangements between North Korean women and Chinese men, are raised in China, and later arrive in South Korea as teenagers. There, these youth encounter a social world in which they are repeatedly cast as emblems of a future united Korea, despite varied personal interest in the state-building project of unification.

Early on in my fieldwork, I noticed that South Korean educators, NGO workers, bureaucrats, and church leaders referred to the work of supporting North Korean migrants as “advancing” or “preparing” for unification. These emblematic readings emerged both in interactional discourse and institutional forms of representation. Across state policy, media campaigns, church ministries, educational programs, and NGO initiatives, North Korean-background migrants are described primarily through terms such as meonjeo on tongil (“first to come of unification”), jageun tongil (“small unification”), and tongil injae (“unification talent). My research examines how these expressions, along with other acts of performance and construal, circulate across institutional settings and come to naturalize the North Korean-background migrant as an enregistered emblem of Korean unification (Agha 2007).

Page 99, which details the sexual exploitation, trafficking, and selling of North Korean girls and women seeking to cross the Chinese border, may seem removed from the dissertation’s broader concerns. Yet, these backstories highlight what the process of enregisterment leaves behind. The histories of exploitation, violence, coercion, and displacement that brought North Korean migrants to South Korea are obscured in the semiotic economy of unification. By juxtaposing these migration histories with the discourse of unification, the dissertation asks how political futures become communicable through people, and what inequalities are obscured in the process.

References

Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Andrew Mitchel takes the Page 99 test

June 15th, 2026

My dissertation, “Beyond the Plate: Culinary Violence and the Oaxacan Chef,” introduces the theoretical framework of culinary violence to examine how chefs navigate the limitations placed on them and their food. Culinary violence is not a physical act, but frames the strategies chefs use to respond to consumer expectations, meet their goals, and cook heritage foods. Chefs, I argue, engage with food as a genre of listening where they navigate meaning by attending to diners’ expectations that dining out is a predictable social experience (Marsilli-Vargas 2022; Pløger 2022). Chefs respond to praise, feedback, and other subtle cues diners have formed based on prior experiences and outside representations of the cuisine they are eating.

Page 99 of my dissertation is a key example from an interview I completed in Columbus, Ohio. Chef Esme, who runs a food hall stand with her family, crafts new dishes to meet outside expectations:

She said, “American diners, when they have a meal, even a taco, they have to have a side.” She has met this local expectation by adding not only chips and pico de gallo to her menu, but also “queso, which is not a thing in Oaxaca… we added it because, during winter, people don’t buy our guacamole or pico de gallo. That’s why we added queso, to help with the sales…. people still have to have their side.”

Chef Esme can be said to have been ‘listening’ for a cue, as she knows that diners want a side. Featuring a hot, savory one for the winter months is a savvy, pragmatic business decision.

Culinary violence may appear to only tighten the confines of Oaxacan food, but Chef Esme has the agency to reframe and recontextualize even known foods like this queso, which she makes “completely from scratch… we add in cut-up blocks of cheese. We make a roasted Oaxacan salsa to go in it; we add in chiles, serranos, jalapeños, dry guajilloes, and garlic.” Oaxacan queso is something new yet instantly recognizable to diners in Ohio; by infusing Oaxacan ingredients into a familiar dish, Chef Esme has listened to her diners, but still pushes forward a reimagined version of this dish that suits her desire to prepare foods that utilize heritage flavors.

Though Oaxacan chefs face constraints on their cuisine from outside ideas about the flavor and composition of their food, they have the agency to introduce, innovate, and transform their food. As I conclude on page 99, Chef Esme’s “expertise, and ability to counter culinary violence, is [paradoxically] most visible when she alters her Oaxacan food from its original form to meet diners’ tastes.” She has contributed to the performative nature of dining out that customers use to enact their goals and identity, and has done so by listening for consumer desires, as she maintains her business and cooks food she is proud to call her own.

Bibliography

Marsilli-Vargas, Xochitl. Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.

Pløger, John. “Dining out as a Performative Event.” Urban Research & Practice 15, no. 1 (2022): 94-111. https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2020.1737726.
Timothy Taylor on his book, Making Value

June 8th, 2026

https://www.dukeupress.edu/making-value

Kenzell Huggins:    This book draws from an eclectic mix of data, building on ethnographic exploration of Irish music sessions, interviews with members of a Los Angeles independent music scene, to the history of early touring musicians. What inspired you to combine these contexts throughout the book, and what did thinking across these contexts contribute to the formation of your arguments about value?

Timothy Taylor: I might as well start with a confession: my Ph.D. was in historical musicology, though I have slowly drifted towards ethnomusicology—the department where I am housed at UCLA—and anthropology, having married a prominent anthropologist over thirty years ago. Musicology, when I was taught, was concerned mainly with western European classical music and, to some extent, jazz. The rest of the world’s musics were left to ethnomusicologists. (The study of popular music didn’t really break in until the 1990s, and that came from cultural studies, not the music fields, though they eventually picked it up.) So, I was well, if conventionally, trained in western European classical music, which explains that discussion in the book, which considers the rise of the virtuoso, aided by agents, who helped create musical spectacles to generate income.

Once I started to read anthropological value theory (with thanks here to Steve Feld, Hannah Appel, and Jessica Cattelino)—especially Terry Turner, David Graeber, Anna Tsing, and Fred Myers—I began to consider I began to consider or rethink issues related to conceptions of value in music scenes with which I was familiar—the LA indie rock scene (with help from one of my graduate students Shelina Brown), and the (meager) Irish traditional music scene in LA, in which I am an active participant as a wooden flute player.

Kenzell Huggins:    Throughout the text you reject an all-encompassing view of capitalism as always already structuring all forms of value-making. Instead, you show how separate regimes of value are absorbed by capital or even maintained as a certain kind of reserve (Chap. 5). How do we protect or cultivate these spaces of cultural production hopefully outside of capitalism? For outsides maintained as reserves, should branded capitalist endorsement be viewed as lifelines promoting growth, exploitation, or perhaps something else?

Timonty Taylor: Before I started to read value theory, I was nonetheless immersed in questions about capitalism, globalization, and more specifically, commodification and consumption. There seems to me to have been a tacit assumption in the music fields and in cultural studies that popular music was a commodity in some kind of straightforward and unchanging way. Many famous writings in anthropology contradict this idea of the stability of the commodity situation (as Appadurai calls it), of course, but these writings that might disabuse us of that notion weren’t always read, at least in the corner of academia I inhabit. So, a good deal of my recent work has been to complicate conceptions of music as a commodity.

I continued to be interested in questions of commodification and, more recently, scalability (thanks to Anna Tsing). It may seem that capitalism suffuses our world, which is awash in commodities. But most of the musicians I know aren’t able to commodify their music or commodify it to the extent that they can scale its consumption sufficient to make a living. Capitalism may appear to be everywhere, but as we know from Tsing and others, it comes and goes from patches around the world. Capitalism is a set of hegemonic ideologies—a structure in the practice theory sense—but actual practices on the may or may not by shaped by it.

I’ve come to think of capitalism as a kind of hegemonic environment but not total, and with nodes of concentrated capitalist activity, like record labels or film and television studios (my interests) but also, of course, obvious places such as bangs and the tech industry. Focusing on agents such as music managers (or matsutake mushroom gatherers) helps us understanding how capitalist value can be created.

Given its reach and hegemony, it’s easy to attribute agency to capitalism; I do it myself. It’s simpler to say that capitalism did something, or that something happened because of capitalism. Instead of talking so much about capitalism as though it were an agent, we need to think about the actual human agents: who is figuring out ways that something that was previously uncommodified is transformed into a commodity? Commodities are so prevalent that they blind us to other forms of the creation of value and its exchange, as we know from Mauss and others, but many things are never commodified; most music isn’t.

