CaMP Anthropology

Fatima Mojaddedi on her book, Shelter for the Night

November 9th, 2026

https://dukeupress.edu/shelter-for-the-night

Megha Bahl: Could you start by briefly describing what your book is about? Please tell our readers how you use ‘language encounters’ as an analytic device in your book, and why you decided to make this choice.

Fatima Mojaddedi: Shelter for the Night is a meditation on how psychic and collective life are transformed by language. It explores this transformation through the prism of a crack or fissure in social life, an idea that emerged during my ethnographic research but remained mostly latent until I began writing the book, when it came to organize my thinking as both the aporetic condition and an effect of the encounters I sought to describe. In this sense, the question of how we live in and through language, especially when its powers of mediation crack and give way, is at the heart of the book and the attempt to take seriously the experience of social and psychic upheaval. During the writing of the book, I confronted this as two conceptual dilemmas: 1) forms of sociality no longer defined or contained by the cohesion of linguistic life and therefore better understood as the experience of rupture or at the very least profound confusion and 2) new signifying practices, and interpretive powers that unexpectedly enable collective and subjective life but are also without coherence and not grounded in a stable regime of signification.

Another aspect of thinking along cracked and meandering lines (because every rupture creates its own space) emerges from my engagement with psychoanalysis, particularly the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, both of whom understood that unconscious life moves according to the principle of displacement (although it was Lacan who formulated this as sharing the same structure of movement inherent to language). Thinking, understanding, desiring, becoming and speaking (or writing) move along a pathway that is serpentine and evades the quest for being, knowing once and for all, possessing, saying all there is to say (or for that matter, getting to the so-called point) or even cohesion in one’s words; this movement which inevitably raises the question of how to be with oneself and others, is what Freud calls the detours of being and they are not secondary or incidental but the very condition of collective existence that I explore.

At the start of my research the questions I set out to answer were largely about the production of new forms of economic value in a scene of protracted social violence. But the more I spoke to people in a wide array of contexts I was repeatedly struck by how often people spoke about their experience of others while also speaking about their experience of some dimension of language (speech, literacy, illiteracy, translation, and rhetorical life in general). I came to grasp something I had previously only understood in theory: that our experience of another person is always mediated by discourse, that is by the symbolic position they come to occupy for us through language, and within the structures that organize social life, including kinship, law, and exchange. Language-encounter homes in on this dilemma (that is also a gift) and names the ways people encounter one another within the symbolic and psychic structures of social life, often beyond what is spoken or consciously known.

For me, the importance of the term lies in its invitation to imagine life through language, as well as a mode of ethnographic attunement oriented toward such a life but not reducible to the study of any particular language. This is not an abstract engagement but a profoundly existential set of concerns: the form a language-encounter takes, whether in speech, writing, translation, gossip, or something else, determines modes of action and understanding that radically transform people’s lives in historical and contemporary settings. Across the chapters, this transformation unfolds through experiences of suspicion, accusation, unrequited love, knowledge, and the projection of global and historical imaginaries. These stories show how processes internal to language (interruption, difference, the deferral of meaning and so on) do not merely shape what people say or write; they constitute the groundless ground on which social life unfolds. In this sense, the analytic of language-encounter illuminates both social dissolution and the possibility of renewal. Language may fail to enable communication or represent a shared reality, but it also provides the unexpected terrain upon which social relations are rethought and then re-thought again.

Megha Bahl: Drawing from Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser’s work A World of Many Worlds, you refer to ethnography as a “concept-making genre.” How do you understand ethnography and why did you turn to ethnographic methods for this work How did it help you shape this book?

Fatima Mojaddedi: I am going to answer this in a slightly wayward manner because the question of ethnographic-concepts (and how we generate them) and ethnographic writing (how we write about them) are not always the same nor entirely synonymous with ethnographic method. In regard to method, Shelter for the Night is the result of two intensive periods of labor: the first during my dissertation research when I conducted ethnographic field research and the second a much longer interval that included years of archival research and the actual writing of the book manuscript. However, this was far from a neat division of empirical and creative work. At times I wrote while revisiting my ethnographic materials or while actively exploring new archives and at other times the writing seemed to take on a life of its own and I would re-think my material in light of what had been written. Writing proceeds through detours that make it hard to predict what a book will embody when finished. And even then, a community of readers imbue it with new meanings and interpretations that sometimes bear no relationship to the author’s putative intent.

As an anthropologist, writing is not simply a way of presenting ethnographic or historical materials; it is the means through which I think them. Its protracted unfolding allows those materials to reveal their significance to me, both within the lifeworlds they inhabit and the spirit of the text itself. For me, de la Cadena and Blaser’s idea of ethnographic-concept making captures this dialectical process between conceptual creativity (and the promise and failures of writing) and the labor of remaining attentive to what evades those forms of capture, in other words, the more capricious and recalcitrant of encounters that demand of us a re-thinking of our own concepts. It names a double movement that good ethnographic writing illustrates; namely, the ideas or concepts that emerge from the ethnographic milieus we learn from over time (this slowness is constitutive of thought and not just a methodological question) and the way those ethnographic worlds resist the very concepts we rely on and force us to re-translate across ideational boundaries. Put simply, ethnography is not a scene where concepts are drawn from or generated but a site that destabilizes the very identity of the concepts (on the question of how concepts respond to worldly dilemmas I find Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? edifying) we bring to bear on our writing and thinking.

Megha Bahl:

There are many thought-provoking moments in Sami’s story but I would like you to elaborate on one such moment. As background for our readers, he faced trial in a special tribunal in Kabul and was imprisoned for attempting to undertake a suicide bombing mission. In court, Sami described how he was brutally tortured inside prison. He described his experience of that violence to the court. You say,

“…like a phantasmatic door, Sami’s words took us to the other side of the law, to the space Walter Benjamin calls the origin and essence “of all that is transmissible.” That space emerges in the same moment as the state’s self-image of justice and order collapses, but it also raises a question about the place of language and speech in its unfolding: What kind of speech can be heard here, and to what end?”

Fatima Mojaddedi: The inspiration for the formulation of the other side comes from Franz Kafka’s short parable “Before the Law,” which is an account of a man’s fantasy of the law and his attempt to access its power through a gatekeeper, who refuses him entry. The man is repeatedly forced to stand before its gate, and to imagine the other side as a place of justice and mediation. Over time, that delay and desire generate the power of the law and turn it into a repressive reality the man willingly subjects himself to. It is a powerful parable that captures both the formation of consciousness (as a subject of the law) and of the law as a reified force.

In Sami’s case, the power of the law is made real through practices of writing that he cannot access (because he is illiterate) and through his own description of physical torture about which he can testify through speech. In doing so, I suggest that he also reveals the other side of the law not as an absolute or sacred reality but as a series of bureaucratic rituals and power dynamics that exist through action, including in the case file and on the body. This recalls Walter Benjamin’s insight that law is maintained through pure force even as it is fantasized about, not unlike the awe we might feel when looking at a work of art and appreciating its distinct aura (for Benjamin this was lost in the age of mechanical reproduction). Of course, the law is not the same as art, but the aura we ascribe to it cannot account for the representational practices that actually ground its power. To me, his case is a powerful text that illustrates how legal and political violence is experienced less as a single event (even though facing the law was a singular event in his life and his attempted crime was understood by the court through the prism of eventfulness) or sequence of happenings but as part of the ongoing failure of interpretation and the question of how to orient oneself in order to live with others.

Megha Bahl: Matin, an urban translator who assisted the United States and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) during counterinsurgency operations in rural Afghanistan shared his experiences with you. He described to you the challenges he confronted during translation. During some moments he found it impossible to translate and convey meaning to the parties around him including civilians and combatants. Could you share your analysis of Matin’s experiences?

Fatima Mojaddedi: My analysis of Matin’s experience captures the indeterminate and at times mimetic quality of a language-encounter. He is a translator from the city who finds himself in increasingly rural and unfamiliar places. This difference is startling to him and like some other urbanites he fears the ingress of rural persons in the city where he presumes they would eradicate a more cosmopolitan way of life. Against the background of this anxiety, he enters moments and relations that becomes increasingly illegible and fraught owing to the slippery place of signification and the difficulty of translation between languages.

On his missions Matin is tasked with translation. Yet the more he attempts to mediate between languages and speakers, including in situations where surveillance, gift exchange, or play are imagined as substitutes for linguistic relations, the more these encounters become incoherent to him and those around him. Where language fails, so too does the gift and other forms of exchange. Encounters are increasingly confused and, in some cases, outright deadly, and the play of signifiers (both linguistic and material) makes it hard for Matin to discern between danger and benevolence. In tracing this intensifying pattern, I also make a claim that reason is not the ground upon which judgements about oneself (or others) and formed. Rather, reason—a faculty Matin holds in high esteem– becomes implicated in these same mimetic dynamics (for example, when Matin goes into the mountains to watch the insurgents he suspects also surveil him in the same manner only to find that like them he eventually has to come down and face the enemy) and is transformed in the wake of translational failure giving rise to new forms of projection, and misrecognition both in discourse and in symbolic activity in the context of counterinsurgency.

Megha Bahl: You describe how you received CVs from your interlocutors and other people in the field in search of better opportunities, many of whom addressed you as sister. How did you understand vita as a metaphor to the incidents, encounters, and detours in the lives of people you met during your work? And how did you reckon with your positionality in the field and the act of sistering as an ethnographer?

Fatima Mojaddedi: The notion of vita is a play both on life’s circuitous pathways and on the traditional curriculum vitae (CV) crucial to academic self-fashioning. The CV I reproduce in the chapter captures this tension: it is deliberately called a CV in order to signify its importance to the foreign (and presumably educated) reader, but it is a short narrative that grapples with the dilemma of how to express to others (who one does not share a language with) those aspects of subjective life for which there is no easy translation. How, for example, to communicate a heavy heart? Or being hungry? Or losing faith in the social? In a sense, it addresses the reader by posing the question of what collective life becomes when language can no longer mediate between experience and the act of addressing the other. To this, the man who gave me the CV adds the interpellation of sister knowing, I believe, that even this cannot secure understanding.

On another level, the CV raises the larger question of how people inhabit and are shaped by language without ever fully coinciding with the identities, names, meanings, or even languages that are available to them. Through this question the book rethinks the conditions of shared life, a question that is once again revealed by the sister who is not and cannot become one. In reflecting on this, my hope is that the reader comes away with a different and more capacious understanding of how life is lived through language, not simply as communication or representation (even as both of those things happen all the time) but as a condition for how we encounter ourselves and others. How can we think of language beyond any language as such? Who do we become in language? What forms of consciousness or interpretation does that enable? How to share this with others? These are questions that matter a lot to me. They not only touch on some difficult philosophical matters but also on the predation and experience of everyday life.
Ashley Thuthao Ken Dam and Stanley Ulijaszek on their book, Mukbang, Food Performance, and Digital Media

November 2nd, 2026

https://www.routledge.com/Mukbang-Food-Performance-and-Digital-Media/ThuthaoKengDam-Ulijaszek/p/book/9781032600239

Madhura Rao: In mukbang, creators known as broadcast jockeys (or mukbangers) consume a variety of foods, often in huge quantities, for an online audience. You describe mukbangers as ‘digital gastro-diplomats.’ How do you think we should reconcile mukbangers’ role in representing national or regional cuisines and culture with the more problematic dimensions of mukbang, such as overconsumption, food waste, and animal cruelty?

Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam and Stanley Ulijaszek: This is one take on what they do, how they perform, if and when they are highlighting the pleasures of eating food from their country of birth, or country of heritage if they are in another country. Of course, cooking and eating shows on TV and elsewhere, which involve gastro-tourism, often have an element of gastro-diplomacy, so it’s not so strange that some mukbangers may operate in a similar way. If anything, being able to step into this informal astrodiplomatic role during the performance imbues a mukbanger with elevated authority and performance, which may align or clash with their cultivated personas, branding, and performed identities.

The medium almost demands spectacle (because this is one reason that people watch mukbang), and ways to create spectacle include overeating and generating food waste in the process – it comes with the territory. If gastro diplomacy and overeating sit in different mental categories within mukbangers’ minds and their audiences, there is probably nothing to reconcile. Rather, there might be a case for rethinking how diplomacy is done.

Mukbang’s stylistic origins often cause its performance to operate in extremes (for example, through overconsumption and food waste), though its genres continue to bring more nuance in pacing, amounts eaten, and its practice overall. Being situated at the crossings of contextual and material conditions; mukbang makes the everyday, banal, and mundane provocative. While accessing different foods, finding them palatable, and being able to eat them in ways which feels authentic to audience viewers is a dynamic and interactive process of exchange and transformation which mukbangers perpetually undergo as they eat the image of foods and their implied symbolism and meaning. While mukbangers may have control of what foods appear in their performance, the ways that audiences perceive and digest these meanings are hard to both rationalise and generalise.

Indeed, different foods, ingredients, and practices are inextricably linked to specific peoples, places, cultures, and histories and consuming them (or not) in particular ways may demonstrate flows of power. By providing vicarious experiences, mukbangers provide audiences with ways to experience, learn about, and engage with foods, people, and places they’ve never been, adding to already possessed knowledge. What audiences do with said knowledge is their own, and while mukbangers could bear some responsibility for upholding some form of ethics and veracity, it’s almost overzealous to expect all mukbangers to do so (and in the same way). However, this has not stopped various platforms which broadcast and share mukbang media have their own ways of flagging and identifying content which might promote harmful stereotypes or are factually incorrect, which serve as institutionalised mechanisms towards increased accountability for mukbang content. Generally, we would like to see these accountability measures expand as mukbang continues to add additional sociocultural and political dimensions to food media and food performance.

Madhura Rao: Like other food-based businesses, mukbang can involve individuals profiting from food traditions outside their own cultural backgrounds, including those of marginalised groups. However, mukbangers typically monetise the performance of eating rather than the food itself. Do the authors think this can still constitute appropriation? How would they distinguish between appreciation and appropriation in this context?

Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam and Stanley Ulijaszek: This is a fine line – some mukbangers emphasise authenticity of their performances, and there they might see themselves as appreciators and champions for particular cultural norms in food. For many, however, foods and the traditions from which they come, are hybridised in the performance. But, so is much of the food in the world now. Whether they reflect food hybridisation or promote it, is difficult to un-entangle.

Appropriation within mukbang leads to increased inequities around food knowledge/authority in tandem with increased exposure and awareness for underrepresented food cultures. By making a living off consuming cuisines, mukbangers acquire perceived authority around the consumed foods and where they come from, to their viewers. The inherent symbolic and semantic complexities of food and cuisine then become flattened in the process of becoming part of the performed personas of mukbangers, bringing to light the dualism of their appearance within the medium.

However, most mukbangers don’t earn a huge amount from their performances, demonstrating the limitations of mukbangers as influencers. A small number do, and it may be best to focus on those, which we largely do, in the book.

Ultraprocessed foods are another ambiguous category, which rely on viral food fusion trends for marketing and product development especially. South Korean Samyang Buldak fire noodles, which appear across many mukbangs, have flavours such as carbonara, curry, and which speaks to the reflexivity of fusion foods’ use and appearance in mukbang overall. The distinguishing between appreciation and appropriation, as well as whether or not these practices are acceptable within mukbang, is up to the performers and audiences themselves.

Madhura Rao: I’m curious how you would situate the future of mukbang amid the rapidly expanding popularity of GLP-1 drugs and the related rise in healthism in the digital food world. Given that appetite suppression and food aversion are expected effects of GLP-1 mimetic use, could broader market access and a favourable consumer outlook towards these drugs reshape how mukbang is perceived and consumed?

Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam and Stanley Ulijaszek: Mukbang might only increase in interest and viewership, as people using GLP-1 mimetic drugs might be drawn more to eat with their eyes and brains and less with belly and brain. New forms of mukbang involving AI already invoke fantasy, such as lava-eating and glass-eating mukbang, where a viewer knows it’s not real, but is drawn to the allure of eating. Watching eating involves no ingestion of calories, yet satisfies the curiosity around consuming the impossible. We imagine that while GLP-1 use may restrict the amount people may eat, the cravings and desires they may have around certain foods will continue and food culture – across the industry, media, and eating practices themselves, will adapt to meet this need.

Currently, there are many kinds of GLP-1 food media: mukbangs (including those in restaurants and cars), “what I eat in a day” vlogs, viral GLP-1 recipe “hacks”, and “GLP-1 friendly” recipe videos. The stylistic features of these videos are similar to current and past mukbangs, but instead feature newer foods, food products, and menu offerings in smaller portions. There has also been considerable push across different food chain restaurant brands to outline and suggest “GLP-1 friendly” or “GLP-1 supportive” menu options. Currently, several chains such as Subway, Chipotle, Smoothie King, and Shake Shack have already begun providing GLP-1 menu items and recommendations for their clientele. We imagine that future GLP-1 mukbang content and their consumption will highlight these foods directly.

Rupali Kapoor : At one point in the book, the concept of intimacy comes up, and I was curious to hear more about it. As viewers are invited not only into the act of eating but also into creators’ homes, routines, and restaurant visits, how do these experiences influence the forms of intimacy being produced? More broadly, is the intimacy built around food consumption different from the kinds of intimacy cultivated in other forms of digital content?

Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam and Stanley Ulijaszek: Food and eating can involve acts that can be more or less intimate. Mukbang intimacy is contrived to seem one-to-one, but is in reality one-to-many (thousands or millions). Sharing a meal is a good way to get closer to someone, and mukbang performance offers powerful para-sociality. This is heightened with chatty mukbangs where the mukbangers engage in conversations seemingly directly with the viewer, who may respond via chat messages. Another example of interactivity which promotes parasociality between mukbangers and audiences, is when mukbangers use audience engagement to structure their next performance — prolonged (in)direct eye contact through video and exclamations of “what should I eat next?” mimic friendly conversation.

Parasociality is a large part of why mukbang caught on in South Korea in the first place, and gradually expanded globally. Rampant normalisation of hyper-capitalist routines and globe-trotting career pursuits have left more people eating on their own, mobile devices in hand, ready to consume digital media with their mealtimes. The intimacy built around food consumption through mukbang and other digital food media is a bit distinctive from other forms in that it inspires offline actions around food given its universal practice. Also, different genres of mukbang may urge audiences to eat different foods, eat differently, and eat in new places by provoking curiosity, encouraging knowledge of/familiarity of foods, and imbue social capital on foods. The ability of mukbangers to extend intimacy towards viewers and influence them is more subtle compared to other kinds of digital content creators, as the attention of audience members tends to be focused on mukbang foods rather than the mukbangers eating them.

Rupali Kapoor: I’d love a deeper look into the methodological journey behind the book. As you went through the fieldwork, did your methodology evolve over time, and if so, in what ways? Were there approaches that did not work as expected or had to be reworked along the way? I would also love to hear more about how you conducted digital ethnography, the challenges you encountered, and how you navigated them throughout the research process.

Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam and Stanley Ulijaszek: The goal of our book was to outline the essence and evolution of mukbang, and our framing of its definition to include spectacle and interactivity was central to this. Methodologically, it involved viewing and analysing images, text, and sound, with discourse, content, and thematic analysis, of publically available videos, social media user comments, and online posting relating to mukbang on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and Afreeca TV. Content was identified through self- imposed creator hashtags on the online content such as #mukbang #eatingshow #foodshow on each platform. Volunteered personal details on mukbang creators’ public profiles were collected – including username, number of followers or subscribers, location of residence (such as country), gender, and age. Thick description of video content was made, with direct mention of username, since it was assumed mukbangers status as public creator suggests interest in engagement with their own content. It quickly became evident that a smaller number of platforms, especially YouTube and TikTok, were the most salient, as the platforms were more widely-used and available across the world. We did not include platforms which supported user-generated-video that were geographically-restricted such as DouYu, as they were not easily accessible through VPNs. Omission of these platforms posed some challenges, as there is much to be explored around how mukbang existed in these spaces. A focus on the most watched mukbangers was very important, but the performances of some less globally popular mukbangers were also salient to understanding this phenomenon in a broader way. Teasing out details, attributes, and practices which separate the successful (and not) was also part of this process while compiling ethnographic notes. Mukbangers’ emphasis on sound, especially ASMR, was not surprising, although its extent and diversity was. Performing sounds was perceived differently between platforms and their audiences, especially given the cultural influence of sounds as pleasing, disruptive, or neutral, assessing these reflections by mukbang audiences required extensive replay which could be over-stimulating sometimes.

Rupali Kapoor: As I was reading the book, I found myself thinking about the deeper cultural implications of mukbang. In the Indian context, for example, women have traditionally been expected to eat modestly and, in some communities, only after the men in the household. In this sense, seeing women publicly enjoy food and display appetite on camera can challenge long-standing expectations around gender, appetite, and visibility. Across the contexts you studied, were there similar norms or expectations around eating that mukbang seemed to challenge, reshape, or make visible?

Ashley Thuthao Keng Dam and Stanley Ulijaszek: Mukbang is a deeply transgressive form of performance. Across most countries where mukbangers perform, there is often one form of transgression or another and it is this defiance which drives mukbang’s performance. Eating in the wrong way can be deeply offensive to many, regardless of where on earth they may be. Codes and expectations around eating are not universal and this ambiguity of social judgement became more nuanced when the phenomenon spread beyond South Korea and the United States.

How to eat, what to eat, carries traditional forms, but the hybridisation of meals and eating that is taking place especially in urban centres, is challenging those norms. Digital media is extending these norms, and the study of mukbang allowed us to examine this.

While the interest of audiences may vary, the consumption of mukbang demonstrates curiosities and affinities for contextual impossibilities. Portion sizing, flavours, and eating styles in mukbang reflect back actions and approaches to food which feel forbidden and or taboo within the context of the audiences watching or the mukbangers positionality. For example, when considering gender, it is hard to ignore the duality of thin mukbanger women’s bodies being engorged with foods that appear larger-than-life.

