CaMP Anthropology

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/kurt-vonnegut-in-the-ussr-9798765132227/

Yana Skorobogatov: In this book, you follow Kurt Vonnegut’s literary career and resonance both in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet space. In your earlier books (Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine and Women’s Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation) you focus on disability, gender, and society in post-socialist Ukraine in particular. How do you connect Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR and your previous books? What inspired you to pursue this particular project?

Sarah D. Phillips: This was originally a tiny side project that originated in an interdisciplinary public humanities initiative at Indiana University (IU) in 2017, one that brought together scholars from across the College of Arts and Sciences to collectively read and Vonnegut’s first five novels and reflect on them from our own disciplinary perspectives. It was during that project that I ran across Donald Fiene’s 1977 New York Times article, “Vonnegut—Big in Russia,” which described Vonnegut’s popularity in the Soviet Union, the work of his legendary Russian translator Rita Rait-Kovaleva, and the 1975-76 staging of a play based on Slaughterhouse-Five at the Soviet Army Theater in Moscow. And I learned about your (Yana Skorobogatov’s) luminous master’s thesis on “Kurt Vonnegut in the U.S.S.R.” (2012), which was a major inspiration for this project. It so happened that I stumbled on both those items, online, while I was on a train from Odesa to Kyiv, Ukraine, in summer 2017. (Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian InterCity trains had terrific Wi-Fi! I hope they still do.) When I got to Kyiv, I learned that my best friend’s daughter and all her friends, high school students, were reading the new Ukrainian translation of Slaughterhouse-Five. That was too much to be a coincidence—Soviet teenagers read Vonnegut in the 1970s, and Ukrainian teenagers read him in 2017? I had to learn more!

On the surface, there’s not much to connect my obsession with Vonnegut’s Soviet chapter and my previous research in contemporary Ukraine on women’s social activism and the disability rights movement. But one anthropological question that has always intrigued me is how people form communities, especially in times of social upheaval. I’m curious about how people work individually and collectively to fight against—or at least poke holes in—institutions and systems that erode their best interests. And that’s a question that is fundamental in all my work—in the face of inhumane, repressive conditions, how do people remain human? How do they create habitable worlds for themselves and others? The same questions motivate Vonnegut’s prose, making this project a good—if unlikely—fit for my interests.

Looking back, I was so unprepared to undertake this project on a topic so far from my original expertise! If I could have predicted from the very beginning how the little side project on Kurt Vonnegut would grow, what twists and turns it would take, and what new (to me) scholarly conversations I’d have to gain some fluency in, I might never have taken it on. So, thank goodness I didn’t have better foresight! Marinating myself in the life story and creative career of the renowned literary translator Rita Rait-Kovaleva also gave me the translation bug. Her Russian translations of not just Vonnegut but also Salinger, Faulkner, Twain, and many others became canonical in the former Soviet Union, and I was fascinated by her artistic, or free/realistic approach to literary translation. It inspired me to try translation myself, from Ukrainian to English. I’m starting with a non-fiction project—a book about Soviet food ideology (The Taste of the Soviet, by historian and novelist Olena Stiazhkina), and if that goes well, I hope to try my hand at literary translation of Ukrainian fiction.

Yana Skorobogatov: Early in your book, you describe how Kurt Vonnegut, in 1972, was very surprised to learn about the popularity that his novel Slaughterhouse-Five had come to enjoy since it was first translated into Russian in 1970. Were you as surprised to discover Vonnegut’s mass appeal in the Soviet Union? How did this realization alter your understanding of Soviet culture, international exchange, and society?