We need to attend to specific cases, which is what I do in some chapters, like the one on music managers. People attempting to get into the record business seldom have any idea of how that business works—they need a manager who can help educate them and mold them into people who can generate surplus value for a label. I’m interested in such figures as these.

As for the question about protecting those forms of cultural production outside of capitalism, I’m not sure that’s our remit. But I would say that they’re all over, we just tend not to take them seriously. Most people who study music—from whatever disciplinary perspective—tend to study the extraordinary musicians. But these are rare; there are many more musicians who aren’t extraordinary, aren’t making a living. They are, however, making value, for themselves and perhaps others and are no less worthy of study.

Kenzell Huggins:    In Chapter 2, you argue that music industries have historically acknowledged that creative production is hard to scale because there are limits on how much new work any given musician can produce. However, you spend some time on counterexamples, including a brief gesture to the Korean music industry, especially K-pop, as industries that are modeled on the manufacturing of stars and hits (p. 44-45). What does the still-growing success of the Korean music industry (most recently exemplified by the success of K-Pop Demon Hunters [2025], perhaps) have to tell us about the possibilities of scaling cultural production to create value?

Timothy Taylor: Until fairly recently, people in the record business would seek and sign multiple acts that they thought might be profitable. But a few decades ago, the cultural business (such as music, publishing, film, and others) shifted to a blockbuster model, since it’s much cheaper to sign one artist who could sell seven million albums than to signing seven artists who can sell a million each, because you’re only producing one recording so there’s much less studio time and money, less money expended on marketing and advertising, and so forth. The rise of social media makes it much easier for record labels to discern who has a large following, how active and skilled an artist is on social media (which matters a great deal today), how adept they are at creating, maintaining, and increasing their fan base. This is the main way that the western record business tries to achieve scalability.

I’m not a scholar of K-pop, but the Korean case seems to me to be unique. It’s more like the old model except more industrialized: young musicians are located, trained, groomed for stardom; as far as I know, there is a kind of industrial infrastructure unlike anything in the west. Some achieve it, some don’t. If it doesn’t exist already, it would be useful to have an ethnography of how this all works, especially in the context of South Korea’s rise to becoming an industrial giant in the same period.

There is, however, the case of Sweden. A few decades ago, the Swedes realized that their country was profiting more from ABBA and other popular musicians than from iron. The government began subsidizing local music centers that lent people instruments, amps, and other gear so that there were few or no barriers to making music. Sweden is now one of the top exporters of music in the world, along with the US, UK, and South Korea.

Kenzell Huggins:    Cultural commentators increasingly claim that the models of other cultural production industries (like film and television) are shifting away from non-scalable creative labor to increasingly mechanized or manufactured models. The adoption of generative artificial intelligence in these industries also threatens traditional assumptions about the scalability of creativity. Both issues of labor as well as the threat of generative AI were principal concerns of the 2023 Hollywood strikes. How do models of creative cultural production have to change to account for emerging technological shifts and evolving labor practices?

Timothy Taylor: There is already AI-generated music and I’m sure that there will be much more. Music not deemed to be important (in advertising, background to homemade videos, and so on) will be largely AI-generated. But to be clear, unimportant music has existed for centuries; most music served some sort of tangible, visible, function, in worship, dance, entertainment, passing the time while working, to demonstrate one’s power over others, and more. Mozart once complained to his father that at one concert, “I had to play to the chairs, tables, and walls”—the aristocrats in attendance considered his music to be part of the background. Only since the rise of the idea of art-for-art’s-sake in the nineteenth century was some music—western European classical music—placed on a pedestal and exalted for not having any function, except perhaps for enlightening and ennobling bourgeois listeners, and later, for demonstrating social status. Bespoke music will increasingly become a boutique item, something relatively rare and special. It will become a touted feature of certain television shows and films.

Kenzell Huggins: On page 140-141, you write about the need for music studies to produce new scholarship beyond functionalist reassertions of the ability of music to represent and sustain community, suggesting that a Geertzian attention to social actors’ own meanings as values can help to provide routes to innovative scholarship. This is a compelling call to action. What do you think are the horizons of research for cultural and social scientific studies of music and other media? What is the role of classic theories in informing (or not!) those horizons?

Timothy Taylor: I have been trying my whole career—thirty-plus years—to bringing more social theory, especially from anthropology, into the music fields. It has been a slow process. Most of us start as musicians and are thus drawn to particular kinds of music to study, which we tend to examine in fairly technical ways. It has been difficult to break this formalistic orientation; some people in ethnomusicology view knowledge of social theory as a a kind of capital to be flaunted; some think theory takes one away from “the music itself”; some think it will compromise one’s ethnography because it transforms the ethnographer from a blank, all-observing slate into someone who can only see class struggle or the patriarchy or racism or homophobia or something else.

At UCLA, I created a specialization in anthropology in my department. Graduate students who opt in take the three core courses in UCLA’s Anthropology Department and must write one of their Ph.D. qualifying exams under the aegis of an anthropologist, and must have an anthropologist on their dissertation committee. Many of our students following this specialization, and I think it has helped them considerably in their dissertation design, research, and writing. And it helps make them stronger candidates on the job market.

As for the future, I think that we need to continue to attend to real people in real places and times. Theory needs an object; I have no interest in what Bourdieu called “theoretical theory.” We must put theory in constant dialogue with our ethnographic data—and vice versa. To echo what I said above, I also think it’s of paramount importance to look not just at capitalism but as capitalists: who is making decisions that, to recall Anna Tsing one last time, introduce alienation? Commodification? Scalability?

Here’s an example. I have a friend who accompanied President Obama to Cuba in 2016 after the president had normalized relations. The Rolling Stones gave a free concert during Obama’s visit, and Coca-Cola wanted to sponsor an after-party. But there was a problem—as my friend put it, “In Cuba, Cuba is the brand.” So, Raúl Castro was approached, and he gave his permission. My friend said that for the next concert, potential sponsors could ask Castro to approve sponsorship of the concert itself since, after all, he had approved an earlier sponsorship. This would be the way that capitalism came to Cuba, my friend said. Understanding capitalism’s agents must be central to what any study of capitalism itself.

I also think a lot of classic social theory is still relevant or can be made to be relevant. I think that many fields in the humanities and softer social sciences have become trendified, picking up and discarding theoretical perspectives so quickly that key insights aren’t given enough space or are overlooked altogether. Or, if one aspect of a particular theorist’s work fades into disuse, we ignore what might still be useful. Geertz is a good example here. He’s been critiqued for a number of things, but his central premise—that people are meaning-seeking begins and that we should focus our studies on what is meaningful to our interlocutors—is still powerful. Theories come and go, meaningfulness does not.
Vita Peacock on her book, Digital Initiation Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain

June 1st, 2026

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501784446/digital-initiation-rites/#bookTabs=1

Mikkel Kenni Bruun: Digital Initiation Rites invites the reader on an ethnographic tour de force into the rather enigmatic world of Anonymous in the context of its British emergence, proliferation and persuasions. In doing so, the book offers both a gripping social history of the 2010s activist landscape in response to UK austerity politics and surveillance practices, and a richly comparative anthropology of initiation and cults. To the outsider, that combination might seem unusual. What motivated you to embark on this project?

Vita Peacock: Firstly Kenni, thank you for engaging with the book in such detail. This textual conversation is a continuation of the in-person conversations we have been having over the past five years for another project on surveillance, and it feels very organic to follow this thread into new domains.