These freaky pairings also find their ways into mukbang menus, where foods considered lesser or even gross may be reimagined as tantalising and tasty, such as jailhouse cuisine. Mukbang inherently manifests and thrives through its alimentary activism of challenging and shattering gastronomic norms.
Remembering Susan Philips

October 27th, 2026

Jen Roth-Gordon: I will always be grateful to Susan Philips for giving me my first big “break” and choosing me to help carry forward the legacy of linguistic anthropology at the University of Arizona. It was an honor to walk in her unfillable footsteps. Years after her retirement, Susan stayed dedicated to our linguistic anthropology graduate program and the joint Anthropology and Linguistics (ANLI) Ph.D. program she and Jane had created. She was an inspiration and a force, and the field as a whole is in her debt.
Ingie Hovland on her book, Life in Language

October 26th, 2026

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo241235926.html

Retief Müller: It would be interesting to hear how you define yourself as an anthropologist over against or in conversation with historians, on the sharing of space, or differently put the mixing of genres. The question of biography is one example of a topic in this vein that could be broached. To what an extent do you see this book as a biography?

Ingie Hovland: Thank you, this is a great first question since it is something I have thought about for a long time! Even during my PhD, when I was originally introduced to the archival boxes filled with papers, clippings, letters, and notebooks from Henny Dons, I wondered if I could write a biography of this Lutheran woman who lived in early-twentieth-century Norway. Feeling a little uncertain about how this would play out in my anthropology department, I remember asking the anthropologist David Mosse, who was on my doctoral committee, what the differences were between history, anthropology, ethnography, and biography. As I recall, he responded by saying something along the lines of, “The labels don’t matter too much to me – I think we’re all trying to do the same thing!” I’ve used this generous perspective as a guide for myself many times since then. Although my PhD was in the discipline of anthropology, I am “sharing space,” as you say in your question, with many others from different disciplines who are, in the broadest sense, doing the same thing: trying to understand human social life. How is this life shaped in such complex ways? How, for example, could Henny Dons run into so many challenges when she tried to use words in new ways as a Protestant woman? What was happening? How did the social problem of “women using words” operate in her life?

In addition to this deep similarity, I’m aware there can be some disciplinary differences between history and anthropology, for example in how we assemble our scholarly conversation partners. Historians might be somewhat more inclined to concentrate on a historical period and place and to engage in conversation with others who have studied that period and place. Thus if I were studying Henny Dons as a historian, I might concentrate more squarely on her role in the so-called mission feminist movement in northern Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century, as she sought to combine her interest in the early feminist movement with her commitment to supporting Protestant missions, and I might focus on conversation with other scholars who have studied this movement in this time and place. But I think of myself more as an anthropologist who does ethnography in the archive. And so I study Henny Dons more as an example, a case of something. I am most curious about her as a case of someone who tried to enact an ethical project, religious feminism, in an intriguing way: by experimenting with new linguistic practices. I see her as a case of a woman using words. So I assemble a conversation with others who might help illuminate this phenomenon of a Protestant woman using words across different times and places and from different angles.

Even after all that, I must admit I still think of the book as a biography, perhaps because I have lived with Henny Dons for so many years now! So I feel the book is about her. But it is not written in a traditional biography genre. Instead, I call it a linguistic biography – it’s a series of glimpses into how she used and changed language practices over the span of her life.

Retief Müller: Since your book is about language and linguistic practices, I have a question about how you make use of language in, for example, the way you divide your chapters under listening, speaking, writing and reading. Is the use of verbs for chapter headings, centering the attention on what people do, intentional and perhaps reflective of the anthropologist’s craft? The reason I ask this is because I think it is less likely to see verbs used in this way when the author is, for example, a theologian or even an historian.

Ingie Hovland: I appreciate what you’ve noticed about my own use of language here. You’re right that I think of the four chapter headings as verbs in the present progressive tense: Henny Dons and her peers were experimenting with listening, speaking, writing, and reading in new ways. I think you’re also right that the reason I find this pattern so interesting – or even that it jumps out at me from the sources to begin with – is because it matches a certain anthropological orientation toward human action that I am drawn to. In fact, this is not just an anthropological concern; going back to your previous question about disciplinary overlaps, an action-oriented interpretation of social life reaches across many disciplines. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom I read and re-read as I tried to understand Henny Dons’ language use in this book, thought of language as an action. Instead of approaching language as a collection of signs, in the vein of C.S. Peirce, for example, Wittgenstein approached it as an action – something we do – that happens together with other actions, such as playing, eating, walking, connecting, narrating, reflecting. Two of his interpreters, the anthropologist Veena Das and the literary scholar Toril Moi, speak about this as Wittgenstein’s interest in our “life in language” – the phrase I chose for my book title.

Retief Müller: I have a question about your front cover, which is a replica of an image that also adorned Norsk Misjonstidende. How do you interpret the relationship between the angel and the ship? Is the angel being projected from out of the ship? In other words, is it the spirit of the ship, and am I correct in assuming that this angelic figure is female?

Ingie Hovland: I’m grateful to the design team at Chicago for the front cover. I sent them a few different images, and they chose this one – it is indeed a powerful image that manages to bring together so many ideas, stereotypes, desires, and projections all at once. As you say, the original print of this image was used on the front cover of Norsk Misjonstidende, the Norwegian mission periodical, for many decades during Henny Dons’ lifetime. The image depicts a sailing ship, and its contemporary viewers would have understood that this was the ship bringing Norwegian missionaries to what looks like an African coastline with stock African figures reaching out their arms in welcome. The sun is rising behind the ship and the angel hovers above it. Perhaps, as you suggest in your question, this particular angel is the artist’s expression of the spirit of the ship – that is, the spirit of the new global Protestant mission movement that grew so fast from the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. The angel is rising, soaring, and mobile. It presents itself as graceful and powerful. It is white, with the racialized connotations that came with that color choice. The entire motif captures both the driving evangelical motivation of the mission movement – a sense of being called by Africa – as well as the combination of liberal and imperial dreams that animated this relation at the time.

I’ve mulled over your question about whether the angel is female. Does it have a gender in this image, or in the image’s circulation a hundred years ago? Or would it have been perceived as being without gender, or even as a different type of biblical or spiritual gender? As an anthropologist, I’m inclined to first try and see it from the perspective of Henny Dons and her peers. Looking at the image, I think the angelic figure’s powerful ability to rise above events and to reach far around the world would have been hard for its contemporary viewers to think of as feminine. My best guess is that they would intuitively have seen the figure as masculine. Even the figure’s flowing hair and robes, which we might code as feminine in Norway or the United States today, I think would have been coded as biblically masculine by Henny Dons and her community; the style matched, for example, paintings of Jesus and his disciples – almost always presented with long hair and robes – on the large altarpieces of the Norwegian Lutheran churches at the time.

Throughout my work on this book, these types of questions about perceptions, uses, and experiences of gender have challenged me. Although Dons lived only a hundred years ago, it is already difficult for us today to imagine with nuance her gendered world, and how she saw the world – or how she was seen – as a woman. For example, even though she was a prominent public figure, it was surprisingly easy for the Norwegian government to bar her from speaking inside a church because she was a woman, and it was similarly easy for the leading men in the Norwegian Mission Society to demote her out of their central leadership team when they chose to do so in the last part of her career. Trying to understand her social experiences of her material, female body, her language use as a woman, and who she could be as a Protestant woman, requires us to imagine how experiences of bodies and gender change over time.

Retief Müller: I read your book as a non-Norwegian who found your comments about Norwegian missionaries, including missionary feminists like Henny Dons, and their uncritical assent to British imperial ideas and stratagems interesting. Is it not curious that Norwegians, from a country that had for long been dominated by larger, including Danish imperial, forces, would be so amenable to the British Empire in Africa? This question relates particularly to Norwegian missionaries’ apparent endorsement regarding the “humiliation thesis” justifying Zulu subjection.

Ingie Hovland: Yes, this is indeed curious. I spent a lot of time thinking about the “humiliation thesis” (as it is called by historian Jarle Simensen) in my previous book Mission Station Christianity. I too was puzzled by why Norwegian missionaries, who first sailed from Norway to the British Colony of Natal and the Kingdom of Zululand in the mid-nineteenth century, started out by emphasizing the equality of all Christians but after a few decades – as a group (there were individual exceptions) – became theological cheerleaders for Empire. Around the time of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, some of the Norwegian missionaries posited that the Zulus, who had not taken to Christian conversion, needed to experience the humiliation of crushing defeat by the British to become receptive to the gospel of grace. I remember finding that particular section of archival material chilling to work on.

A few decades later, in the early twentieth century, Henny Dons repeated the same strong support for British imperialism in her books and lecture notes in Norway. At that time, at the so-called height of the British Empire, her Christian endorsement was less the result of missionary frustration with a lack of conversions and more the result of the unfolding of liberalism. This might seem strange to us today, since we tend to think of imperialism and liberalism as opposites. However, just as historian and literary scholar Lisa Lowe has urged us to read the liberal and colonial archives together for the turn of the nineteenth century, the turn of the twentieth century also compels us to take note of this symbiotic relationship. Dons and her Protestant community were engaged in the unfolding of liberalism in northern Europe. While one outcome of this liberalism was a shift toward broad-based democratization in Norway, including the growth of a variety of religious organizations and women’s organizations, another outcome was an increased awareness of the globe, of Europe and Africa, and of Britains’s role in stopping slave ships, in mapping and cataloguing scientific knowledge about Africa, in using words such as law and peace, and in allowing Protestant missionaries to establish mission stations with churches, schools, and clinics, for example in Zululand. Thus in Dons’ writings, liberalism, democratization, rights, feminism, health, Protestantism, and imperialism seem to flow easily together in her mind. She was not alone in this matter; Norwegian school textbooks at the time presented British colonialism in glorified terms.

Here Henny Dons’ life presents us with a microcosm of the unfolding of North Atlantic late modernity more broadly. We might even say that important strands of the late modern situation we know in Western Europe and North America today were formed about a hundred years ago, as liberal responsibilities fused with imperial moves, and as diverse understandings of feminism became laminated to diverse understandings of democratization and Protestantism.

Retief Müller: I was fascinated by your comments about materiality and demateriality in Protestantism and what your study of Henny Dons may reveal about this. You indicated that the classical thesis of demateriality as Protestant ideal is challenged by this case you present. You describe, for example, how Dons and colleagues developed the practice of listening as a technology of world-enchantment populated with figures out there (der ute). Their meetings themselves, while moving away from the materiality of crafts, cakes and knitting apparatus, reintroduce other elements of material culture, such as books, notebooks, pens, lecture notes, lists of prayer topics, a different soundscape and spatial arrangement within the meeting. Is this perhaps then a rematerialization rather than a dematerialization, in other words?

Ingie Hovland: Yes, and even more than that: I see Dons and her peers constantly working to materialize their Protestant language use, to connect their words to physical notebooks, to their bodies standing in front of audiences, to institutional spaces and church buildings, to groups of people, to circulating periodicals, to work tasks, and to any number of material objects and actions. They wanted their Protestant linguistic practices to be carried out with constant materializations.