Sarah D. Phillips: Vonnegut once wrote, “Looking back on my life now, I am particularly astonished and pleased by all the friends my books made for me in what used to be the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Why this happened I can barely guess. Good and bad things happen accidentally.” I think I was probably even more surprised than Vonnegut was to learn about his massive popularity among Soviet readers! At every turn I was learning about the rips in the Iron Curtain that allowed a healthy cross-trickle of information, literature, and people during the Soviet long 1970s. Tracking Vonnegut’s popularity helped me demystify the period under Brezhnev conventionally known as Stagnation. Conventional wisdom is that the 1970s in the USSR was a time of what you (Yana Skorobogatov) have called S-words: stultifying, sluggish, and stagnant. So much about the story of Vonnegut’s popularity there upsets this narrative. First, Donald Fiene, an IU PhD student in Slavics carried Vonnegut’s books to Moscow in his suitcase in 1966 and put them in the hands of Rita Rait-Kovaleva, one of the Soviet Union’s best literary translators. And Rait-Kovaleva’s lively, informed correspondence with Fiene, Vonnegut, and other foreign writers, not to mention her immersion in vibrant literary scenes in Moscow and Leningrad. I interviewed people who had been teenage Vonnegut acolytes in the Soviet 1970s, and learned about their vibrant social networks and creative endeavors that revolved around engagements with American, British, and other western literatures, music, fashion, and so on. In short, the old Cold War chestnut about how boring and cut-off life was in the USSR during so-called Stagnation is just that—an old, rotten chestnut.

I was triangulating many different sources—letters and reports I found in personal and institutional archives; interviews with literary figures and others who read Vonnegut in Soviet times; published memoirs, journalistic reports, and literary criticism; and minutes from meetings of the Translators’ and Writers’ Unions of the USSR—and this allowed me to track how the relationship between the Soviet state and the individuals who inhabited it was not always simply one of command and compliance. It was, instead, a mutual negotiation shaped by ideology, personality, personal loyalty, and private interest. This upsets conventional notions of how power operated in the 1970s Soviet Union. Literary scholar Julia Vaingurt wonders whether the ideological machine of the USSR was purposely open to contamination. That’s an intriguing notion and one this project got me thinking about, as I studied the ingenious ways that creative people in the Soviet Union circumvented restrictions on transnationalism in the arts.   

Yana Skorobogatov: Your book is the embodiment of interdisciplinarity, seamlessly bridging the disciplines of anthropology, history, and literature. What new intellectual skillsets did you find yourself acquiring as you researched and wrote this book, and which parts of your anthropologist toolkit did you find yourself turning to, as well?

Sarah D. Phillips: I had never worked seriously in archives, and this project helped unleash my inner detective. I just loved exploring the archives for different clues about Vonnegut’s Soviet chapter. I was able to visit six different archives in three countries (the U.S., Russia, and Germany), and I ordered materials from five additional archives, including the KGB Archive in Kyiv, Ukraine. Although I enjoyed archival research immensely, I was not prepared for the organizational discipline and prowess it requires. You must carefully document where you found every document. And you must organize it all so you can a) find it later; and b) guide others to it. Sometimes I failed at that completely, and it cost me a lot of time and worry. Next time, I’ll be more careful!

Maybe I shouldn’t admit it, but I especially loved reading people’s letters in the archives. The key characters of this story were all writers—Vonnegut, Donald Fiene, Rita Rait-Kovaleva—and they wrote terrific letters. I also lived for the take-your-breath-away moments of unexpected archival discoveries. Like when I stumbled upon the amazing illustrations of key scenes from Vonnegut’s books that two Ukrainian teenagers completed in the mid-1970s. The drawings, which eventually ended up in Indiana University’s Lilly Library, are currently on display at IU’s Process Gallery in the Cook Center (part of the 2026 Granfalloon, until July 4), and at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis (special exhibition, “Vonnegut in the USSR,” until September 30).

I used my anthropological training to contextualize Vonnegut’s reception by Soviet readers, to see how Vonnegut’s fiction found a home in family histories, romantic relationships, college routines and pastimes, and travels and expeditions across the Soviet Union. I conducted interviews (in person, virtually, and via email and SMS) to explore the deeper meanings that some of Vonnegut’s Soviet readers in the 1970s attached to his messages. The advantage of this approach is that, along with learning what Vonnegut meant to some of these readers, we also learn about their lives as late Soviet subjects.