The combination you note, of 2010s activist ethnography with the literature on initiation and cults, was by no means planned. The first bell which is inaugurated this project was rung in 2010, when Britain elected a Conservative Liberal Democrat government, who began almost immediately to reduce central government support for public institutions. Just as I was beginning my Ph.D and deciding to enter British academia, the system itself was changing widely, particularly with the introduction of higher tuition fees. This was also the era of what Paulo Gerbaudo named Tweets and the Streets (2012), the first moment in human history when we witnessed what digital connectivity could do in terms of mass civic mobilization all over the world. It was a heady time, and one that I wanted to explore anthropologically. In 2013 I received the go-ahead from a British research council to carry out a study of a group called UK Uncut, who at the time were staging fascinating hyper-mediated performances as a form of satirical protest against austerity. Just as I began the research however, UK Uncut were more or less disbanding (which it later transpired was partly due to undercover police infiltration) and so in late 2013 I was looking around for another group who were engaged in comparable activities. I first came across Anonymous as a street-based phenomenon in January 2014, and was immediately captivated by their use of masks which seemed to indicate something deeper than just networked activism.

The emphasis on initiation arrived in the first instance through my reading of Michael Taussig’s Defacement (1999), in which he makes links between revelatory truth, and the unmasking that takes place during initiation rites. By 2016, the optic had begun to wrap itself so sinuously around the ethnographic material that it almost took on a life of its own. The more ethnographies of initiation I read, the more I saw Anons as engaged in something even more profoundly human than I had realized, atavistic almost in its imbrication with initiation rites.

Mikkel Kenni Bruun: Your key concept of digital initiation is stimulating and intriguing. In situating and theorising this notion, you critically engage with and draw on – but do not necessarily follow – an earlier corpus of classic anthropological literature on initiation, especially Arnold van Gennep’s famous Rites de Passage (first published in 1909), as well as the work of Jean La Fontaine, Victor Turner and other titans of ritual. In the process, you rethink the structure and significance of initiation, suggesting ways in which we might engage with the topic anew in the twenty-first century. For those who have not yet had the pleasure of reading the book, I wonder if you could tell us what is particularly digital about the kind of initiation you observed among Anonymous?

Vita Peacock: This is an important question that can be approached from two distinct angles, one etic and the other emic.

To address the etic first I turn to my operative definition of a digital initiation rite, which is that a digital initiation rite is one in which digital communication and information technologies play a substantive role in part of the initiatory sequence. In Anonymous, the part of the sequence that is substantively most digital is the moment of learning about what Turner called ‘the sacra’ (1967), forms of secret knowledge, which marks a major theoretical turning point in the biography of the initiand. In Anonymous this arrives mostly on the audio-visual platform YouTube, in which they encounter alternative narrations of the origins of the world, that provoke further epistemic journeys. This is the most digital part of their initiation, and also the most solitary part, as both the crisis that instigate it and the forms of political solidarity that come after it are both more clearly located in in-person meetings.

Within this definition there is scope, however, to explore other digital initiation rites in which the digital occupies a different part of the sequence. For instance, I recently became aware of performed oath-taking ceremonies online, posted by members of QAnon. Here an established initiatory practice, namely oath-taking, is happening across digital devices, yet this is complemented by in-person activities which form other parts.

The second answer to your question is emic. Anonymous is what is called a born digital phenomenon. This means it materialized in its first cultural expression online. That the digital is pivotal for the gestation and birth of Anonymous ramifies deeply into their own epistemologies, as digital ICT remain the location for the truth they are seeking. In Christian theology, there is a concept called biblical inerrancy. This means that the bible must be free from error in its entirety otherwise the whole concept of truth it articulates is thrown into doubt. I encountered a similar, albeit reformed, set of ideas in the ways that Anons spoke about the truth they discovered online. While Anons were cognizant there were a lot of misleading stories and sources of information online, they still believed the truth was ultimately to be found online, it simply required a lot of digging to discover it.

Mikkel Kenni Bruun: In the first chapter, you describe how ‘AnonUK grew out of a story, that was based on a story, that was based on four centuries of vernacular stories’ (p 31). You show that, as initiatory passages, these narratives involve embodied experiences often through a dynamic process from trauma to resistance. The stories we acquire as bodies, and which shape our bodies, seem fundamental to the initiatory journey. Could you say more about this process?

Vita Peacock: I am really glad you asked about this Kenni because the body is central to the argument of the book. When reading around the literature on online radicalisation or the growth of conspiracy theory, I was struck by how little the bodies of those who had undergone major epistemic transformations was being addressed. The approach has largely been to focus on what is going on in people’s minds, and therefore to pursue another reification of the mind-body dualism.

What I hope the stories collected in the book demonstrate is the profound significance of embodied experience in instigating the initiatory journey. If you wish to better understand how people arrive at more extreme theoretical positions, it would suggest you should attend closely to what is going on in and around their bodies. In Anonymous these experiences were highly diverse and took many different expressions, however, there was a visible correlation between the severity of the bodily experience, and the efficacy of initiatory transformation. This is something widely documented in the literature on initiations. Some of the most brutal rites, for instance the notoriously violent rites into Freemasonry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were also among the most transformative.

I appreciate you raising the question of stories, as I had not thought of the narrative of these bodily imprints as stories too, but they can certainly be viewed in this way. Anons used to talk about going online to find out about something ‘you know already’, in which what is known is this bodily story that they are seeking to theorize. A cognitive reading of this that one encounters in political science is known as confirmation bias, which seems to castigate the subject for simply not being methodical enough. However, if you see this instead as people engaged in a legitimate quest to work out the stories through which their bodies have been imprinted in it starts to look much more logical. This aspect also comes out strongly in the character of V in the graphic novel V for Vendetta (Moore 2008), readers might be more familiar with the film based on this graphic novel. V is a victim of institutional violence, the subject of involuntary biological testing, and manages to escape the facility by setting it on fire. He then seeks vengeance on the structures of society that endorsed his own bodily suffering.

The importance of the body in a digital initiation rite is an area I think that would particularly benefit from further research. The question is methodologically challenging, because in this ethnography, almost all of these embodied experiences took place in the past, and so I relied on Anons’ own narrations of them. If there were a way to document transformative bodily experiences as they were happening, it would further develop the anthropological understanding of these processes.

Mikkel Kenni Bruun: The book is composed of eight chapters – elegantly captured through one-word titles: Body, Dream, Society, Mask, Knowledge, Symbol, Growth, Sacrifice – which are divided into Part I and Part II: Death and Waking Up. The comparative lens is striking from the contents page alone. What led you to construct this particular contrast and narrative? And, dare I ask, what happens after we wake up? Do we die again?

Vita Peacock: The book initially had a three-part structure, Death, Dreaming, and Waking Up. This spoke to how much I had been influenced by the tripartite models of Van Gennep, Gluckman, and Turner. However, in a digital initiation rite, the division between the first two seemed increasingly arbitrary. Death and dreaming come together, as it was forms of bodily crisis, whether short or long term, that prompted them to discover ‘what is actually really going on in the world’. I then found myself partly returning to James Frazer’s (1890) simple dichotomy of death and rebirth that preceded the publication of Rites of Passage (1909), in which what separates the two is the moment of schism that Anons refer to as ‘waking up’. Waking up is a process of remaking all your relationships in light of what you have learned, and is therefore a bifurcation between two distinct parts of a digital initiand’s biography. This is why dividing the book into these two parts made sense.

The decision to use one word chapter titles is largely rhetorical. The book contains a lot of complexity. The stories themselves are intricate and complex, and the reach towards ethnography rather than philosophy to develop the theoretical narrative is also a complex to and fro in which the reader travels across different places and times to reflect on the problem. The one word title is an effort to reduce this complexity and ease the reading. From the title, epigraphs, and particularly from the short stories (which I think of as word-images) that open each chapter, the reader should be aware of precisely what subject the chapter is addressing, which I hope makes digesting this complexity somewhat more palatable.