It took me awhile to be able to find scholarly terms to describe this desire of theirs. In our academic conversations in anthropology and religious studies, Protestantism is typically referred to as a religious tradition that desires dematerialization. Protestants, it is often said, are focused on interior, individual, sincere belief; they use words while shying away from the materiality of objects or bodies, and they disenchant the world. This claim has become so common that anthropologists may refer to “the Protestant language ideology” when they mean a use of language that aims to be thoroughly dematerialized (even though this is, in reality, an impossible ideology, as anthropologists also point out). Similarly, in religious studies, scholars may refer to “the Protestant bias” when they mean that a particular strand of scholarship has prioritized interiority or discursivity while ignoring materiality.

By the time I had worked my way to the end of writing the book about Henny Dons, I was convinced that in these scholarly claims the term Protestantism has become a cipher. Henny Dons’ life in language, I argue, was not primarily centered on dematerialization; instead, she desired it to be material-discursive. In the book, I draw on concepts from feminist new materialism – especially in the lineage of Donna Haraway, Marilyn Strathern, Annemarie Mol, and Karen Barad – to describe how Henny Dons sought to use words with materializations and used materiality as part and parcel of her linguistic and subjectivity actions. Therefore, the book’s larger goal is to help steer our scholarly conversations about Protestantism away from the notion that Protestants desire dematerialization. I engage with a number of scholars in the book who have found similar cases, such as the anthropologist Joe Webster whose concept of Protestant “world-enchantment” you mention in your question, because I want the book to help draw together a new conversation about the persistent, multiplying, material-discursive qualities of Protestantism – and their many effects on our human social life.
Lauren Zentz on her book, Echo Chambers and Epistemological Bubbles

October 23rd, 2026

https://www.routledge.com/Echo-Chambers-and-Epistemological-Bubbles-Communicative-Flirtations-with-the-End-of-Democracy/Zentz/p/book/9781041389460

Eunjeong Lee: I found the way you introduced how you entered this project in your first chapter and your discussion of positionality in Ch 2 really humbling and illuminating. I’m curious to hear more about how you navigated the tension in understanding the influencers’ own moral-political norms on their own terms as you emphasize. What has doing so entailed both in terms of your methodological choices and your daily practice as a researcher?

Lauren Zentz: I think ultimately, I am encouraged to be skeptical of my own points of view. I hope that we all are as scholars, but more broadly speaking, I have found that being skeptical toward the points of view of myself and those I agree with has led me to feel more secure in what I believe, the principles I adhere to, and why I do adhere to these beliefs. But also it’s helped me better understand that there are fundamental and visceral attachments that others who don’t think like me also hold to and see as equally natural. However, what the media and those who let propaganda run amok do with those foundational sentiments is, it seems to me, increasingly problematic and heading toward tragic.

In terms of my methodological choices, I guess my answer to this is at least 2-fold. First, I had been doing research on social media sites, and I had proposed a mnemonic (the Seven As) that I wanted to test out on other platforms. This was the methodological and theoretical question that I had on my mind at the time I started collecting data. The second fold is that there is currently a lot of research on the US political far-right and on the European far-right. This is, expectedly, by researchers who do not sympathize with far-right points of view. As an outsider, it seems easier to sort of assess and delineate the parameters and scope of certain communities’ belief systems. It’s harder to do that as an insider, though, and so I wanted to take a moment to second guess what I and likely many of my colleagues take for granted – to foreignize the familiar. I felt that this would help me look under the hood, if you will, to think about why I followed the political influencers I followed and why I believe the political things (ranging from facts to values) that I did, which also includes the how did we get here component – how has this set of possible beliefs come to exist in the first place? I felt like learning more about how some of the left thinks and believes could help me understand how all of us come to our moral-political beliefs and value systems in general. To get there, though, I needed to sift through some sociopolitical history as well as figure out how to discern such belief systems through pithy and frequent tweets instead of well-thought-out essays on the matter.

Eunjeong Lee: I can only imagine the series of methodological adaptations you had to make during your data collection and analysis given the technological scene that has drastically changed, to say the least. What unexpected methodological or other ruptures occurred during your research, and how do you think those speak to or have shaped your argument?

Lauren Zentz: The most salient rupture would be Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter and conversion of the site to X. This did not affect my data collection during the collection period – January through April 2021. Luckily, in fact, this change in ownership didn’t change much for me after the change in ownership either because the format of the site remained mostly the same. When the purchase happened, I had been a bit worried about changes in formatting, or deletion of data on the site, because when I collected the tweets in the original collection period, I only collected the texts of the tweets, with the expectation that I would go back and take screenshots of the users’ posts later and as needed. This approach made sense for me because otherwise I would have had to screenshot several thousand tweets during my original collection period. That just wasn’t economical in any sense of the word. So, since most of the issues that concerned my data and how I was using it didn’t change after Musk turned it to X, it wasn’t much of a problem to go back and collect the screenshots as needed. That is, however, until one of my most prolific influencers – Joy Reid – decided to close her X account in 2024 in protest against Musk. When she closed her account, all of her posts disappeared. So, for those tweets of hers that I ended up using and that I had not taken a screenshot of yet, I had to either use text only or find a workaround, like taking screenshots of the tweets she had retweeted (posts she had reposted, post-Musk) in a given post, and/or just using the text from her own post.

Another difficulty as I sorted through the data was trying to figure out how to deal with the tweets that each of the influencers had retweeted with no text. Clearly, those posts express something that the influencers have on their mind; however, they don’t make it explicit. It’s just a bare retweet. It absolutely takes an ethnographic lens to be able to discern what these influencers are insinuating when they do that, or when, as with Kyle Griffin quite frequently, their entire post consists of just a quote from a politician. Taking a quote from Kyle Griffin citing something Nancy Pelosi said in a press conference shows nothing more than what she said; however, knowing the stances Griffin has taken over a long time period, and knowing the types of quotes that he selects as salient and worth presenting in a post, gives me some idea of what he actually is insinuating beyond the text of the post.

Finally, presentation of data was difficult with these posts because Twitter contains a lot of nested texts. That is, a retweet can contain a retweet, which can contain another retweet, and so on. So when a retweet from one of these influencers went 3 or 4 tweets back, across the same number of users, I had to figure out how to show that textually. Ultimately, I adapted some of Twitter’s own metadata (for instance, the “Quote tweet” header that Twitter would show when someone was retweeting), to try to convey how the tweets were nested from one to the next.

Ultimately, all of these strategies revolve a bit more around presentation of data than around methodology for data collection. In terms of the ethics of data collection on this platform, I would say that this was much easier than the data collection considerations I had to make for my previous research on Facebook. On Twitter, you basically have one public forum. When people post there, it’s public. And when public influencers with millions of followers post there, these posts can easily be treated as publicly accessible information beholden to, for instance, no IRB review requirements. With Facebook, though, I had to take into account, on people’s personal Walls, whether or not they had posted on a public or private setting, and then I had to try to understand whether the user actually knew if they were posting on one of those settings, and whether people responding to those posts knew if they were responding to a public or a private post. I also had to contend with secret Facebook groups – these are groups that are not searchable and that do not appear on users’ profiles – that contained over 10,000 and 20,000 users within those groups. Is a group that contains over 10,000 people, even though it’s listed as secret, private or public? How should I treat that data? Ultimately, my ethical considerations in that project were much more fraught – they required IRB permissions, but I had to go well beyond what even the IRB folks thought about. This ultimately led me to simply to talk through the details with my participants regarding how I would collect and present data so that we all had a clear understanding of what I would consider private and what should be anonymized or not used at all in my publications. All this is to say, Facebook makes Twitter look easy, when it comes to data collection ethics.

Eunjeong Lee: You conclude a note on technology and algorithms, and their continuing influence on democracy. I appreciate your discussion here to contextualize the point that algorithmic working only affirms that there is no objectivity in knowledge making, while also acknowledging its impact on our day to day knowledge making process in the backdrop of our material condition. What do you see as the role of those of us who study language and society, broadly speaking, in relation to power, at the moment? And how does your book speak to this role?

Lauren Zentz: I suppose my first point would be to say that we can take no part of meaning making for granted. All talk is situated within an (or multiple) episteme(s). This of course just harks back to the basic principle in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis that all talk is situated. If we understand this, then we can find our way to the understanding that, for instance, terms like freedom and free speech that have been bandied about lately by people of many political persuasions in the US have very different meanings. The uses we are seeing on the right bring me to the quote I cite in the book’s conclusion from JD Vance in which he claimed “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do” (Wade 2024). In such an episteme, good faith or bad faith argumentation – whatever it takes – can be used to get one to their political goals. In a democratic framework, though, good faith information – truth-telling and evidence-based assertions – are privileged, and a country’s political leaders in such a scenario are expected to abide by such norms. The latter is what I refer to as a scientistic framework in the book. In a scientistic framework, lies or bad faith argumentation have a complicated relationship with free speech and with political leadership. As such, we can look at Vance as operating from within an episteme that falls outside of the bounds of democratic, scientistic norms. This is not to say that in a society that privileges free speech, lies are not allowed! So what do we do with this as both sociolinguists – analytically speaking – and politically – in terms of trying to uphold a democratic republic that relies on the dissemination of good faith and evidence-based information? I believe I’ve already addressed the sociolinguistic part of it, but the political part is harder, because we have to decide where free speech rights end and begin. Legal scholars clarify that we have both negative and positive rights – we have a negative right for the government to not interfere with our rights to free expression; however, in a democratic society we also have a positive right to receive accurate, good-faith information. As such, free speech simply has limits. To go further, though, scale and power factor in here. I absolutely have a right to lie to my neighbor and will usually suffer no legal consequences for such behaviors. However, should that same freedom apply to a legislator who has the ear of all the nation’s media outlets, or a President who has millions of followers on whichever social media platform they are using? Would that ever be allowed in my own teaching and research? What are our mechanisms for accountability when our political leaders flout the democratic norms of good-faith information seeking and sharing? And what is the role of private entrepreneurs who own these platforms in policing the dissemination of misinformation? Is it even fair to call them private entrepreneurs when millions of people use their platforms for sharing public information? What are these entrepreneurs’ duties to democracy in contrast to their duties to their own businesses’ growth and profits? What are educators’ and researchers’ duties to democracy? And finally, why can’t legislators in a democratic society come to an agreement that there are limits to speech freedoms that are being encountered currently in ways that violate the norms of the very political institutions they are supposed to be trying to uphold? What is the meaning of democracy that such legislators are abiding by, based in what moral-political episteme? These are questions that legal scholars might seem more authorized to take on in comparison to sociolinguists and social scientists more broadly, but I believe as educators, researchers, and citizens, we all have a big investment in the response to this question, and that is why I conclude the book asserting a certain stance about how democracy might be enabled thrive.

Eunjeong Lee: What do you hope your readers take away from this book?