I also used anthropology to innovate how we study the history of reading. Histories of reading usually either chart secularized, emotional, and private readings, or they track the transformation of reading as communal experience into a private, deeply individual practice. As an anthropologist, I tell a story about communities of readers, about reading as a social experience that straddles private/individual and social/communal. I situated Soviet readers’ responses to Vonnegut in several different contexts: consumption of literature by other foreign authors in translation; consumption of self-published, banned writing (samizdat); and consumption of science fiction. I also took an anthropology-informed material cultural approach to explore readers’ makeshift book-binding practices—extratextual creative interventions that shed light on the limitations of Soviet publishing.

Yana Skorobogatov: Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR is full of delightful, often hilarious, descriptions of the various ways in which Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, characters, and “Vonnegutisms” were translated into Russian. Can you share your favorite example of one such translation?

Sarah D. Phillips: I love the creative liberty Rita Rait-Kovaleva took with Vonnegut’s “wide open beaver” schtick in Breakfast of Champions. “Wide open beavers” (not a familiar phrase in Russian) became “unbuttoned minks” (norki—naraspashku). The word for mink in Russian—norka—contains a double-entendre. It is also the diminutive form of nora, or burrow/hole. And minks are more culturally familiar for Russian speakers than beavers. Rait’s unbuttoned mink caves successfully related a sexual innuendo replicating Vonnegut’s intention in spirit, if not exactly in form. And Rait got him to draw a mink to substitute the beaver illustration in the Russian translation of Breakfast. I detail more examples in the book, but the unbuttoned mink is my very favorite!

Acknowledgements:

I am grateful to colleagues who provided feedback on the book at the 2026 AATSEEL book forum in February 2026: Eliot Borenstein, Eleonora Gilburd, Georgii Korotkov, Yana Skorobogatov, Julia Vaingurt, and Frederick White. I have relied on some of their generous insights here.

Cited References:

Skorobogatov, Yana. “Kurt Vonnegut in the U.S.S.R.” MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2012. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/dddb9250-e9b9-4786-bc83-9516b5661c1a.

Vonnegut, Kurt, to Nataliya Shulga, November 22, 1995. Personal Archives of Nataliya Shulga, used with permission.

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MasquelierIn

When we first decided to edit a book, following the success of the workshop on “Waiting” held at Tulane University in 2018, we had in mind a collection of essays that would explore the work that waiting does. We were both interested in questions of temporality and futurity, and of the shape/ing of time. In our respective ethnographic work (Durham in Botswana, Masquelier in Niger), we had previously written about how, even when people are ostensibly stuck (that is, trapped in immobility), they engage in various forms of planning, experimentation, and repair that keep life projects alive, while also keeping open the possibility of some future, distant as it may be. What is more, that future itself was rarely a fixed point or event, but filled with uncertainty, shifty, liable to redefinition and reinvention—what we came to call “the possible,” even as it was anticipated as a point from which one would look back at the meantime. And the spaces designed for the wait cannot be reduced to containers of static being-in-the-world. By attending to the forms that sociality, exchange, anticipation, and improvisation take in these spaces, we each had become aware that the experience of waiting needed to be taken up as a problem.

We also felt that, despite being central to the experience of modernity, as social theorists, like Henri Lefebvre, had observed, waiting had been ignored by anthropologists, or seen as unwanted gaps in productive time, indeed a suspension of temporality altogether. Even though waiting had become a sign of our times—in 2018, there were entire nations, like Syria or Scotland, or, indeed, Western Sahara, about which Mark Drury writes in his contributing chapter, waiting for an elusive future—it was not perceived as a legitimate object of analysis. Anthropologists typically fastened on the measured and structured dimensions of time, evaluating duration within measured structures. Waiting was treated as an interruption between events anticipated in a structure of events—an interval during which nothing, at least nothing worth paying attention to, happened. We were interested in exploring how waiting is also and, importantly, part of “duration,” the experiential aspect that involves a range of emotive orientations and a sense of being-in-the-world.

