CaMP Anthropology

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.   

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)?

Located near the end of Chapter 2, Page 99 of my dissertation features an interview with Director Byul Yun, a prominent K-pop music video director. This conversation highlights a central puzzle from my fieldwork in Seoul: while the term A&R (Artists & Repertoire) was on everyone’s lips, particularly among the young aspirants at the private production academies that served as my primary fieldsite, very few people actually hold this formal job title in the industry. What, then, does the A&R represent?

My dissertation argues that A&R functions less as an official job title and more as a vital conceptual anchor for K-pop’s complex, high-stakes production pipeline. To bring an idol album to life, every creative professional, from songwriters to cinematographers, must embody a panoptic A&R lens to align their specific labor with the overarching vision.

On Page 99, Director Yun illustrates this production reality beautifully. She recalls stepping far outside her directorial expertise to help develop original choreography, ensuring the movement fit the video’s narrative vibe. My research shows this experience is prevalent across my interlocutors. Whether a graphic designer or a lyricist, K-pop creatives must constantly weave between the local view of their discipline and the global view of A&R. Diffused throughout the pipeline, this characterological figure forces specialists to become both the proverbial jack of all trades and the master of all. Alongside the fan and the idol, the A&R stands as one of the three mythical figures motivating K-pop as an art form, embodying the creative economy’s intense demand for simultaneous technical breadth and depth.

Reflecting on this at the end of my dissertation fieldwork, I realized that this impossible expectation of maintaining both technical breadth and depth is precisely where the modern A&R parallels the modern anthropologist.

Anthropologists studying contemporary life face a strikingly similar mandate. We, too, are tasked with the near-impossible challenge of cultivating extraordinary thematic depth while analyzing multi-scalar global industries. Both the A&R and the anthropological paths force us to contend with the persistent anxiety of never having done or been enough to produce meaningful work, all while trying to secure basic upkeep in hyper-competitive, tightening job markets. Like the aspiring K-pop producers I met in Seoul, anthropologists peer behind the emerald curtain, witness the industry’s impossible standards, and choose to traverse the path anyway.

What a Piece of Work is a… Meowth?
That’s right: We’re talking about language and personhood among humans and pocket monsters.

by Erika Alpert

I’ve had a few encounters with Pokémon in the course of my life [1]. I played Pokémon Go for a bit after it was released in the 2010s, and it made airports a lot more fun. But mostly, Pokémon passed me by. I was in my late teens and too cool for kids’ stuff when it first became popular in the 1990s. I didn’t need Pokémon. I had a car. So I did not know any of the lore about its world until my toddler found the first season of the anime on Netflix on my tablet and pressed play of their own accord. I have now watched Pokémon: Indigo League more times than I can count. I have thoughts: about language, and what the Pokéverse reveals about who language includes and excludes in our world.

Photo by the author, from the Field Museum Pokémon Fossil Exhibit. The exhibit asserts that “no Earthly animals exist in the Pokémon world.”

The Pokémon anime chronicles the adventures of a young pokémon trainer named “Ash Ketchum” [2]. In episode one, having freshly turned ten(!), he is given a pikachu by his local pokémon expert, Professor Oak. Then he sets off into the wilderness to learn how to capture and train pokémon. (In the Pokéverse, this is a laudable and lucrative career goal.) Along the way, he accrues companions, allies, and enemies. Particularly of note are Misty and Brock, fellow young trainers who travel with Ash. There’s also Jessie and James, representatives of an evil organization named Team Rocket. They mostly tag ineffectually after Our Heroes while trying to steal Ash’s pikachu and sundry other valuable Pokémon.

Brock, Pikachu, Ash, Misty, and Misty’s togepi.

What are pokémon? Literally, pocket monsters: creatures you can put in your pocket, after capturing them in a pokéball. “Pokémon” is a standard Japanese redaction of an English phrase, using the first two morae of the words in Japanese. “Pocket monster” > “poketto monsutā” > “pokemon.” These pocket monsters are the central creatures that all of our characters interact with.

It’s not clear to what extent there are non-monster animals in the Pokéverse. We occasionally hear mention of mice or cats, but these describe pokémon. Pikachu is an electric mouse pokémon; Meowth is a cat. Human-pokémon relationships parallel human-animal relationships. Accordingly, pokémon can be wild, or captured and tamed. Some are bred in captivity—Brock’s goal is to become a top-tier pokémon breeder. Some are pets or companions. Others fight for glory and entertainment. Yet others work alongside humans. Pikachus can generate electricity. Chanseys can help heal other pokémon.