Lauren Zentz: I suppose that one thing I hope readers take away from the book is that we need to be clear and explicit about the principles we choose to stand by as educators and researchers, and as citizens. Ours, like all others, are never views from nowhere. They are principled choices embedded in histories of, for my purposes here, moral socialization, conditioned by the communicative affordances that we are beholden to. For myself, I want this clarity because I want to be sure I know what I’m talking about when I say things like “Democracy and education go hand in hand”, or “Democracy and good faith information circulation go hand in hand.” As educators, researchers, and citizens, why are these principles important to us, and what exactly do they mean? And therefore, what are the stakes at hand right now when democratic principles are being sidelined in favor of autocratic and bad faith ones? My purpose is not at all to embrace an extreme type of relativism where all moral-political orientations are equally valid and valuable, but rather to say, Let’s understand our choices and our principles, and let’s understand that things like democracy, free speech, and so on, are still delimited moral political principles. They have definitions and they have epistemological limits, and if especially our governments go outside of those limits, then we no longer have these things. That is to say, for instance, free speech is actually a delimited principle; it is not a principle that actually accepts all speech as free, especially coming from people in power. To state this another way, I hope that people take away from this that we have to be just as able to describe what exactly it is that we stand for, and not only what we stand against. This is the great rethinking that I hope we as an academy and as people who believe in an inclusive democracy can engage in under the current circumstances that we find ourselves in.

These are my notes on the bigger, moral picture. My notes on the sociolinguistics of morality, which I used as a basis for analyzing and understanding these influencers’ tweets, are as follows:

Social media interrupt, more than other media, our notions of truth, our notions of good-faith argumentation, our notions of narrative structure, our notions of context, and more. As I have argued in this current book and my previous one, we must fully take into account the sociolinguistic grammars of the platforms that we do research on. While all media shape messaging, it seems that social media play a much more important role in shaping discourse, and each platform does so in different ways by delimiting different affordances. So, when we do research on social media, language gets ever more complicated, and this will continue to change as platforms like TikTok move us away from textuality altogether. As such, I encourage us all to get really thoughtful and creative about the sociolinguistic tools that already exist that can be adapted to social media contexts, or to propose new methods and frameworks that keep us thinking about language socialization as it pertains to moral formation and/or in online contexts.
Perry Wong takes the page 99 test

October 19th, 2026

Page 99 occurs in Chapter 2 of my dissertation, which is broadly about the historical dialectics of symbolism relevant to a majority Mayan municipality in Guatemala called Cunén. Chapter 2 reviews the earliest documentation of Cunenteco, Cunén’s unique Mayan language, which many people currently consider to be a variety of K’iche’. Cunenteco is not a recognized language among linguists nor by the Guatemalan government.

Page 99 serves the larger argument in a number of ways. On page 99 I am discussing the linguistic documentation of Robert Burkitt, an archaeologist and linguist who visited Cunén and surrounds in the early 20^th century. Cunén is plurilingual; some speak Cunenteco, most speak K’iche’, many speak Spanish. By foregrounding Burkitt’s documentation (including documentation of uniquely Cunenteco forms, such as kḯstaw ‘chin’) on page 99, I am showing that Cunenteco is not my invention, and, in fact, it has been documented as long as linguists have visited Cunén, as Burkitt was the first. Furthermore, Burkitt not only documented Cunenteco, he documented a local pragmatic paradigm where Cunenteco and K’iche’ were alternating sociolinguistic registers for local society, as demonstrated by the various forms Burkitt includes which blend features of Cunenteco and K’iche’. This pushes the horizon of language contact which I have also documented today back as far as the documentation goes, and likely far beyond.

Such documentation serves my argument that Cunenteco has long been a distinctive local language, despite the fact that most outside observers have hitherto considered it a strange variety of K’iche’. Burkitt was the first to document Cunenteco’s phonemic high tone, as I show on page 99. No other language within the K’iche’an Proper subgrouping of Mayan to which Cunenteco belongs has a high tone. Burkitt’s documentation gives independent depth and confirmation to my findings. This serves the speakers of Cunenteco, some of whom (that is, those who I have worked with) desire greater recognition for the distinctiveness of their language.

My dissertation can be found here: https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/records/gsc29-s9v80
Anand Taneja on his book, The Gabriel of Madness

October 12th, 2026

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-gabriel-of-madness/hardcover

Rushnae Kabir: Urdu poets – Hindu and Muslim, past and present – are the primary interlocutors in your book. You show how contemporary political subjectivities are formed through an engagement with the “mimetic archive of Urdu poetry.” What, in your opinion, makes Urdu poetry such a productive site to study contemporary political subjectivities in India? What is the relationship between this mimetic archive and what you call the “networked public sphere”?

Anand Taneja: For me, one of the best things that Shahab Ahmed achieves in What is Islam? is to forcefully remind those of us in Islamic Studies of the centrality of poetry to the Islamic discursive tradition. In Muslim societies, poetry is the pre-eminent medium of public intellectual discourse, and hence poets are the pre-eminent public intellectuals. Think of his Khwaja Ghulam Farid’s kafi, “ai husn e haqiqi”. As Shahab Ahmed shows in his analysis of this poem, here is a poet—considered a wali (friend of God, or saint)—presenting to us the diverse philosophical and theological approaches to God in the vast Islam intellectual/spiritual tradition, and presenting them in a melodic metrical form which an unlettered farmer living by the Indus could remember, recite, and sing along to. Or think of Ghalib who says of his own poetry that it contains masa’il-e tasawwuf, the problems/conundrums of Sufism. At the same time, this poetry is deeply personal: the subject who speaks the sh‘ers of a ghazal is an interior self expressing its questions and doubts, its vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Like Ghalib who says, in the same sh‘er, that he would be considered a wali, was it not for his wine-drinking. So poetry, the most widespread form of discourse in Muslim societies, is both philosophical and affective, both deeply personal and entirely universal. It is also, thanks to its metrical form and rhythm, an eminently mnemonic and memorable form. So in a sense poetry has always been a mimetic archive: a concept I borrow from the work of William Mazarella. Of Urdu ghazal poetry, people often say that it is gagar men sagar, the ocean in a pot of water. It can bring you the vastness of the Islamic tradition, and express the complexity of being human, in two pithy lines. And this form and tradition continue to be central to meaning making and ethical self-formation in contemporary India, which is what my book draws attention to. Poetry has always been a mimetic archive, but when it meets the networked public sphere—a concept I take from the work of Zeynep Tufekci—the accessibility and reach of this mimetic archive becomes exponentially greater. You and I can now access live musha‘irah recordings from the 1980s on our smartphones, or read digitized 18^th century texts, or find new and exciting poets on Instagram reels. This vastly expanded access to the mimetic archive of Urdu poetry has led to profound social effects and cultural shifts, some of which this book explores.

Rushnae Kabir: The Gabriel of Madness draws attention to an imagination of public ethics that lies outside of the State and does not draw on its coercive and disciplinary power to maintain harmony. Rather, it relies heavily on friendship between the Hindu and Muslim communities. How would you describe this conceptualization of friendship? How does it relate to the longer, historical tradition of Hindu-Muslim interactions in India?

Anand Taneja: As I think about your question, the first image that comes to my head is from the iconic movie Sholay, Veeru and Jai singing, “Yeh dosti ham Nahin torenge”: two heterosexual men singing that they will die but not give up each other’s company. I think that movie and that song highlight the importance of friendship in South Asian popular culture. Friendship is not just “light touch intimacy”, but a deeply valued and valorized form of intimacy, which has always carried the potential of crossing otherwise strictly patrolled boundaries. Inter-religious marriage may be uncommon in India, but inter-religious friendships have not been uncommon at all: I am thinking, for instance, of the warmth with which the 19^th century poet Ghalib addresses Hindu friends and shagirds in his letters. Or I think of my own experience growing up in Lucknow where I didn’t know any difference between my Hindu and Muslim friends and classmates till the growing politics of Hindu nationalism made it otherwise. That being said, inter-religious friendship as a social and historical phenomenon is quite understudied. In his book Perilous Intimacies SherAli Tareen argues that Hindu-Muslim friendship becomes problematic for certain Muslim thinkers in the colonial context because friendship challenges the claim of sovereign mastery. Friendship across religious boundaries makes it impossible to claim sovereign mastery for a religious community as it becomes a political identity—an invention of colonial modernity—because it signals the inextricable entanglement of the self with the other. And so the rise of Hindu nationalism, and its desire for complete Hindu dominance of the state in India, has seen a systematic public campaign—through Bollywood films and WhatsApp forwards— to make suspect any form of friendship or intimacy between Hindus and Muslims.

Rushnae Kabir: Your book offers a nuanced vision of secularism. It is one that is not devoid of religiosity, but rather religiosity forms the common ground through which morality is expressed. In developing this argument, how do you draw on (and challenge) previous critical studies of secularism in anthropology?

Anand Taneja: For me, one of the most trenchant critiques of state secularism comes from Saba Mahmood, who writes in the conclusion of Religious Difference in A Secular Age, that “Secularism as a statist project exerts inordinate power on our political imagination, most evident in our inability to envision religious equality without the agency of the state… how can we expect the modern state to ameliorate religious inequality when… its institutions and practices hierarchize religious differences, enshrine majoritarian religious and cultural norms in the nation’s identity and laws, and allow for religious inequalities to flourish in society while declaring them to be apolitical?” Mahmood asks us instead to turn towards a “critical practice of pluralism.” This is the move I make in my book, moving away from secularism—a concept that has been thoroughly interrogated and critically unpacked by scholars such as Hussein Agrama and Mayanthi Fernando—to thinking about the grounds of a flourishing, religiously plural society without the agency of the state. I made this move guided by my Indian Muslim interlocutors, who were living with the failures of state secularism, and also saw no contradiction between being deeply religious and yet committed to a religiously plural society. Their subject positions, and the poetry and scripture they quoted, guided me back towards Mughal political theory, where it is not the power of state that is the guarantor of multi-religious flourishing, but rather, the work of ethical cultivation that is done to make selves who are not just tolerant towards religious difference, but deeply welcoming of diversity. This work of ethical cultivation, of course, brings us squarely into the domain of religion.

Rushnae Kabir: Your book draws attention to the openness of the Islamic tradition, which has provided your interlocutors with various capacities: of non-national belonging, of non-conventional religiosity, and of friendship in the face of difference. Often, you show us how common people develop their own, deeply private yet publicly engaged, imaginations of Islam. How are these engagements with Islam shaping new forms of religious authority in contemporary India?

Anand Taneja: In the book I quote a poet who says that I used to be afraid of God, but after reading Ghalib I truly came to faith. In that same chapter, I quote a religious leader who says that audacity and boldness are valuable, even desirable qualities in religious life. All of this tracks with Shahab Ahmed’s observation that there is a vast exploratory dimension to Muslim religious life that has become quite invisibilized in Islamic Studies because of dominant understandings of the tradition as primarily prescriptive of behaviour and norms. The openness of the tradition, for individuals living their lives as Muslims (especially through their engagement with poetry), is a longstanding part of the tradition. What is new is how the networked public sphere, and the particular circumstances of living under a deeply Islamophobic regime, are driving changes in the public, prescriptive life of the tradition. In Chapter 6 of the book, I explore how the social-media driven activism of young Muslims interacted with the strategic silence of traditional ‘ulema to bring about the novelty of joint Shia-Sunni prayers as a way of unifying the community. The exploratory, personal dimension of faith is interacting with prescriptive forms of authority in new, more public ways, and these interactions are not necessarily or always antagonistic.