We had noticed that while anthropologists were actively engaged in theorizing certain temporal experiences—unemployment, the suspended future of asylum seekers, the inability to leave a natal home or afford a marriage, or the poor’s wait for social services—that spoke to some of the critical issues of our time, they rarely treated the temporalities of these experiences as anything but a frustrated and passive state of suspension. Save for some notable exceptions, waiting was treated as dead time to be endured. We wanted to highlight how, far from being synonymous with inertia, waiting was also about temporal tactics, affective strategies, and social investments and hopeful calculations. From this perspective, temporal suspension was as much our anthropological object as our medium—something to work on and with.

One could say that In the Meantime—both the book’s production and its organizational structure—reflects the contingent nature of human projects, including editorial ventures. When in 2017, we applied for funding from a US-based organization to hold a workshop on “waiting,” we were told that the exhaustiveness of the concept, its capacity to include not only a plurality of experiential phenomena but also diverse affective states ranging from hope to doubt and dread to boredom and much more, made it impossible to pin down as an object of analysis. Put bluntly, waiting was not an adequate topic of anthropological investigation in the way that more clearly defined problems, such as migration, precarity, labor, or even futurity, were. Anthropologists aim to reveal the cultural basis of what may, at first blush, seem like a natural practice or inclination. The ubiquity of waiting, and its incorporation of too diverse other topics of anthropological interest, from affect to temporality to productivity, made it too ordinary—or perhaps too diverse—a human experience to attract significant anthropological interest.

Ever more determined to explore what an anthropology of waiting might look like at this juncture, we obtained funding elsewhere and sent out invitations to scholars we thought might be interested in joining our conversation on the temporality and texture of anticipation, planning, postponing, and passing time. During the one-day workshop, speakers and discussants infused the discussion with passion and insight. The quality of the contributions, written and oral, and the questions and ideas they raised among us, encouraged us to move forward with our plan to expand and officialize our critical exploration of waiting as not simply a gap but a critical path to the unfolding of possible futures.

As often happens when a workshop becomes the inspiration for an edited collection, not all the original participants ended up contributing a chapter. While some workshop participants dropped out, new contributors joined the book project along the way. As the book started to take shape, we temporalized it by marking some chapters as interludes—shorter and experience-dense discussions—that invited the reader to pause the heavier analyses of academic writing and immerse themselves in these moments and explore their possibilities. These interludes, shaped not only by the moments they describe but by the contingencies of waiting as the book came together, ultimately instantiate the temporalities and timelines of the collaborative effort involved in the production of edited collections. By then, the editorial project had coalesced around the concept of “the meantime” through a critical examination of waiting as a kind of emptiful duration whose open-endedness gestured to what we called “the possible.” Embracing the possible in our analyses was a way of understanding the gap, not as a period of suspension in a structure of anticipation to be endured, but instead as a complex and capacious temporal space in which the future was managed, the present was lived in one way or another, and the past also played a meaningful part.

Our exploration was motivated by the recognition that, as a mode of engagement in and with time,waiting for (something) is necessarily entangled with other temporalities and other projects and thus contributes to the occasionally puzzling complexity of “the meantime.” Of course, the multiple engagements, diverse schedules, and changes in circumstances of individual contributors provided a gap between the original workshop and the publication—one that, we all agree, allowed those other engagements to overlap, sometimes redirect, and always enrich the eventual publication. This is the waiting of scholarship. We never dreamt that by the time we had secured most of the contributions and were about to write the introduction, an event of seismic proportions would give renewed purpose to our scholarly project by forcing most of humanity to live a suspended and often literally liminal (from the Latin for “threshold”) life and learn to manage new forms of waiting, futuring, inhabiting time, and making time. We are talking of the pandemic, of course. COVID-19 made us bluntly aware of the meantime by upending routines, blurring the boundaries between work and home, and realigning our temporal as well as spatial horizons. Though boredom, frustration, restlessness, as well as fear, and for some of us, grief, became part of our daily experience, the meantime we seemed to be stuck in also turned out to be a space of potential—one in which we struggled with new technologies, and with not only separation but also intensified relationships. This was also a space where some activities slowed down and others sped up.  The process of moving the book into its final stages certainly involved both these temporal experiences, helping us appreciate how the editorial project itself inhabited “the meantime” it sought to describe.