The question of what happens after waking up is the ultimate unanswerable question! Do we/they die again? I cannot say. My final interviews, recorded in the conclusion, took place in 2017, and even this felt like a somewhat longitudinal study given I had first met all these individuals three years earlier. My impression from the light-touch interactions I have had with Anons since is that they have not died again, that what they went through with Anonymous, and their own journey through waking up, has not since been repeated.

This is the point where it is particularly important to distinguish a digital initiation rite, from the quotidian liminal and epistemic encounters that people have online in the course of their daily lives. The expression ‘falling down the rabbit hole’, a classic threshold metaphor, has become a commonplace for simply learning about a topic online. What Anons went through was not an everyday experience, it was a prolonged encounter with the deepest questions of existence that people could potentially go through their whole lives without ever having had. These are far away from the daily transformations espoused in areas of social life influenced by Buddhism such as mindfulness culture (Cook 2023).

What happens next in the final analysis hinges on the new nexus of relations that digital initiands arrive into. So here we return to the standard problem of incorporation. Again, I would suggest returning to the body, and the materiality of these relations, which for all my interlocutors looked slightly different.

Thank you Kenni for your questions, which have provoked many more questions.

Bibliography

Cook, Jo. 2023. Making a Mindful Nation: Mental Health and Governance in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press.

Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2012. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. Pluto.

Frazer, James George. 1998 (1890). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. With Robert Fraser. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford University Press.

Moore, Alan. 2008. V for Vendetta. New edition. Vertigo.

Taussig, Michael T. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford University Press.

Turner, Victor W. 1967. The Forest of Symbols; Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press.

Van Gennep, Arnold. 1977 (1909). The Rites of Passage. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Melissa Crouch on her book, The Palimpset Constitution

May 25th, 2026

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-palimpsest-constitution-9780198956884

Amy Cohen: What is the central puzzle that your book addresses through the case study of Burma/Myanmar, and why did you focus on this case study?

Melissa Crouch: Since the semi-political opening in 2011, there was significant discussion and debate in Myanmar about the possibilities of constitutional reform. I had the opportunity through various teaching and other engagements to be witness to those debates. The focus of my book on Myanmar draws on the time I spent teaching but also undertaking intentional field work and archival work. The central puzzle I became curious about was why people in Myanmar kept talking about past constitutions and draft constitutions in discussions of constitutional reform, as opposed to our assumptions that constitution-makers are interested in comparative examples of liberal democracy. In the book I frame this as a question of why do past constitutions matter?

I focus on Myanmar as I had prior connections to this context. Back in 2006, I moved to an area of Melbourne with a high population of refugees and migrants, and was working with a social organisation at the time. Many of my neighbours were Burmese and so my connections began there. Then during my post-doctoral research in Singapore, I undertook field research in Myanmar/Burma. Even when I returned to Australia, I continued travelling regularly to Myanmar until 2020 (when Australia’s borders were closed due to COVID-19). As a marginal or non-existent case in constitutional studies, Myanmar/Burma also seemed the perfect case to both expose the liberal democratic preoccupations of comparative constitutional scholars, and invite these scholars to adopt a broader frame of reference in terms of whose constitutions are worth studying and why.

Amy Cohen: Central to your book is the idea of the palimpsest constitution. Why palimpsest, and what does this concept illuminate in terms of the nature of constitutions in the 21^st century?

Melissa Crouch: The book derives its title from George Orwell’s famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Published at the end of World War II, Orwell describes history as a palimpsest to explain how a totalitarian regime sought to erase memory and rewrite history. Likewise, in my book, I suggest that the idea of history as a palimpsest is a productive way of thinking about modern constitutional histories, or the palimpsest constitution.

I adapt Orwell’s insights about how regimes manipulate and rewrite history to constitutional history. A palimpsest can be a text on which later writing is superimposed, or it can be the combination of two or more successive texts.

In the book, I elaborate on the ways that modern constitutions are palimpsests: they build on the legacies of each other, each one superimposed on the next, recombining and repurposing earlier texts. Constitutional texts are repurposed, reused, and altered, even as they retain or evoke legacies of prior texts and forms. They draw on previous constitutional principles, scripts, and politics—comparative, transnational, and domestic. The palimpsest constitution embodies the reality that nation states are never blank slates for constitutional reform, and that constitutional histories are marked not only by optimism but simultaneously by tragedy and suffering.

Amy Cohen: Burma/Myanmar is a relatively unknown country for most Global North scholars, with perhaps the most common reference point being Aung San Suu Kyi as Nobel Laureate but also, from 2016 onwards, her fall from grace due to credible allegations of genocide against the Rohingya. Your book uses the case of Burma (the name the US government still gives the country) to illustrate the concept of the palimpsest constitution. As a case study, is Burma an anomaly, or is it a case that can speak to a broader audience, and, if so, how?

Melissa Crouch: I suggest that the case of Burma/Myanmar is a fitting one for our times. The book uses Myanmar to address debates about the legacies of law, but it cuts across legal traditions and different legal systems. Myanmar was colonised by the British and was initially part of British India; once it became independent it introduced parliamentary democracy. The country then experienced periods of martial law, socialist-authoritarian rule, and military rule with and without a constitution. It has multiple points of comparison with countries that were also part of the British empire, that experienced periods of socialist legality, that have had periods of military and authoritarian rule. One of the exciting aspects of Myanmar as a case study is its potential relevance not only for South Asia (such as India, Bangladesh and Pakistan), Southeast Asia (such as Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines), but more widely to parts of Africa and Latin America.

In short, few countries live up to an idealised view of constitutional endurance as the longevity of a single text; instead, many countries have had multiple constitutions. Myanmar has embraced, discarded and replaced multiple constitutional texts. This practise calls into question assumptions of constitutional endurance as the endurance of a single text, and optimistic accounts of constitution-making.

This brings me to a second aspect of the case study, which is to explore the endurance of constitutions in terms of their social life, and how ideas about past constitutions and their legacies circulate in contemporary society. In these ways and more, I think the case of Myanmar/Burma has much to say to a broader audience.

Amy Cohen: Who is the audience for your book? As a law and society scholar with an interest in ethnography, how does your book speak to an anthropology audience? That is, what is ethnography to you and how is this expressed in the book?

Melissa Crouch: The book offers a way of studying constitutions ethnographically by following the social life of constitutions. I am interested in debates about the legacies of law and constitutions, and how constitutional ideas and texts live on in social memory even after they are replaced. The book will appeal to anthropologists for its focus on tragedy and violence, which I position as central to the book through engagement with Renato Rosaldo’s ‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’. The book will also appeal to anthropologists for its attention to non-state forms of constitution-making. Constitutional pluralism is a central theme of the book.

If legal scholars tend to focus on liberal democracy, state constitutions and success stories of constitution-making, then this book appeals to anthropologists with its focus on what else is going on – governance motivated by other ideologies, non-state constitutions, and the suffering and tragedy that is a reality in many constitutional contexts.

Amy Cohen: Tell us how you understand constitutional ethnography, and about the choices you made in your approach to writing ethnography, such as questions of representation, style and perspective.

Melissa Crouch: Law and society scholars have long focused on the plurality of law and society and their interrelationship. I seek to bring this focus to constitutional studies by outlining an approach to ‘constitutions-in-societies’ or constitutional ethnography.

Central to constitutional ethnography is an appreciation of constitutional pluralism in terms of both legal and social pluralism. Societies are diverse and heterogeneous rather than uniform, and states have multiple constitutions over time, change constitutions through amendments, vary in the interpretation given to texts, and even host competing texts in terms of alternative or non-state constitutions.