Rushnae Kabir: In Chapter 3, you show how the networked public sphere has restructured gender relations in India and allowed women to take up greater space in both public and private capacities. What drew your attention to women’s engagements in the public sphere? How did these engagements culminate in the women-led Shaheen Bagh protests, which you engage with in great depth?

Anand Taneja: As a young college student in Delhi, and one not familiar with Urdu literary culture, the Urdu poets I encountered were all men: Ghalib, Iqbal, Faiz, Nida Fazli. It was when I started doing fieldwork in Delhi in 2018 that I started encountering women poets, many of whom I write about in the book: Aleena Itrat, Gouri Chugh, Pooja Bhatiya, Sabika Naqvi, Samina Tabassum. All of them came into public view through the internet and social media. So in a certain way the networked public sphere allowed for women to bypass (even if unconsciously) the patriarchal gatekeeping of publishing and patronage and to gain more visibility. I do not think that there is a directly causal relation between the growing visibility of women poets and the women-led protests in Shaheen Bagh. However, the potentialities created by the networked public sphere—the ability of women to network and dialogue even without access to (male dominated) public spaces, the networks and connections between men and women, the openness all of this created towards being more receptive to women’s voices and presence—certainly went a long way, in my understanding, to making something like Shaheen Bagh possible.

Rushnae Kabir: Different temporalities play an important role in enabling the political imaginations at the heart of your book. The past offers traditions of coexistence, the present is a time of wehshat that leads to junun (divine love-madness), while the future offers radical possibilities, as glimpsed in Shaheen Bagh. Could you comment on each of these threads? How do these temporalities shape the vision of love, politics, and belonging you have examined?

Anand Taneja: One of the most beautiful expressions of the temporality of poets and poetry is by Nosheen Ali, who writes about the relationship of contemporary poets in Pakistan to (what linear time would conceive of as) the past thus: “Indeed, “contemporary” poets conceive of themselves in conversation with the living word of poets, deceased or alive. A poet goes back and forth, back and forth, not across vast swathes of time — as we often hear — but within eternal time, in a manner as freeing and constrained as a child on a swing.” Nothing new happens in the Urdu poetic universe, I’ve been told in Delhi, it just happens to new people. So muhabbat, wehshat, and junun are not temporal stages, but affective/ethical/spiritual cycles we all have to go through, individually and collectively. When Ghalib wrote Azadah rau hoon aur mera maslak hai sulh e kull (I am free countenanced and my religious path is peace with all), the philosophy of sulh-e kull was not a bygone relic of Akbar’s court from three centuries before, but a living reality for him. This is the magic of poetry: that despite the destructions of colonialism and post-colonial nationalism, those ethical orientations are alive and palpable and accessible for us even today: To quote William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” For me the poetic orientation where there is no telos, no end of history, is ethically empowering. We have to struggle like every generation before us has struggled. Every generation has the resources of muhabbat, of building love between individuals and communities. In every generation this is challenged by forces of hate and division, leading to the feeling of frenzy and savagery, of wehshat. Every generation must rise to the challenge of transcending this through junoon, through divine love madness, ignoring the calculus of expediency and caution to reimagine and rebuild the world anew. For junoon, as a wise man said to me, is the extreme limit of muhabbat, of love. And so the cycle repeats.
Yeon-Ju Bae takes the page 99 test

October 10th, 2026

The page 99 test of my dissertation (Bae 2024) leads me to revisit the moment of breach at a Buddhist temple in a return-to-the-farm (gwinong) village in South Korea. During my fieldwork from 2018 to 2020, the temple held a reading group titled “Let’s Live as a Buddha,” where the head monk, local elderly people, and middle-aged newcomers participated. The reading group was originally intended to recruit only newcomers but it happened to be open to locals as well by mistake. In one meeting, the head monk wanted everyone to share their thoughts and discuss the reading as equal participants, but local people kept asking for teaching by the head monk as an authoritative figure. The head monk ended up admonishing participants for their inadequate attitude that was waiting for a sermon, when they were supposed to try to study themselves. Why did this breach moment take place, and what does it tell us about the dynamics in the South Korean return-to-the-farm village that was cultivated by the eco-religious movement?

The return-to-the-farm village that I call Mosan, located on Jiri Mountains, presents a rich ethnographic site in which different groups of people pursuing different values come to interact with one another. After the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, a local Buddhist temple initiated a return-to-the-farm movement drawing on the Buddhist idea of interrelatedness, which attracted educated urbanites to move in for alternative ways of life as a critique of capitalism. While newcomers overall promote egalitarianism, they didn’t move into a social vacuum. There are local elderly residents in the village, small-holder farmers who still value kin-based hierarchy and aspire to development-oriented values. The different sets of values that locals and newcomers emphasize are recursively drawn on as they justify their practices across the social dimensions of speaking, farming, and religious participation. The breach moment at the Buddhist reading group emblematically showcases the different tendencies between locals and newcomers, not only in terms of Buddhist practice but also in terms of their everyday interaction with others and the environment.

While different values upheld and practiced by diverse villagers can lead to tensions and conflicts, that is not the end of the story. As the villagers live and farm next to one another, they come to accommodate different kinds of practices and landscapes that each cultivates, which influences how they see and evaluate oneself and others. I attend to the generative role of ambivalence, as to how the villagers’ ambivalent stance-taking of oneself and others affords the cultivation of meta-ethical awareness. In other words, they come to see oneself not only from their own perspective but also from others’ eyes as well. I argue that the meta-ethical ambivalence is an emergent form of interrelatedness by Mosan villagers in their efforts to learn to co-exist and engage with different others.
Livia Stone on her book, Without Masters

October 5th, 2026

https://www.dukeupress.edu/without-masters

Katie Hejtmanek: As succinctly as possible can you explain autogestión? And why is it so important now?

Livia Stone: Autogestión can mean different things in different contexts, but it almost always refers to non-hierarchical, autonomous, and non- or anti-capitalist organization. An autogestive factory is one in which the workers themselves organize production and compensation without any bosses (Without Masters!). An autogestive collective in Mexico City generally refers to a group of people who are doing some productive activity together like making art, publishing zines, making music, or organizing a community center in a non-hierarchical way and completely autonomously from any governmental or commercial entity. It generally appears in English as self-management, but it’s not a great translation.

It is important now, and for an English-speaking audience, for a few reasons. First, because non-commercial self-organized activities are rarer and more precious than ever before. Young people especially are looking around for real human (and analog) connections with others and doing things that are personally and politically meaningful outside of a framework of consumerism or political parties.

Second, because I believe autogestión is one of the points of convergence of the contemporary political right and left, especially in the era of Trump in the United States. The idea of local, self-organized and self-governing initiatives whose primary purpose is to uplift and strengthen local communities is as attractive to an anarchist in Chicago as it is to a Trump-supporting farmer in a rural area. It is an unambiguously radical concept, but also incredibly, and foundationally, able to transcend partisanship.

Last, I think that it is a significant political and ethical concept that unfortunately we missed in the English-speaking world because of some poor translation choices of the 1960s!

Katie Hejtmanek: Your book is part history, part ethnography – can you tell us how and why that came to be?

Livia Stone: It began as an ethnography of colectivos autogestivos (autogestive collectives) in Mexico City, but in trying to put together the history of autogestión as background for the project, I realized that the literature is wildly inconsistent in its use of the term. Also, shockingly, I found no evidence that the commonly repeated origin story for the term was accurate. Basically, I ended up writing the background book that I wished had already existed! I hope that it will now be useful to others.

Without Masters makes clear what I believe to be the origins of the concept of autogestión in the Algerian revolution in the 1960s, and its pathway through the French student movements of the late 1960s, the punk movement in Mexico City in the 1980s, Zapatista student networks in the 1990s, and finally to the colectivos autogestivos in the first few decades of the twenty first century. It is a history that starts quite general and that I hope to be useful and interesting to anyone interested in autogestión in any context, and then zooms in specifically to the Mexico City context, that in itself has been broadly influential throughout the world in anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal activist networks.

Katie Hejtmanek: Building on that: Can you tell us about where and with whom you did your fieldwork? How many years is this book in the making and how do you incorporate such non-fieldwork into your fieldwork?

Livia Stone: Without Masters is a project that took more than a decade to write. I am a cultural anthropologist, but because of my interest in what is sometimes called cultural production (film, music, art), and my intensive engagement with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Latino/Latin American Studies, both of which are heavily interdisciplinary, I am comfortable in an interdisciplinary space between the humanities and the social sciences. Without Masters is reflective of that.

The research for Without Masters began as ethnography: hanging out with and interviewing people in Mexico City involved in self-identified colectivos autogestivos and anarchist federations (these are mostly two different populations). As the project leaned backwards in time, I began to do more oral history of the 1980s and 1990s with people in Mexico City’s punk scene and who were involved in the important 1999-2000 student strike of the national university system.

The 1960s portion of the book was formed primarily out of the activist and academic writing of French and Algerian Trotskyists and anarchists who were involved with the Algerian revolutionary movement and Algeria’s early Socialist phase of independence.

The 1980s and 1990s portions of the book are triangulated and supported by quite a lot of work with some informal, but extensive private archives. I had the great honor of having access to the collections of a few people who kept lots of political pamphlets, zines, posters, and other materials from organizing in the 1990s in Mexico City and who were activists in the important 1999 student strike. I also examined hundreds of Mexico City area punk zines from the 1980s and 1990s that are held in a few different repositories.

The result is a kind of scrappy, queer, people-centered, immersive, anthropological history of autogestión.

Katie Hejtmanek: Tell us why Mexico City is the center of the world, and Indigenous Mexico City at that.

Livia Stone: I’m not sure that I say in the book that Mexico City/Tenochtitlan is the center of the world, but I do dedicate a chapter to working through its simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility in the social sciences. We tend to be very myopic in the United States and focused on the short-term. For a non-specialized US-based audience, anything having to do with Mexico tends to be burdened with this shallow perspective. The truth is that Mexico City/Tenochtitlan has been a crucial center of global politics and culture since the sixteenth century.

Europeans were fascinated with the wealth and power of what they thought of as the Aztec empire well before the Enlightenment. As a result, there are bits and pieces of indigenous Tenochtitlan embedded in everything we do in the social sciences, and especially in anthropology. The entire field of anthropology, for example, was more or less invented after Edward Burnett Tylor spent a few months in Mexico in the 1850s. Foundational political writings of Marx and Engel are inspired by Lewis Henry Morgan’s very pointed ideas of indigenous “communism in living” in the Valley of Mexico. The Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century was defining for any even slightly Marxist social theorists of the twentieth century. In part because of this revolution, it was a crucial site of political culture throughout the twentieth century. It is where people fled in exile from Franco’s Spain, where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara met, where Leon Trotsky was exiled and spent his final years. There is very little that has happened in the world in the last five hundred years in which Mexico City/Tenochtitlan has not played a role.