We could say that in some ways, we felt vindicated. COVID-19 was not, of course, just a meantime to be suffered or a period of waiting for its outcomes or its passing. Instead, it was a space of experimentation in which calculation coexisted with uncertainty, imminence with deferral or delay, and where the now was brought into conversation with the past and the possible. Put differently, the very issue we had identified as an interesting problem—and that had been largely ignored by anthropologists—acquired almost overnight a relevance (and resonance) we could not have anticipated. From scholars to editorialists, in the New York Times and in academic blogs, everyone, it seemed, was writing about waiting and the shape of time. As Bruce O’Neill, one of the manuscript’s reviewers, put it in his endorsement, “The book’s timing and its framing could not be better.”

In the end, the gap between conference and publication, with shifting long-term calendars and daily schedules that combined multiplying domestic demands with periods of boredom, allowed us (the contributors) not only to experience but also to benefit from the meantime. We found ourselves, with upended calendars, re-engaging with older writing, pressing the volume into new shape and analytical space. Rethinking and revising the book was more resonant than anticipated. Although in the process a number of questions arose—notably, for one of us, about whether anyone would even want to read and think critically about waiting after having done so much waiting themselves—the project also provided a sense of purpose in the midst of widespread uncertainty. And the meantime of the book’s topic, and the book itself, continues: time has not shifted back or indeed forward into a neatly scribed calendar, and the ethnography and ideas we worked through in the book haven’t settled into a secure now. We hope that the book reaches out to a larger social space, with insights into how we—and people everywhere—live a present that interrupts a past and, while waiting for it, reworks possible futures.

https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781800412835

Khoi Nguyen: As you state in your introduction, your starting point was the relations between employed staff and volunteers in refugee support, and it was observations in the field that drew your attention to what I see now as a more central component of your book, the languaged subject and specifically the languaged worker. We’re talking about how people are evaluated and evaluate themselves according to their linguistic repertoires, conceptualised as linguistic resources at work. I think the concept of the languaged subject has wide reaching implications in contemporary Europe and beyond. How would you explain the significance of being languaged in Austria and in Europe, or more generally today? And what other areas do you see where this form of subjectivation is particularly consequential?

Jonas Hassemer: Takes on language have assumed an immensely prominent role in discourses around migration in Austria and across Europe, it’s heavily politicised. I am thinking about aggressive language testing regimes and restrictive language policies but also discourses on the value of linguistic diversity. We see it in discussions around what is viewed as integration, mainly, and Austria has adopted very early, very rigorous political measures for migrants coming to Austria regarding language that connect questions of language learning to social benefits and legal rights. In my book I wanted to look at people who work with languages in various ways, not all of them for money (as counsellors, interpreters, volunteers) in a field that is decidedly critical of the restrictive political climate.

Khoi Nguyen: Because you focus on counsellors rather than the people that seek services, I think it’s striking that being languaged is also a way in which people achieve agency in the institutions, right?

Jonas Hassemer: One achieves agency within a certain frame. Processes that institute difference between people also materialise such frames. There is no agency if there’s no material from which it can be formed – the constraints are constitutive for agency, but structure is also something that needs to be produced and reproduced. In the book, I’m trying to understand how people navigate the constraints they find themselves in. And they manage to achieve quite something – they fight unjust evictions, fraud on the housing market, mediate in conflicts, organise furniture – but they are always implicated in differences and inequalities, which we see in the languaging, but also in responsibilising logics that gain traction in some decision-making processes. I think of agency as always contaminated. A prime example of this were those counsellors on the team who could speak Arabic (Chapter 6): highly esteemed by the team but also confronted with multiple and sometimes conflicting expectations by colleagues and clients. These expectations are tied to language, but also to gendered and racialised positions. And in the book, we encounter individuals who make this work very well for themselves and others less so.