A second dimension of constitutional ethnography is its constitutive impulse, that is, the interdependence between laws and societies. Constitutional ethnography builds on and affirms the constitutive thesis; that is, the idea that laws and societies are not two separate and independent phenomena but, rather, mutually influential and interdependent.

Further, constitutional ethnography in my view is interdisciplinary, weaving together studies of law with anthropology, history, and sociology. Finally, scholars undertaking constitutional ethnography show a commitment to immersion, whether through in-person fieldwork techniques, such as extended participant observation, interviews, to more documentary practises such as archival work. Constitutional ethnography brings to the fore the cultural power of law, and the idea of law as culture, rather than merely as a doctrinal science nor as raw politics.

But beyond this focus on methods, constitutional ethnography pays attention to both the ethics of fieldwork, different types of data, and the writing process. As a mode of writing, my audience was not judges or legal scholars, but rather scholars interested in social processes. The question of representation was a challenging one. I chose to write in first-person both to demonstrate the ability of narrative as a mode of argumentation, but also to navigate some of the complexities of writing about an authoritarian regime and reduce risks to those I met. For anthropologists, this attention to writing and the ethics of writing is commonplace; but for legal scholars, this is an unusual mode of writing, and many may say it is perhaps even outside the realm of what is acceptable in constitutional scholarship. In doing so, I am precisely challenging modes of writing and what counts as scholarship about law.

Amy Cohen: You are based in a law school. Did any particular anthropologists inspire you to work in this way?

As a PhD student, I was inspired by the works of legal anthropologists of Islamic law like Lawrence Rosen (The Anthropology of Justice: Law as Culture in Islamic Society) and Clifford Geertz’s work (Islamic Courts in Indonesia). In fact, so powerful an influence did Rosen’s work have on me, I can remember exactly when and where I first read it. I was sitting on my couch in a rental property where I lived in an outer suburb of Melbourne with a high migrant and refugee population. I was undertaking my PhD on Islam in Indonesia at the time, while living in a community where most of my neighbours were Burmese Muslim. Reading Rosen’s work was refreshing as he confronts Max Weber’s idea of the Qadi sitting under a tree making arbitrary decisions as they please; instead, through ethnographic fieldwork and the use of narrative, Rosen reveals the patterns and advocates for the rationality of Islamic judges based on notions of relationality and community. What I took from Rosen the sensibility that all legal traditions and cultures are worth studying. My current book is only tangentially about religion (although the lawyer at the heart of the book, Ko Ni, was a Muslim in majority-Buddhist Myanmar), like Rosen, I think that we learn much about others and about ourselves through a close examination of how law structures our lives and the diversity and pluralism inherent in human interactions with law.
Michelle Phillipov on her book, Digital Food TV

May 18th, 2026

https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Food-TV-The-Cultural-Place-of-Food-in-a-Digital-Era/Phillipov/p/book/9781032200330

Ariana Gunderson: What is the top argument you hope readers take away from Digital Food TV: The Cultural Place of Food in a Digital Era?

Michelle Phillipov: Essentially, the book’s central argument is that food TV’s digital transformation disrupts many of our previously scholarly assumptions about what food TV is, as well as what it does – culturally, politically, industrially.

Newer forms of digital food media remain deeply intertwined with legacy food media (with respect to their textual conventions, industrial logics, and audience pleasures), and there is far more blurring and cross-pollination between legacy and digital genres and industries than is typically acknowledged. But there are also key differences that are not yet well understood. To give an example: many previous studies – including my own! – have tended to understand the politics of food TV as primarily a politics of food. These studies have focused, for instance, on television’s role in shaping ideas about what constitutes good food, healthy eating, appropriate and desirable subjectivities and bodies, and so on.

Yet, the sustained popularity of digital food media now enables digital food TV to intersect with a range of additional questions and concerns. Put simply – and this is really the book’s key argument – the politics of digital food TV are now rarely to be found in its manifest textual content. Rather, they are to be found in the affects that its texts give rise to – for example, cultivating new forms of audience and industry labor which recast work as leisure (as I argue in Chapter 2), or offering new forms of identification and immersion that provide testing grounds for digital platforms’ market rationalities (as I argue in Chapter 3).

Ariana Gunderson: Your book calls for an analysis of food TV that goes beyond the textual, to include “what is imagined by digital food TV” and “what is made possible (or impossible) in these imaginings” (110). How did you go about that methodologically, and what makes that approach particularly fruitful for you?

Michelle Phillipov: Early in my career, I wrote a paper called ‘In Defense of Textual Analysis’, which argued that textual analysis, as a method, provides important analytical insights that are largely inaccessible through other means. Scholars invested in empirical methods can often dismiss the insights of textual analysis as merely anecdotal. And while it is certainly the case that the findings of most textual analyses are not replicable by other researchers (except perhaps those that describe the manifest content of texts, such as content analysis), they do provide ways of thinking differently about textual content. This is particularly due to the ability of textual analysis to uncover meanings and interpretations that may otherwise remain unexplored or unidentified by empirical methods.

My approach to textual analysis always goes beyond the text to consider the broader cultural, industrial, infrastructural and, yes, textual work that food TV texts do. In the specific context of this book, what this means methodologically is that I attempt to work at the intersections of textual representations, televisual production practices, and digital platform infrastructures: that is, to consider audience–text–infrastructure–industry simultaneously in my analysis.

What this approach does is not only take us beyond the manifest content of food TV texts, it also takes us beyond the food itself to consider what else is made possible by food TV’s representations. Admittedly, some of the ideas that I outline in the book do tend to lean towards the negative (for example, the role of new digital forms in masking exploitation, concealing commercial logics, weakening activist commitments), but there are also some moments of possibility – some possible re-imaginings – that I point to. For example, I use Misha Kavka’s concept of the cusp formation to explore the ways in which the textual intimacy and supposed closeness of the digital can enable new forms of connection between viewers that disrupt typical public/private boundaries and, in the case of the examples I use, link home cooking to broader food justice initiatives. Put simply, the digital can offer opportunities to do food differently if we can take the analytical opportunities offered by textual analysis to think food (and food media) differently, and this is one of things I am trying to do in this book.

Ariana Gunderson: The synesthetic experience of haptically scrolling on a phone through ASMR food videos with brain-tickling noises and fantastically fast food preparations produces what you call an “excess of affect,” (72). These food videos, you argue, operate as an example of Brodmerkel and Carah’s (2016) “affect switches,” or touchpoints where bodies and media systems come into affect-laden contact. How does food video as affect switch affect both the viewer and your analysis of the material?

Michelle Phillipov: Such videos affect the viewer primarily by situating them in the material – offering visual continuity between the hands preparing the food on screen and the viewer’s hands as they hold their digital device, or providing the viewer the point of view of the eater or the cook – in ways that give rise to immersive experiences. Analytically, the key is the excess of affect these experiences produce.

In the book, I give an example of a video that depicts the making of a layered crepe cake. Filming lingers on each step of the production process far longer than is necessary for instructional purposes – we see disembodied hands cooking all ten crepes in five different colors (when just one or two would have been enough to demonstrate the process), whipping the cream in nearly real time, plus almost two full minutes preparing and portioning the cake for eating. I read the video as more akin to an ASMR experience for relaxation, comfort, and calm than a how-to for people to make the cake at home. This is significant because short form food videos have typically been understood by scholars as tools of cooking instruction or inspiration but, actually, I think they offer all sorts of pleasure to the audience.

However, it is important to remember that while such excesses of affect are sources of pleasure for audiences, they also serve as touch points between bodies and calculative systems in ways that bring both bodies and data into the service of the algorithmic and market rationalities of digital platforms. Let’s be clear: our viewing habits, including of legacy media, have always been monetized, but the ways in which this occurs has previously been visible to us (for example, we would see the ad breaks, or the product placements or endorsements), but how and when and in what ways our viewing is monetized is now far more opaque. In the scholarship of ASMR, media academic Jessica Maddox has called this ‘transactional tingles’, where relaxation for the viewer is exchanged for metrics (likes, views, comments) for producer and platform, and we are seeing similar things occurring in the food space as well.