Katie Hejtmanek: One of the most compelling aspects of your book is how you take on social theory. Can you explain how you came to do this and what significance it has on what we know and how we think we know it/who we give credit for knowledge production to? Or what are the bodies and where are they buried?

Livia Stone: Without Masters is an anthropological history of a small piece of radical social theory, the concept of autogestión. It is an activist and ethical principle to be sure, but it has the same pedigree as the vast majority of the prestige social theory that we use in the social sciences surrounding the mid-century French Marxists like Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord. As such, the story of autogestión is an insightful window into the production and dissemination of our shared theoretical tradition in the social sciences.

There are two corpses that I talk about being unearthed by the story of autogestión. The first is the ubiquitous, yet nearly invisible role of Mexico City/Tenochtitlan that I’ve already mentioned above. One simply cannot have a full understanding of social theory in anthropology without understanding the role of Mexican indigenous peoples in its creation.

The second corpse has to do with the activism of the mid-century French Marxists, like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, and some lesser-known figures such as Raoul Vaneigem and Daniel Guérin, especially as relates to Algeria, one of France’s most important colonies that gained its independence in the early 1960s after a long and bloody war for independence. We often downplay the role of activism, both on the formation of our academic greats, and the roles of their own activism in the formation of their thoughts.

Without Masters does not use these well-known figures as thinkers who have helped me understand ethnographic and historical data. The book instead sees them as actors in our collective political and cultural struggles, who also wrote some things, just like influential organizers of the punk scene. I think that cultural anthropology is due for a re-thinking of the way we generally separate our ethnographic data from our theoretical frameworks. The distinction is an artificial one that doesn’t always serve us well.

Katie Hejtmanek: What does any of this have to do with punk?

Livia Stone: An excellent question! I did not set out to write a book about punk. I didn’t know that the book had anything to do with punk when I began. But an early research question that drove my curiosity about autogestión was why there were all these people in Mexico City intensively engaged with what I thought of as an anarchist principle who vehemently denied having anything to do with anarchism? People told me they were drawing from Zapatismo and the 1999 student strike, but the EZLN has never used the language of autogestión to describe themselves and the usage of autogestión in the official strike materials of 1999-2000 was very thin. You’ll have to read the book for the full story, but the short answer to the question is that it was Mexico City’s anarcho-punk scene that redefined the term according to a uniquely punk sensibility and then popularized the term to the point that no one even realized it was coming from punk. The student strike and Zapatismo are very important to the story, but in unexpected ways.

Katie Hejtmanek: How is a concept of the self implicated in the book? What does it have to do with transnational flows of knowledge and production?

Livia Stone: I think there is a popular conception of anarchism that links it to violence and chaos. However, adherence to anarchist principles, whether one identifies as anarchist or not, takes an incredible amount of discipline. How do you extract coercion and hierarchy from your most intimate relationships and friendships to make them truly egalitarian? How can a group of people come together and create something together without anyone imposing their will on the others? These are very difficult processes that take an enormous amount of self-discipline and intense purposeful engagement in collective processes. These are questions about the individual self: what it means to be human, and even trying to purposefully change what it means to be human in an intensely capitalist and oppressive world. At the same time they are about our collective selves: what would the social, political, and cultural consequences be if we all maintained a fierce interpersonal commitment to a life without masters (meaning both without domination and without adherence to an established form)?
Remembering Susan Seizer

October 2nd, 2026

Susan Seizer was a luminescent bundle of irreverent energy and one of the many ways she transformed the world was by co-founding this blog. In her honor, we are posting people’s recollections of how she made all of our lives better. May her memory be a blessing.

How to Apologize by Ellen Bass

Cook a large fish—choose one with many bones, a skeleton
you will need skill to expose, maybe the flying
silver carp that’s invaded the Great Lakes, tumbling
the others into oblivion. If you don’t live
near a lake, you’ll have to travel.
Walking is best and shows you mean it,
but you could take a train and let yourself
be soothed by the rocking
on the rails. It’s permitted
to receive solace for whatever you did
or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful
human. When my mother was in the hospital,
my daughter and I had to clear out the home
she wouldn’t return to. Then she recovered
and asked, incredulous,
How could you have thrown out all my shoes?
So you’ll need a boat. You could rent or buy,
but, for the sake of repairing the world,
build your own. Thin strips
of Western red cedar are perfect,
but don’t cut a tree. There’ll be
a demolished barn or downed trunk
if you venture further.
And someone will have a mill.
And someone will loan you tools.
The perfume of sawdust and the curls
that fall from your plane
will sweeten the hours. Each night
we dream thirty-six billion dreams. In one night
we could dream back everything lost.
So grill the pale flesh.
Unharness yourself from your weary stories.
Then carry the oily, succulent fish to the one you hurt.
There is much to fear as a creature
caught in time, but this
is safe. You need no defense. This
is just another way to know
you are alive.

Susan Lepselter: If you asked anyone even tangentially connected to any of her many worlds, Do you know Susan Seizer? The answer was always :Of course! OMG I love her!

How could you not know her? Susan was a force of nature. The blue and purple and bright white hair rolling towards you, the vividly colored cotton clothes and silk scarves, the glittering earrings and nose stud, the hand stretched out to grab yours, the beaming grin with full eye contact, the force radiating from Susan that seemed to channel the playful energy of the universe.

How ya doin Leppie! I can hear her. In our small division of the now defunct department we both started in at IU, we called each other Seizy and Leppie to manage the two-Susan confusion, and the nicknames stuck.

Everything Susan encountered charmed her. This ethnographic superpower made her a brilliant, celebrated anthropologist and it also was just part of her sensibility, almost an essence: being delighted by the way things in the world were both different from and alike to her. Instinctively inclusive, she did not categorize people, there was never a hierarchy, she didn’t understand snobbery. She loved high scholarship (if it wasn’t dry and stuffy) and middle brow mainstream Hollywood movies and raunchy comedy (as long as it wasn’t punching down.) If a performance was expressive, she grooved on it.

As kind of an introvert, I never really understood the gorgeousness of extroversion til I understood Susan’s brand of it: she was in love with people and their worlds in all their singular variation, and she pumped them full of that love, which made a loop back to her. Some people make themselves feel important by deciding that the accomplishments of others are not really all that. Susan was of the opposite school: Everyone is fabulous!

Susan loved so much and she is so much loved.

Little by little, then all at once. Even as we witnessed the difficulty of Susan’s physical decline over the last couple of decades, she was the most embodied person I’ve ever met. She had of course been a full-time dancer in her 20s. Her body was herself, even when her body wasn’t working — frustrating her and pissing her off. She swam daily, she walked on the treadmill religiously, she was meticulous about her diet and when she couldn’t move her lower half, when her feet were swollen and her legs didn’t attach to her brain, she danced with her arms.

But – let me mention her family. Catherine, Keith, Forrest. All parents love and worry about and are proud of their kids. Susan of course loved and worried and kvelled, but what struck me was how immersed she was in discovering who these specific boys were, not projecting her fantasies for who they should be, or her wishes for what they should do, as many parents can’t help, but always just trying to see them and help them become themselves, her intensely adored Keith and Forrest.

And Catherine: her rock, her partner in adventure, the love of her life.

She also made family everywhere. She was so eager to connect. The downtown NYC 80s avant-garde performance and dance scene, with Jennifer Miller, here, the road comics in the dives and humble motels of the Midwest, folks in the French Pyrenees village where, during a post-college Europe backpacking trip, she found herself again immersed and connected, and wound up living there in Marcevol for a year – and then reconnecting half a century later, finding the people there still missed her and didn’t skip a beat catching up. And of course, her Tamil Nadu family, over generations, of special drama performers.

Susans huge generosity was part of her expansiveness – generous with time, energy and solidarity in her friendships, her many commitments to activism, to volunteering and community. But she also was generous materially. Most anthropologists maintain professional boundaries that mean they don’t get involved with solving people’s material problems in the ethnographic relationship. Susie didn’t bother with those kinds of conventional academic limits. For her friends in Tamil Nadu who were poor because of structural inequities, she simply decided they needed things she could give. She paid for the educations of children from families with whom she had built enduring multigenerational relationships. She financed building houses for families there, paid for weddings and cleared debts. She paid for a daughter’s startup in special drama, financed the costumes and materials needed to get a boost in the career, so the girl wouldn’t have to abandon her legacy tradition just to earn an alienated living in some other way. Susan valued this special drama tradition despite its stigma and discrimination, she valued it as an art form; she valued – and encouraged — the performers’ own valuing of it for themselves, and as an anthropologist she celebrated its value to the wider world. She continued to look out for her family in Tamil Nadu and to lift them up in a situation where many special drama actors resort to suicide under the weight of impossible debts.

Closer to home, I can’t count how many times I was refreshed and lifted up by Susan’s amused energy, chatting and laughing alongside her wheelchair in the accessible city park she favored, sitting on her deck, or walking the garden paths in the home orchard that Susie and Catherine created to literally share the fruit. Susie would say, you’ve got to take home these tomatoes — no take more of them, you have to taste this berry, have you ever tasted anything like it! Right? She took my daughter under her wing, both in Bloomington and L.A., modeling a queer disabled feminist joyful life when that’s what my daughter needed. Susan modeled a similar thing for the whole field of anthropology with her trailblazing early article about her own queer identity as an anthropologist, where her personal forthrightness inspired an entirely new way to acknowledge being a real human being in fieldwork. She didn’t do discretely holding back your true self for anyone. She encouraged her students to open up and explore the rich entanglements between their ideas and their lives without judgment, made them feel heard and seen in the classroom, had a blast with them and sometimes became their very good friends forever. The close community that could develop in and beyond her classrooms was astonishing.

Susan was ambitious and worked hard, draft after draft of writing, both in a groove, and revising with collaborative comment-seeking from her academic buddies. She needed to know how everything worked and didn’t gloss over anything. She asked a lot of questions, in every context imaginable. And she hung out with profundity. She was self-revealing, direct, even blunt. She wanted to share real things. Trying her hand at the stand-up comedy she’d been documenting in her ethnographic film, she had the audience screamlaughing over a graphically hilarious depiction of her own copious misadventure in perimenopause. People still talk about that comedy act. She never took on the discreetly indirect language of her adopted Midwest, but her Hoosier friends who did that got her: her directness and honesty just revealed such a damn good heart.

Susan grew up in a background of mid-century TV royalty in Beverly Hills, where over the past few years she stayed for months at a time, telling me often she wanted to get as much quality time as possible with her mother Fern, who she so respected as well as adored. Here too she and Fern welcomed visiting and local friends into her childhood home. Her beloved father Bob had died in 2024. She had close relationships with her brother Steven and sister-in-law Claudia and maintained lifelong childhood friendships in L.A. There’s a stereotype of women from privileged backgrounds which flies in the face of this surreally unsnobbish, metaphorically omnivorous, down-to-earth woman. It’s not that Susan didn’t feel privileged, in fact she felt always entitled to being treated with great care and wasn’t afraid to speak up when she wasn’t. But she thought everyone was entitled to being treated with great care, in large and small ways, and was baffled when folks didn’t extend themselves fully to others.