Khoi Nguyen: I think the racialised component is visible in your book, where a lot of interactions have nothing, primarily, to do with passports or alike, but with the body from both sides, how people come to embody things, but also how they are being perceived. Speaking of embodied experience, I want to single out something on the verge between methodology and theoretical insight. You and Mi-Cha Flubacher have also written about this outside of the book. Could you talk a bit more about what precarious ethnography means and what maybe distinguishes it from more general ideas of researcher positionality and reflexivity?

Jonas: With precarious ethnography, we wanted to talk about positionality and reflexivity in a way that embraces discomforting experiences in fieldwork as sources of knowledge. I suppose discomfort is a very common experience for ethnographers and for researchers in general, but it’s not something encountered very often as part of the analytical framework. What Mi-Cha and I found interesting was that we experienced our positionalities during fieldwork as something that needed to be managed in certain situations, and we wanted to look at this as something systematic. It’s not random that I have, for instance, to think about coming out or not in the specific context I am doing research in, but also about the way I think about myself as a speaker of German in that context. With this idea of precarious ethnography, we wanted to look not only at questions of positionality as something that gives a certain perspective on the research object (and definitely not in the sense of bias or privileged access). The idea of being transparent of one’s perspective is of course important part of researcher reflexivity. But we also like to think that this perspective, which for instance I can assume vis-à-vis a specific research object does not only depend on me: Where do I fit in within that specific context that I’m doing research in? Trying to locate the position or the different positions that I’m able to take within that space would reveal something about that space. So it’s about how our positionality is articulated in co-dependence with other participants in the field and then connect this to more systemic differences and inequalities in motility, in access to resources, in wiggle room that subjects have within that space.

Khoi Nguyen: We will return to precariousness/precarity because it’s a bigger part of your general argument, but first, I’d like to ask you about Chapter 4, on the Emergency List. There is a significant exploration of morality, particularly in an institutional context of power and existential stakes. For context, it is about which clients receive again limited resources, namely emergency apartments. The people making these decisions, obviously – this is an NGO – they’re not being cruel. They’re trying to morally navigate this situation. I would be curious about what thoughts you have on reflexivity, not just in terms of research ethics, but as an ethical practice more in general.

Jonas Hassemer: Maybe I need to go back to why I was interested in reflexivity in the first place. When I started doing research in that organisation, I was fascinated by the very elaborated thoughts people working there had about current politics, about their own work, while at the same time being able to take very difficult decisions which I would personally see as dilemmatic. This was puzzling to me because I had thought about reflexivity as leading to a place where you are very cautious about giving definite answers to problems, because you can always see the downside to things (and I tend to see this as somehow typical of the sociolinguist’s professional habitus). I wanted to figure out how people did not end in aporia when facing moral or political dilemmas, while being reflexively aware of the complexities and power dynamics involved. I’m interested in this also because I think it’s an important part of doing critical sociolinguistics. The knowledge we produce should allow (us or others) some kind of political evaluation of what is going on, to draw conclusions from what we observe and from the kinds of analysis that we’re doing. Hence my interest in reflexivity as an ethical practice, as a sort of meta-reflexivity. I explore this from different angles: In relation to the emergency list, I look at how certain ideas of reflexivity emerge in a specific interactional context, how they develop across various interactions and how the idea of an ethical subjectivity becomes connected to these models of reflexivity in practice. At a later point (Chapter 5), I look at different ways of embodying a reflexive Self, and then into how practices of reflexivity are being institutionalised in the NGO, and how pathways of institutionalisation also lead to differential access to reflexivity as a resource for different actors in the NGO (Chapter 9).

Khoi Nguyen: To explore that further, I want to pick up an aspect from Chapter 5 Being a ‘Good’ Counsellor. You begin that chapter with a field note that describes Sara’s [the manager’s] professionalism in terms of affect. Conceptually you draw on various sources, but I’m thinking about it in terms of Wetherell’s idea of affective practice, as a social practice linked to Sara’s habitus and the practical mastery of her display of emotions and behaviour towards the emotions of others. It reminded me of Wetherell’s discussion of the notion of emotional capital with respect to effective affective practices. Sometimes the institutionally advantageous affective practice is sarcasm and joking, and other times it is restraint, and sometimes it’s a display of empathy. It depends highly on race, gender, and other embodied biographical elements which affective practices are legitimate or effective in any given situation. Do you think there is a way to usefully talk about your observations in terms of capital, affective or otherwise?