Ariana Gunderson: The feel-good Netflix food competition shows you analyze, like Crazy Delicious and Sugar Rush, take their lead from the Great British Bake-Off with mostly gentle evaluations, camaraderie between contestants, and happy, whimsical food creations. This is a far cry from a screaming Gordon Ramsay in Hell’s Kitchen. You identify this newer trend in digital food TV as a dampening of affect, a decrease in intensity, in contrast to the frenetic surplus affect of online food video. How might you read these two phenomena together in light of the practice of second screening: scrolling a phone in front of a TV?

Michelle Phillipov: Shows like Crazy Delicious, Sugar Rush and the like reflect a wider turn towards what has been called ambient TV. This is TV that has been deliberately designed for passive consumption – ‘visual wallpaper’ is a particularly apt term I have heard used. Ambient TV is not limited to food TV – perhaps the most well-known example is the series Emily in Paris – but what all of these examples share in common is that an assumption of distracted or atmospheric viewing is built into the narrative design of the series.

To return to your above example of Gordon Ramsay, even he is getting in on the act! Reviews of his Netflix documentary, Being Gordon Ramsay, have characterized the series as boring and as having a limited narrative stretched out over too many episodes to maintain interest, but I think that misses the point. The show is not designed for watching with focused attention – it is another example of ambient-style TV, and understanding this trend is essential for understanding contemporary food TV today.

In the book, I argue that these supposedly feel-good, easy-going pleasures work in such shows often serve to mask exploitative relationships between platforms, TV contestants, content creators, and audiences. But as the Gordon Ramsay example indicates, we are now also seeing this as a technique used in celebrity image softening or rehabilitation. I would suggest that Meghan Sussex’s series, With Love, Meghan, could also been seen as part of this category as well.

Ariana Gunderson: Your book traces the shifting strands of televisual food across traditional broadcast TV, streaming, and digital-first online video, exploring how the infrastructural context around the textual content shapes available readings of the material. You examine the recontextualization of broadcast shows from the 1990s and early 2000s made available to stream online, as well as the ways social media food videos have influenced new broadcast TV, as in the case of Jaime Oliver’s pandemic shows. Do you have any hunches or hopes about how emergent or future televisual platforms and infrastructures will shape digital food TV to come?

Michelle Phillipov: Most of the examples I examined in the book were of digital first food content. The only examples of supposedly traditional food TV I considered were in Chapter 4, where I looked at the adoption of digital techniques within Jamie Oliver’s cooking shows. The specifics examples I looked at were a product of COVID-19 – as a result of lockdowns, Oliver could no longer film in a studio, so filmed his shows at home, on his mobile phone – but we are now seeing even further encroachment of the digital into the traditional. For example, I just finished re-watching Donal Skehan’s show Superfood in Minutes and was struck by the frequency with which Donal adopts the conventions of short-form food videos (for example, disembodied hands, overhead shots, short ingredients lists) within the context of broadcast/streaming TV. This show is admittedly not that recent (it was made in 2019–2021), but we are seeing a lot more examples of this type. Yesterday, I was watching an episode of Silvia Colloca’s latest season of Silvia’s Italian Masterclass, which was made in 2025 and makes use of fast playback techniques and jump cuts – much like we see in online video – to keep the recipes moving.

More than just an increased blurring between the digital and the traditional, my prediction is that outputs will continue to become increasingly platform agnostic, with the distinctiveness of individual platform offerings likely to be further eroded. In the book I have chapters on specific output types – streaming TV, catch up TV, short form food videos, broadcast TV – but I suspect such distinctions will become progressively less meaningful as platform conventions merge.

One thing that has changed significantly since I wrote the book, and which I think gives us some cause for concern, is the extent to which our online screen-based experiences are now flooded with AI-generated content. This includes recipe slop, bizarre food dramas acted out by AI fruits and vegetables, kitchen hacks, AI-generated advertising, and a range of other things. Quite a bit of it is targeted at children. Much of it is terrible. And the nature of platform algorithms means that once we pause to take a look at one of these videos, our feeds become saturated with more and more recommendations for similar content. It is a phenomenon that reflects both voracious audience demand for new content and the capacity for cheap, sped-up production, but we are bombarded with so much content it is becoming harder work to curate our viewing experiences. What this means for the future of food media is anyone’s guess, but I’m (cautiously) optimistic that things will balance out over time.
Roderic Crooks on his book, Access Is Capture

May 11th, 2026

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/access-is-capture/paper

Zhenzhou “Andy” Tan: Your ethnography of experiments with technology in public education in urban Los Angeles not only convincingly rebuts the persistent and appealing trope that access to technology contributes to racial justice. It also presents clear and strong evidence that “data in all its forms…contributes powerfully to racial projects” (p. 11). Can you give CaMP Anthropology readers a sneak peek of one especially compelling ethnographic case from the book?

Roderic Crooks: Thank you very much for engaging with my book. I understand attention to be a form of care, one that makes scholarly life possible. I appreciate the care you have shown my work, as well as the care of the readers and maintainers of the CaMP Anthropology blog.

Access Is Capture describes three interrelated sites: a high school, a charter management organization that runs a portfolio of schools, and a series of meetings with community organizers. Across these sites, I am thinking about different articulations of the value of access to technology partly in conversation with what Safiya Noble (2016) calls Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies. From this vantage, the question of the value of access to technology looks less like a question of the equitable distribution of resources and more a question of how interrelated, socially consequential differences such as sex, race, geography, and citizenship determine who may benefit from technology and who must provide those benefits.

One scene that encapsulates my approach concerns a big meeting of researchers, health workers, and neighborhood people that happened right around the time I was starting my field work at a South Los Angeles high school. This meeting was not directly related to my project on edtech and was instead ostensibly about how neighborhood people could learn to record data about air pollution so that they could apply for public money for remediation. Most of the people talking at the meeting were academics, not-for-profit workers, and county officials. These experts presented a charming and highly plausible program explaining how community members could collect data with their phones. When the meeting broke into smaller groups, the vibe shifted. The community people present were mostly aunties—respected older women. They had sat patiently through this day of programming that presumed the audience needed training and instruction in order to document local air quality hazards, and they felt condescended to. The organizers of this meeting imagined they would be celebrated for finally paying attention to this community, but the aunties, it turned out, had their own agenda. They already knew where the pollution hazards in the neighborhood were and had spent years complaining to local officials about them. They used the meeting as an opportunity to ask these researchers and officials hard questions about why they had so long ignored delivery trucks idling, car exhaust from the freeways, and factories located too close to schools. To the aunties, all of this business about data and reporting and community-based research really distracted from what people in the community already knew and had been saying for years to anyone who would listen. More, they wanted the officials there to speak to larger questions about why zoning laws allow pollution to accumulate in working-class neighborhoods, but state funds to clean up the air never materialize. At the end of this episode, community members were left unsure if their participation would be rewarded, if they would end up getting anything in exchange for working with data as the county people and academics wanted them to. It is a pattern I saw again and again, but it took me some time to recognize it.

Zhenzhou “Andy” Tan: You offer the analytic term “datalogical enframing” to capture the ways the pursuit of access to technology and data-drivenness ideologically and materially supports racial projects in almost all your cases. Although the term is amply fleshed out ethnographically, I do not remember you explaining why you chose this specific term, especially the qualifier “datalogical.” Is this a reference to an intellectual tradition, or is it a neologism for your specific analytic purposes? By attaching the suffix “-logical” to “data”, are you gesturing towards data’s epistemological, representational, and ideological affordances?