She certainly did.

Luminous, hilarious, generous, curious, brilliant, adventurous Seizy, I will always feel you as full of color and devouring life. Thank you for being my and my daughter’s dear friend for 19 years. I can’t imagine the world without you, and I miss you so much already. I know we all do.

(Thank you to Catherine Brennan for collaborating on this eulogy.)

Teri Silvio: Susan Seizer was dazzling. Meeting her at the University of Chicago was like running into Oscar Wilde in the aisles of an Ikea. We had an absurd amount in common – how on earth did the department let in not one, but two queer Jewish women who wanted to study marginalized actresses in Asia? Of course we became friends and comrades in arms, how could we not?

Some of my favorite memories of Susan:

About a week after we first met, she just started talking to me like of course we were both lesbians, and of course we both knew it. Completely bypassed the hesitance and trauma of coming out in the late 1980s. No one had ever talked to me like that, it was a revelation, like discovering that all it took to relieve your persistent back pain was a new pillow.

When we went to see Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing at Doc Films, and she was so excited by Rosie Perez’s opening dance, and we spent hours over diner coffee afterward talking about Brecht and Labanotation and comparing Chicago and New York.

When we decided to form a guerilla street theater troupe, the TWAT team, to protest the first Gulf War, and Jennifer Miller flew out to Chicago to help us write our scripts, make props, and rehearse. Susan and Jennifer taught me how to juggle, and Susan taught us a song from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, where she’d spent some time (of course). It became our theme song — “We’re shameless hussies and we don’t give a damn, we’re loud, and raucous and we’re fighting for our rights, and our sex, and our will to be free!” We were very angry and very sad – it wasn’t just the pointless murderous war, it was also the height of the AIDS epidemic and all the people with power were callous psychopaths. But we also had a hilarious, wonderful time. I was in awe of Susan’s fearlessness. She’d get up right in the face of any cop who tried to intimidate us, and brushed right past anyone who was bogging down the organizing work with impromptu lectures on Gramsci or Robert’s Rules of Order.

When Susan and Kate and I would drive up to Devon once a month when the Tamil community there rented out a theater, and we’d watch a 4 hour long Tamil movie and she’d patiently whisper to me what was happening on screen, and then we’d go out for sambar and idli at a restaurant where, of course, the whole staff knew her.

Visiting Susan and Catherine in Silverlake in, I think, 2005. I think it might have been the first time I met Catherine, but I might be mixing two different trips. Anyway, Keith had just started to crawl. We didn’t go anywhere exciting, mostly just took walks in the neighborhood and sat in the sunny living room dishing over tea. I remember Catherine trying to convince me that Canberra isn’t boring, and Susan catching me up on what our classmates had been doing, and both of them being hilarious about the joys and tribulations of parenthood. It was the only time I’ve ever felt at home in LA.

When Susan came to Taiwan in 2013 for a theater conference a friend of mine had organized. When she arrived, I’d figured out how to rent a wheelchair, but I still had a lot to learn – like I forgot to make a map of where the elevator entrances to the MRT were at each stop, so it took us ages to get around. But Susan was patient and good-humored. The students at the conference were absolutely dazzled by her, I think she completely upended their ideas about what a professor had to be.

Susan was my best friend during one of the most stressful, but most exciting, times in my life, and she kept my chin up through all the job applications and breakups and book writing after. I miss her more than I can say.

Jean Comaroff: I am saddened by the news of Susan’s passing, but full of gratitude for having had the joy of being her advisor during her time at U Chicago. Truth told, the mentorship went both ways. Susan was a luminous presence in the often-austere intellectual atmosphere of Chicago Anthropology of those years, being unusually at home in her own physicality, intensely alive, playful. She saw the vibrance and poetry in the often-ribald Special Drama she studied in Madurai, a genre often spurned by scholars of more respectable traditional culture in India. I think her defiant spirit resonated with the transgressive creativity of these outcast players , whose world she described with such uncommon imagination. When I myself was stricken with serious illness, she offered insight, empathy, but also an example of a stubborn refusal to give up on the beauty and absurdity of existence. I wish her family long life. May her memory be a blessing.

Dick Bauman: Endings have a way of taking you back to beginnings. I first met Susan in connection with a job search I was chairing for our fledgling department of Communication and Culture (CMCL) at IU. The department had three areas of concentration: Rhetoric and Public Culture, Media Studies, and Performance and Ethnography. P & E, as the latter concentration came to be called (later, the P & E’s morphed into the homophonous “Peonies”), was made up of anthropologists who looked to performance as a vantage point on expression and to ethnography as a method.

Susan’s letter of application was intriguing—a former dancer, a student of South Indian popular theater, an experienced teacher of anthropology—but our interview conversation at the AAA meetings was a true pleasure. CMCL had a number of impressive candidates for the position we advertised, but Susan was head and shoulders above the rest: richly insightful, vividly expressive, deeply engaged with the performers to whom she devoted her research and, for the rest of her life, her resources, and her spirit. Her campus visit was fully as impressive as the AAA interview and we lost no time in inviting her to join our bouquet of Peonies.

CMCL, alas, was eventually broken up in a fit of misguided budget cutting and consolidation from on high and the Peonies migrated to the Department of Anthropology. Through it all, Susan was a spirited presence, introducing us to road comics, scooting across campus on her Segway with her tutti-frutti hair flying, showing up faithfully at demonstrations for Palestinian rights, even as her physical condition became ever more difficult. She was a beautiful and inspiring friend and colleague. Now, to our sorrow, she’s gone. We will miss her deeply.

Kate Graber: I read Susan’s book in graduate school at the University of Michigan, in a seminar on performance with Alaina Lemon, so I was delighted and a little awed when we became colleagues at Indiana University several years later. Susan was always fabulous. I learned loads by observing her in the classroom, in meetings and talks and hallway conversations, and just going about the daily life of a faculty member. One of our last conversations was after she had retired, at a protest. We talked about the protest grounds as a performance space (because of course we did), about the relative power of different embodied actions, and about the unique power of her own wheelchaired body. I think of that conversation often because it felt vulnerable and dangerous; she was weighing risks that most people would not be willing to take, and our theoretical positions suddenly became visceral. As we parted ways, she said “thank you,” as though I had empowered her—which I remember thinking was odd, because she had been empowering me, not just in that conversation but in so many other ways besides. I think that was one of her unique gifts, and something that I wish I’d had more time to learn from her: Susan made people braver, by being brave herself, but she acted like we’d been the brave ones all along.

Jane Goodman:

I wrote these remarks on the occasion of Susan’s retirement from Indiana University in 2022.

Susan Seizer had a rich career as a preeminent scholar of theater, stigma, and stand-up comedy. Susan joined Indiana University in 2006, after 8 years at Scripps College, where she served as chair of Anthropology. At IU, her first appointment was in the interdisciplinary Department of Communication and Culture, where she was part of the “Performance and Ethnography” group. In 2015, she moved to the Department of Anthropology, where she helped found the CaMP (Communication, Media, and Performance) area of the department.

Many anthropologists end their careers by reflecting on their fieldwork. Susan is perhaps unique in that she began her career with a frank, moving, and for its time, risky account of an aspect of her own fieldwork in India. In 1995, while still in graduate school at the University of Chicago, she published an article titled “Paradoxes of Visibility in the Field: Rites of Queer Passage in Anthropology” (Public Culture 1995 8:1). The piece made a mark for many reasons, not least among them Susan’s open acknowledgment of her queer identity alongside her reflections on the ways that women in India developed homosocial relationships even as the category lesbian was not, at the time, societally recognized. This early article allowed her to reflect on the power entailed in naming (and in not naming) a social formation. It also opened up new conversations in the field, serving as a courageous example for future LBGTQ ethnographers, to whom it offered both inspiration and methodological guidance. Few anthropologists see their very first publication become so influential.

Susan’s reflections in that early piece came out of her extended ethnographic research in South India, where she was working with theater artists engaged in bawdy improvisational comedy – an art form looked down on by the larger society. She studied ethnographically the ways these female artists used humor and linguistic play to address social stigma. Her book Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India (Duke University Press, 2005) won the prestigious A.K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2007, and was subsequently reissued by Seagull Press in India, reflecting her commitment to making her work available to Indian publics.

The intertwined issues of humor, laughter, and stigma would go on to infuse Susan’s subsequent project – an ethnography of road comics in the Midwestern United States. For this research, she took to the road with three comedians. To bring the research alive and make it accessible to a range of audiences, she made the decision to produce a documentary film – bucking the academic tendency to view print culture as the primary measure of success. Her 2012 film Road Comics: Big Work on Small Stages follows the road lives of the three comedians as they performed in venues across the Midwest. In the ethnographic spirit that informs all her research, Seizer focused on comics who have performed in some of the more off-beat, out of the mainstream spaces – those spaces in which stand-up comedy flourishes in Middle America outside the gaze of scholars, journalists, and critics. In subsequent pieces, Susan took up questions of bigotry, obscenity, joking, domestic violence, and gender, always managing to strike a compelling balance between textured ethnography and her own personalized and deeply human writerly voice. Her work has appeared in venues including American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, and the Journal of Humor Research, among others.

Across all of Susan’s research, her commitment to cultivating ongoing relationships with her interlocutors is palpable. Before the pandemic, she initiated a project with the next generation of Special Drama artists in India, working with the children of her initial interlocutors in a relationship spanning three decades. Her 2016 essay “Heredity Abandoned: Kannagi’s Courageous Decision to Act in Special Drama” came out of this return fieldwork in Tamilnadu, and she continued to work on an ethnographic memoir of her multigenerational relationship with these interlocutors (who have become part of her extended family). To this end, she also convened a conference at Indiana University titled “Love, Money and Reciprocity in Long-Term Ethnographic Relationships,” bringing together experts from around the country.

Teaching has been an equally vibrant part of Susan’s trajectory. Her fortunate students have benefitted over the years from her signature course “Stigma,” which speaks to the ways marked categories of persons are culturally created, socially maintained, and hopefully also transformed and/or transcended. In the wake of her road comics project, she developed “Humor in Use,” which explores how humor helps to navigate complex social issues that are not as easily addressed outside of comedy. In her course “India Lost & Found: Diasporic South Asian Feminist Filmmakers,” she introduced students to prominent films and filmmakers that they otherwise would never have encountered. Susan subsequently developed a fascinating course on ethnographic memoir, again bringing her research directly into the classroom.

Susan was beloved among her students and her colleagues. We have all drawn inspiration from her intellectual vision as well as from her active engagement in helping to build a collegial and generous community, whether in the classroom, around a seminar table, at a faculty meeting, or at the Bloomington Faculty Council. She will be deeply missed.