The explicit argument of the show is that humans should care for pokémon as kind and enlightened conservators. Pokémon are portrayed as sensitive creatures whose feelings matter. While they can be owned and controlled, they should also be viewed as friends, partners, and allies. Pokémon wellness, sense of purpose, and personal development, including evolution, should be at the center of trainers’ care for their pokémon.

Training pokémon to battle might seem contrary to this ethic [3]. But many pokémon actively want to battle, like the Farfetch’d inepisode 49, “So Near, Yet So Farfetch’d.”Farfetch’d’s trainer, Keith, is using it to help steal other pokémon for money to survive, because he thinks Farfetch’d is too weak to battle [4]. However, an encounter with Team Ash teaches him otherwise as Ash’s bulbasaur battles and loses to Farfetch’d in the quest to get their pokémon back. This allows Keith to return the stolen pokémon and abandon his life of crime. In the Pokéverse, battles are not wrong or abusive when they are conducted nobly and in a sportsmanlike way. Care must also be taken to make sure the fighters don’t get too injured and receive medical attention immediately after.

Moral Failures of Pokémon Trainers

Through Ash, Brock, and Misty’s journey, we meet many side characters like Keith whose relationships with their pokémon fail to uphold the show’s moral standards. While pokémon battles are not inherently wrong, they can become wrong if done in a venal spirit of real argument. “Showdown at Dark City!” (episode 42) features ongoing street fights between two rival pokémon gyms, each of which wants to become Dark City’s official gym. Ash tells them that “pokémon are not just tools for fighting or a way of making money,” and he laments what might happen if either gym became official: “they think pokémon battling’s like plain old fighting.”

Relationships with pokémon can also go awry when there’s too much focus on competition, and not enough on individual pokémon needs. In “Electric Shock Showdown” (episode 14), we meet a pokémon gym leader (Lt. Surge) who evolved his pikachu into a raichu before it was ready, to make it stronger. Every pokémon who battles the ferocious raichu winds up horrifyingly injured, and the local human nurse despairs of Lt. Surge’s battling habits. However, Raichu’s forced evolution ultimately makes it possible for Ash’s pikachu to win. Even though it’s supposedly weaker, Ash is in tune with his pikachu, and it has learned its moves well. By comparison, the prematurely-evolved raichu has a more limited battle repertoire.

We see other trainers who are obsessed with evolution and its perceived strengths at all costs, but Our Heroes always learn to prioritze their pokémon’s preferences. Episode 40, “The Battling Eevee Brothers,” tells the story of four brothers, each with an eevee. The older three have evolved their eevees into their respective water, fire, and electric forms. However, the youngest cherishes his eevee as is. He even feigns abandoning his eevee to protect it from the pressure of his evolution-crazed brothers. However, with the support of Ash, Misty, and Brock, he resolves to challenge his brothers, let Eevee evolve at its own pace, and stay Eevee for now.

Meanwhile, some exploitative relationships with pokémon center around profit, rather than affection and shared goals. In addition to the case of the Farfetch’d described above, Team Rocket’s entire shtick is trying to steal pokémon for their own benefit. They resolve to steal Ash’s pikachu once they perceive that it’s unusually intelligent and agentive: they think they can use it.

However, Our Heroes also routinely fail to live up to their own standards. Ash and Brock have their bad moments, but I have to admit: I really hate Misty. Misty is cruel, and entirely without self-reflection about it. She routinely insults and sidelines her own or her companions’ pokémon when they get in the way of her goals (“No one cares about your stupid charmeleon, Ash!”). This is nowhere more evident than in her callous treatment of a Psyduck who comes into her possession. In various episodes she insults it, berates it, hands it over to breeders who promise to improve it, and encourages other pokémon to beat it into a severe headache in order to trigger its powerful psychic abilities in battle.

This is one of our protagonists?

Team Rocket in Pokémon: Indigo League. From left to right: Ekans, Jessie, Meowth, James, and Koffing.

The Trouble with Meowth

Jessie and James, our main antagonists, are not good people. As noted above, they constantly try to steal pokémon for glory and lucre. They’re mean to each other and everyone else, they’re cheerfully deceptive, and they don’t appear to care about any side effects of their evil quests. They’re also terrible planners, so their plots always fail.