Roderic Crooks: When I refer to the datalogical enframing, I am calling into question the representational capacities of data, not just whatever measurement, observation, or fact any given source of data is said to hold. I return frequently in this book to data, how it is captured and created, who can use it, and how it can stand as a proxy for things in the world. This is partly out of a Latourian commitment to “follow the actor” (Latour & Crawford, 1993), but is also because I think data is interesting and important. Thinking about data lets me question how power shapes what comes to be known, how we make choices about what kinds of things are in the world and what is at stake in such choices (Mol, 1999). This is how I use the term “datalogical,” as a way to draw into my analysis what data is imagined to be, what it is allowed to be, and what kind of knowledge and power people derive from association with data. As I say in the book, even if data is not everything it is hyped up to be, for the people and organizations who claim to make education data-driven, the power it confers is real.

I was also inspired by abolitionist writers who talk about enclosure, specifically Damien Sojoyner and Ruth Wilson Gillmore. Both Gilmore and Sojoyner use the term enclosure to talk about the whole complex of relations that structure life in minoritized communities in ways that perennially create less valuable, more exploitable subjects. I wanted to differentiate enclosure in the context of datafication as distinct from geographical, institutional, or legal forms of enclosure. In making this distinction, I am saying that there are many forms of enclosure that structure life in a working-class community: ironically, it is precisely the consequences of these structurally imposed enclosures that access to computing (data-intensive or otherwise) is supposed to fix. So datalogical enframing echoes the work of these scholars, showing how the very technologies that are supposed to offer us something contribute to the conditions that keep us unfree.

I hope others might make use of this term if it suits their projects, if they see places where appeals to data or data-drivenness are used to distract from material demands for education, clean air, food, or any of the other things that people need to live. As the revised version of the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program (Newton & Seale, 1972) states, “We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology.” So there can be a place for authentic community demands for technology or for data or for all kinds of things, as long as these demands derive their warrant from the lived conditions of the people themselves.

Zhenzhou “Andy” Tan: You center race in analyzing the complex relations between minoritized communities and technology. As most of your research participants are identified as belonging to or serving working-class Black and Latinx communities, to what extent does this book pertain to other types of oppression and minoritization that intersect with race in public education or urban United States in general?

Roderic Crooks: My focus on access to edtech is both professional and personal. It stems from my interest in the working-class and poor communities and my scholarly writing about race in public life. I did not set out to write a regional work, but in a way, that is what I have done. I was born here in Southern California and consider it an honor to work, teach, and raise a family in my home state. The ten years of fieldwork that form the basis for this book are also set in Southern California. The ideas I am talking about—the centrality of race in understanding public life and the turn to data-intensive computing—are playing out all over the world, but the atmosphere and people I describe in the book are very much specific to Southern California.

My interest in race and class was primarily determined by the field site. Like many schools in South Los Angeles, the school I studied first (and that really set this project in motion) was “doubly segregated” (Pfleger & Orfield, 2025), that is to say, segregated both by class and by race. During the time I was initially doing my fieldwork, a lot of public schools in South and East Los Angeles were experimenting with technology, which school administrators and funders believed could address the persistent economic inequality that shapes life chances for working-class Black and Latinx youth. Why such inequality exists in the first place seemed never to be explicitly named by school administrators but also completely understood by everyone, including students and parents. I very much wanted to honor what people knew about the way power determined how and where they could live, but I also wanted to be clear that talk about access to technology foreclosed discussion about race, segregation, class, and inequality. Talking about tech (or about data or about AI) takes all the air out of the room and does not leave space for people to talk about their authentic needs, desires, and hopes.

In my approach, race cannot exist without class, gender, geography, disability, native language, or citizenship because, as The Combahee River Collective (1977) told us fifty years ago, “the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” There are certainly many forms of difference I do not specifically analyze in the published book, but this is largely out of concern for space, not significance. For example, I gave short shrift to sex and gender differences, which are tremendously consequential, especially among the youth I spent time with. But I think with a little bit of assistance from a generous reader, my argument that talking about access to technology constrains our shared ability to demand more meaningful changes can function along those axes of difference as well.

Zhenzhou “Andy” Tan: As far as I know, you received your PhD in Information Studies from UCLA and now you are teaching in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. While reading your book, I was also happily informed that your intellectual approach was firmly rooted in “a time-tested approach to social informatics” (p. 135). What is the significance of social informatics, or your specific approach to it, for technology-focused research in general? Or, what is the significance of an ethnographer like you teaching in a department of informatics?

Roderic Crooks: I first heard of social informatics as a graduate student at UCLA in the 2010s. When I found out that there was a field of research that concerned computing but was not based primarily on accepting boosterish, one-sided claims about the wonders of modern technology, I felt a sense of recognition. As it was originally proposed, social informatics was an umbrella for research in fields including computer science, anthropology, sociology, communication, psychology, and management that studied the uses of computer systems of all kinds and the broader consequences of the spread of computing. It was a research perspective that was both empirical and critical in that it eschewed tech sector hype and schematic systems descriptions in favor of looking at what actual people do using social scientific methods. Social informatics as an organized discipline (or maybe subdiscipline) goes back to the 1960s and the work of Rob Kling. This body of research was both older than I imagined and also surprisingly relevant to what was happening at the intersection of the tech sector and the public sphere.

Now I work at UC Irvine in the Department of Informatics, which was a home for social informatics research for many years. Many scholars who I admire and cite frequently also work or worked in informatics, including Paul Dourish, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Bonnie Nardi. Works in the Irvine School of Social Informatics (King, 2004) exhibit a kind of ethnographic sensitivity that I admire, as well as a certain commitment to scholarly writing that tends toward the literary. I am very honored to continue that tradition, to contribute work that examines technical things with an interest in the social. Technology-focused scholarship has frequently ignored race, or actively obscured its workings with anodyne constructs like the user or the client. My take on this tradition has been to insist that an interest in the social, however articulated, is also necessarily an interest in the racial and, therefore, in every other form of socially consequential difference. I think I am honoring that tradition by studying new objects with classic approaches.

References

King, J. L. (2004). Rob Kling and the Irvine School. The Information Society, 20(2), 97–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972240490422978

Latour, B., & Crawford, T. H. (Thomas H. (1993). An Interview with Bruno Latour. Configurations, 1(2), 247–268. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.1993.0012

Mol, A. (1999). Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions. The Sociological Review, 47(1_suppl), 74–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03483.x

Newton, H., & Seale, B. (1972, May 13). The Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program. The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service. https://hueypnewtonfoundation.org/advocacy

Noble, S. U. (2016). A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies. S&F Online, 13(3). http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/safiya-umoja-noble-a-future-for-intersectional-black-feminist-technology-studies/

Pfleger, R., & Orfield, G. (2025, September). Extreme segregation and policy inaction in California schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/39s231mn

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. (2023, June 9). From academic complicity to academic rebellion: Universities and the police. https://stoplapdspying.org/academic-complicity/

The Combahee River Collective. (1977). Combahee River Colelctiev Statement. https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/
Arnold, Guzman, Avera and Corwin on Language and Health in Action

May 4th, 2026

https://academic.oup.com/book/62559

We may not always be aware of it, but language practices have profound impacts on health outcomes. This is the central insight of our new edited volume, Language and Health in Action, which brings together cutting-edge global scholarship from linguistic and medical anthropology in a volume that is designed for undergraduate teaching. The volume draws on research from around the globe to introduce readers to the ways that taken-for-granted communication processes shape medical care and produce uneven risks and consequences for human health.