However, Jessie and James also live out an ethic of human/pokémon relations that is not only arguably good, but far more radical than anything we see from Ash and company. Jessie and James travel with three pokémon: an ekans, a koffing, and a meowth.

Ekans and Koffing only come out of their pokéballs occasionally, when it’s time for a battle. But Jessie and James treat them kindly and seem to have great affection for them: their tears over asking Ekans and Koffing to evolve actually trigger their evolutions into Arbok and Weezing.

But Meowth? Talks.

Meowth talks in perfectly ordinary human language. How? He taught himself to impress a girl meowth, as shown in episode 70, “Go West Young Meowth.” (It didn’t work.)

Almost everyone who meets him talks back to Meowth as if he were human. He can serve as his own trainer and send himself into battle if he so chooses, such as his fight against Ash and Misty for custody of a newly-hatched togepi in episode 50. In every episode, Meowth is a full member of the team. He helps make and execute all of Team Rocket’s plans.

He has no pokéball. People don’t live in pokéballs, and Meowth is a person.

Jessie and James don’t always treat him very well, but they don’t treat each other very well either. Or, as James says in episode 71, “We may be mean and nasty, but we never turn our backs on a teammate in trouble.” Jessie and James are the only characters that act like pokémon really are sensitive and thoughtful creatures. But maybe it’s easy for them, as teammates of one of the Pokéverse’s few (but not only!) talking pokémon.

So: is language the only thing standing between treating pokémon like people and incorporating them as full participants in society?

It kind of seems like it.

In so much speculative fiction, successful communication with nonhuman entities is a breakthrough moment. It changes antagonists into allies and reshapes the unknown into familiar terrain. I can think of multiple episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation offhand where the entire plot is, “is this alive? Is it sentient? Can we communicate with it?” While this says a lot about how often I’ve watched that show too, it also says a lot about how common a trope this is.

But let’s look at one example: in “Home Soil,” Our Heroes discover a planet occupied by silicon-based lifeforms—a sand-based collective consciousness. Previous scientific teams did not recognize them as alive or sentient because their biological makeup was so unfamiliar, and so was their communication through light and color. A crew of scientists are terraforming the planet, but this would destroy the native life, so the Enterprise must stop them. By the end of the episode, Our Crew has figured out how to auto-translate their speech into human language, leading to the episode’s best joke: the sand consciousness calls humans “ugly bags of mostly water.”

After all, we humans could be unrecognizable and repulsive from someone else’s perspective.

There are two implicit moral points here. One is that the ability to communicate in intelligible, translatable language is a reliable marker of intelligence. Consider the word “intelligible” itself.

Its corollary is that beings who cannot communicate in a way we understand have suspect consciousness or intelligence at best.

We see this play out over and over again in the real world as well as our stories. Public figures embarrass themselves by insisting that large language models are conscious. This is precisely because the thing that LLMs are built to do is string words together in highly probable combinations. LLM creators are happy to perpetuate this illusion, along with its concomitant claims of LLM intelligence and agency, although some researchers are pushing back.

Meanwhile, animal rights basically don’t exist (Prall 2025), despite large bodies of research into non-human communication systems and cultures (Suzuki 2024, Whiten 2019). We frequently understand disabled speakers as “less-than-human” because of their  non-normative language. Consider signers, whose language is non-vocal, or autistic speakers who use communicative aids (see especially Henner and Robinson 2023 on “Crip Linguistics”). And by treating bilingual or bidialected children as “deprived” of “proper language,” with a “language gap,” we dehumanize them as well (Figueroa 2024).

Consider that “dumb” literally means “unable to speak,” as in the phrase “dumb animal.”

Cripping Poké-Linguistics?

Our talking meowth is not more “intelligent” than any other pokémon. All pokémon understand human language. Humans talk to their pokémon and receive responses that indicate they have been fully understood. Pokémon communicate with humans by repeating their names, or by using gestures, other iconic body language, indexical signs like pointing, and more. Between each other, pokémon are capable of elaborate conversation, planning, and moral reasoning.

Thus, in episode 17, the Team Ash and Team Rocket pokémon are all stranded together, away from their trainers. In this episode, we hear the pokémon communicating with each other by speaking their names, but this is subtitled as a lucid, normal conversation. They debate whether they have been abandoned by their trainers, and what they might do to find them again. They also discuss their relationships to their trainers, how much their trainers care about them, and how trainers can force “good” pokémon into “evil” acts. Meowth participates in this conversation, understanding all of it and replying in human language. The pokémon then respond to him, clearly full of sophisticated understanding and very different opinions.

In other episodes, it’s clear that trainers regard their pokémon as capable of understanding speech and reason, such when a ponyta trainer begs her pokémon to let Ash ride it in a competition (episode 33, “The Flame Pokémon-athon”). The ponyta understands her request and can signal its understanding. If nothing else, this is true because ponytas are basically ponies on fire, and they burn anyone who tries to ride them without their consent.

Likewise, in episode 60, “Beach Blank-Out Blastoise,” Ash and team confront the problem of a sleeping blastoise (giant turtle with water cannons) who won’t wake up. When the local pokémon don’t trust the humans, Ash’s squirtle explains things pokémon-style, with body language and his name. Looking on, Ash says, “I wish I knew what they were talking about.” He understands these pokémon to be communicating complex social and practical information—he even understands them to be languaging. It’s just that he can’t understand.

So why is Meowth the only pokémon routinely treated like a person, when all of them should be? I would argue it’s because his capacity for recognizable human language and human-style interaction is constant and undeniable. Is Squirtle talking? From Ash’s point of view? Maybe. As viewers, we know more than any of the human characters about pokémon subjectivity, because we sometimes get subtitles.

But Meowth always talks, just like a human, with no ambiguity. While other pokémon live as gladiators, pets, or utilities, Meowth gets to chart his own destiny (evil though it may be).

A Ponyta (Standard Pokédex Art)

In the 2020s, the Pokéverse is clearly moving towards a world more focused on the agency and inner lives of pokémon [5]. Pokémon Concierge is a gorgeous stop-motion series about a burned-out Japanese career woman who runs away to work at a resort dedicated to making pokémon happy. Pokémon Pokopia, the latest video game, has no humans in it. Instead, it’s about pokémon themselves rebuilding their world in the wake of an ecological disaster. In the process, they talk to each other and forge relationships with each other, entirely without human intervention.

What can we do in the real world to bring justice and empathy to all the people who are not currently recognized or treated as such? I imagine it starts by attending to everyone whose communication we do not automatically recognize, understanding that they’re speaking, and taking what they tell us seriously. This newly published crip linguistics reader (Robinson, Moriarty, and Henner 2025) seems like a great place to start.

Notes

[1] In this essay, capitalized Pokémon refers to the media property, while lowercase pokémon refers to the actual creatures. Likewise, it seems intuitively right to use “a meowth” for a member of a pokémon species, but “Meowth” where the species is used as a name.

[2] This analysis only addresses the English-language anime dub. In addition to the fact that Netflix has a limited range of languages, the English dub is also the canonical version for many fans, as well as the basis of other translations. I use Pokéverse to designate the entire Pokémonmedia world of shared characters, continuity, and lore, while acknowledging that this isn’t always congruent between games, television, movies, and other media.

[3] The number of times I’ve sat on the couch with my child bemoaning that we’re basically watching a show about dog fighting? Uncountable.

[4] In Indigo League and other early episodes, all pokémon are referred to as “it,” except for Meowth and his love interest. Both the narrator and characters follow this pattern; I follow the usage of the show. This only highlights the extent to which Meowth is a full and uncontested person. Interestingly, in the English version of the game Pokopia, all pokémon refer to themselves and others with they/them pronouns.

[5] Many thanks to Lauren Ackerman and Jacq Jones for teaching me so much about Pokémon lore on Bluesky and Discord and telling me to go watch Pokémon Concierge. They were completely correct. The plush, stop-motion pokémon look impossibly huggable and personable.

Works Cited

Figueroa, Megan. 2024. “Decolonizing (Psycho)Linguistics Means Dropping the Language Gap Rhetoric.” In Decolonizing Linguistics, edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197755259.003.0009.

Henner, Jon, and Octavian Robinson. 2023. “Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto.” Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability 1 (1): 7–37. https://doi.org/rg/10.48516/jcscd_2023vol1i.

Prall, Ethan. 2025. “Animal Rights Before Legal Personhood.” Cornell Law Review 110: 75–134.

Robinson, Octavian, Erin Moriarty, and Jon Henner, eds. 2025. The Crip Linguistics Reader. Gallaudet University Press.

Suzuki, Toshitaka N. 2024. “Animal Linguistics.” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 55 (1): 205–26. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-102622-030253.

Whiten, Andrew. 2019. “Cultural Evolution in Animals.” Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 50 (1): 27–48. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-110218-025040.