We carefully curated the volume, so that it both advances the field and is accessible to an undergraduate audience. We did the latter by emphasizing the use of clear prose, minimizing jargon, and defining key terms. To support student readers and instructors, the book includes a chapter that introduces foundational information from social scientific research on language and health. The core chapters of the volume are organized into five thematic sections that highlight major areas of research: 1) Clinical Interaction, 2) Language Access, 3) Community and Communicability, 4) Language and Environment, and 5) Healing Practices. Each section includes a brief editors’ introduction to orient readers to the focus of the unit.

The volume is not only a teaching text, however. It features original scholarship that explores the centrality of language practices and language ideologies in how families and communities navigate illness and pursue health across the life course, in clinical contexts and beyond. Each chapter includes immersive examples from qualitative or ethnographic research. Across the chapters, readers will see how language is at work in navigating infectious disease and chronic illness, mental health and addiction, and disability, dying, and healing. Different chapters highlight urban and rural settings, immigrants, and racialized populations and present findings from research conducted in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Tanzania, and the United States. We are excited about the volume’s potential for reaching broad interdisciplinary audiences interested in language and health, since it provides a rare opportunity for readers to engage with original research that is written in accessible language.

The origin story of the volume

During the 2022 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Conference at the University of Colorado Boulder, a number of us linguistic-medical anthropologists kept running into each other at panels featuring scholarship on language and health. This sparked some great hallway conversations about new research and about our experiences teaching at this intersection. We swapped ideas about the readings we had been assigning and realized that we all needed a deeper well of resources for undergraduate instruction, especially for anthropology courses that attract pre-clinical or public health students and for our courses that contribute to interdisciplinary programs such as medical humanities or sociomedical sciences. These courses pose a unique opportunity to familiarize future medical professionals, public health advocates, and global health policy-makers with critical issues around language and health. Following the conference, we convened some virtual conversations and eventually landed on the idea of putting together an edited volume.

As we began to envision the volume, we spent time assembling contributing authors for the book. We sought out early-career scholars, scholars who are practicing professionals in healthcare, and scholars who are doing community-engaged work. We reached out to people doing research in healing and medical traditions both within and beyond biomedical settings, as well as across multiple countries. Though inevitably there are topics and regions that aren’t represented in the book, we are happy with the wide diversity of issues, perspectives, and voices represented in this volume.

It was important to us that the book be rooted in the incredible scholarship that has paved the way for emerging work on language and health. We did this in two ways. First, in writing the “Key Concepts” chapter and the section introductions, we highlighted and cited foundational work by scholars working across the linguistic-medical intersection. And second, we invited two senior scholars to anchor the volume with contributions that respectively contextualize the genealogy of linguistic-medical anthropological scholarship and illuminate the role of language-focused training in pedagogy for clinicians. Charles Briggs’s foreword provides a high-level overview of the development of language-health research over time. And Mara Buchbinder’s afterword elaborates on the importance of teaching medical students to appreciate the complexity of patient stories through training in narrative medicine.

Our collaborative editorial process

Perhaps the most gratifying thing about our work on this volume has been the collaborative process that we built together as co-editors. Over the course of three years, we all stayed committed to the project and kept to a rigorous timeline to maintain forward momentum. We didn’t hurry the work, but we also never delayed. All of us were juggling busy professional and personal responsibilities, including work on other intellectual projects. To stay organized, we held weekly or bi-weekly meetings during much of this time, with structured agendas, notes, and lists of action items that we compiled in the same running document that is now 138 pages long!

One thing that made this co-editing among four people possible (and enjoyable!) was our adoption of a feminist ethic of care. One of the simple ways we enacted our ethic of care was to begin each meeting with time to connect interpersonally. Sometimes we shared a win from the previous week, a grief, a worry. Other times we took a moment to stretch or do a grounding exercise. We also made time to get together in person on an annual basis, either during a conference or (twice) for in-person writing at a beautiful retreat center in Pennsylvania, which provided space for more informal connection over meals and on walks.

We also deliberately used a “no flakes, no bosses” model of non-hierarchical collaboration. This approach relies on building mutual trust through dedication to a shared project, in which everyone works to contribute to the best of their ability using their particular talents. We drew on our different areas of expertise (such as global health, aging, migration) and also came to recognize and rely on each other’s special skill sets (for example, organization, diplomacy, creative vision). We made decisions by consensus, which required humility from each of us and time for discussion, but the deliberateness of this approach helped us build trust and deepen our relationships. Perhaps most importantly, we held space for one another and gave each other grace in sharing the labor of writing, editing, and corresponding with contributors and the press. At different times, each of us had obligations that took us away from the project, but the work continued to advance with our solid collaborative process driving it forward.

Writing for an undergraduate audience

In the process of developing the volume, we realized that writing for undergraduate audiences was no easy task. It involved what Mike Mena calls transposition, drawing on the musical process of transposing a piece of music from one key into another. Our discipline-specific language and jargon is the key we have been trained to write in: writing for undergraduate audiences involves learning how to write in a different key. We were inspired by other transpositional efforts in the field, including Mike’s The Social Life of Language YouTube channel, the Demystifying Language Project (Lynnette is a co-director) that is transposing linguistic anthropology for high school students, and the edited volume Language and Social Justice in Practice.

In our transposition process, we intentionally incorporated feedback from actual undergraduate students in the several rounds of editorial feedback that each chapter underwent. In Fall of 2023, Emily used the first drafts of the chapters as part of her Language and Medicine class at Colgate University, and in Spring 2024, Lynnette taught second drafts of each chapter in her Language and Health class at UMass Amherst. These two classes, one at a liberal arts college and one at a large state university, included students from a range of backgrounds and majors including anthropology, linguistics, communication, public health, psychology, biology, and microbiology. Teaching chapter drafts required a great deal of pedagogical flexibility, but the students were enthusiastic about the opportunity to participate directly in processes of knowledge production.

Emily and Lynnette designed course assignments to gather student feedback on the chapters, including annotating chapters in Perusall and focused reading responses. We worked through this student feedback to extract actionable revisions and compliments that we shared with chapter authors. Emily and Lynnette also taught the revised chapters again in Fall 2024 and Spring 2025, while the volume was going through peer review. This time, students helped us to find a range of multimodal materials—including videos, podcasts, and documentaries—that complement each chapter, and will soon be available online at a companion website for the book. We also used these classes to hone a set of reading questions for each chapter that can be used for individual writing and for small and large group discussion. Ultimately, input from these four different groups of undergraduate students was absolutely vital in guiding the development of the volume. To honor all of these contributions by our students, we will be donating all royalties from the book to student-facing programs in the social sciences and the humanities.

Some final invitations

Emerging from its beginnings in hallway conversations, the volume took its final shape thanks to our collaborative editorial process, the input of students, and of course the many hours of hard work that all of the contributors devoted to their chapters. We are so excited to have this volume join ongoing conversations at the intersection of medical and linguistic anthropology. If you end up teaching all or part of the volume in your own classes or using it in other ways, please do let us know how it goes. You can reach us at languagehealthvolume@gmail.com.

As we co-editors wrap up this collaboration, we find ourselves reflecting back on all that we have discovered in the process. Working together so closely over the past three years has been intellectually generative as we have learned from one another, from our students, and from the chapter contributors. Collaboration is an underutilized resource for strengthening and expanding the reach of our scholarship, and is particularly important for cross-subfield work such as that featured in this volume. Beyond these intellectual motivations, however, we have been struck at how this collaborative process has brought the four of us closer together. Working together became a way of offering one another mutual support across career stages and life challenges, of building connection, finding solidarity, and renewing our collective commitment to what is meaningful in our work. So we end with an invitation to our readers to engage in collaboration. In a world on fire, we need each other more than ever. Find your people and find ways to collaborate on meaningful work that lifts your spirits and our world!