Jonas Hassemer: First, I think we need to differentiate: capital for whom? To feel, like some of the counsellors I encountered, an embodied connection with their client based on a shared experience of language or racialisation, was seen as a resource by some, but it could also be the opposite. At least partly, it is a question of whether that kind of embodied affect smoothly blends into institutional order, whether it helps to grease the machinery, so to speak. Then it becomes an emotional capital in the workplace, it’s something that people are valued for in the team, but to what extent they can themselves profit from it, is yet another question. However, if it contradicts the institutional will, it can become a (often well meant) concern for the team and the individual as well. When the institutional order is threatened, embodied affect becomes problematised very quickly. Then, it becomes difficult to reformulate it as a resource, even if the actors themselves understand it that way.

Khoi Nguyen: You pick up affect as a way of understanding how the NGO workers balance the usefulness and the neediness of volunteer interpreters as a sort of moral practice again. I feel like there’s a lot of interplay between empathy and compassion on the one hand and affect and affective management on the other hand. Do you think, besides just affective stance taking to embody morality, there is such a thing as affective ethics, drawn on precarity?

Jonas Hassemer:: Practicing some sort of affective ethics is an important part of all kinds of professional work that is connected to helping and supporting people. It has so many facets: Why do you keep working in an underpaid job with a constant lack of resources? A job which often requires a lot of patience with both people and structures? There’s also the dimension of excessive compassion, unmanageable affect which not only paralyzes you, but it also occludes the possibility to use compassion in a measured and goal-oriented way. A chapter in Miriam Ticktin’s Casualties of Care inspired me a lot where she writes about how compassion is something that health professionals need to be socialised into. I see this with both the counsellors and the interpreters in my NGO context. But there is a huge difference between volunteers and counsellors. Counsellors can extensively draw on institutionalised practices and structures that allow them to process affect, the staff meetings, supervision. Most of them also have had professional training in a relevant field, while with the interpreters the situation is very heterogeneous. They can also take supervision, but the structures at their disposition are much less encompassing.

Khoi Nguyen: I wanted to give you more space to discuss a point that you raise in the discussion, namely how even very socially oriented, empathetically motivated work cannot quite be disentangled from the inequalities in which the work occurs. I want to broaden this out to the context in which the two of us find ourselves, and which may ring true for social researchers in general who might be reading this blog. How do we navigate and resist politics of difference while our subjectivities are inextricably intertwined with the same politics of difference? It’s becoming more relevant, I think, these days.

Jonas Hassemer:: Yes, definitely. It’s a huge question. I think what I did in the book, to start with this perhaps, is that I tried not to assume a bird’s eye perspective, in the sense that I’m going to tell these people what good reflexivity looks like, and where this should lead. I think there is a lot ethnographic research can offer: looking at how differences are constructed, pointing out where inequalities creep into the practices we’re implicated in, and studying ways of living together across differences. Not so much as (lived) utopia, but as a social space which people happen to share and need to work on to create liveable conditions for each other. NGOs can be places where this happens. To me, that’s a promising way of thinking about social critique. If, with Foucault, critique is something that is historically contextualised, it’s not something that comes from a bird’s eye position. It can help to navigate inequalities and try to find ways of at least partially resisting them. And I think that is promising, especially in times where the political landscape looks gloomy.

https://nyupress.org/9781613322796/living-toward-justice/

Fanicy Sears: Can you just briefly describe what the Living Justice Project is and what the book seeks to do?

Sonya E. Pritzker: The Living Justice Project, which took place between 2022 and 2025, is a global collaborative ethnography that included 54 diverse collaborators located across the US as well as in Canada, Germany, Ireland, and England, all of whom had some amount of experience studying or teaching in the emerging field of embodied social justice (ESJ). Also referred to as “politicized somatics,” “embodied activism,” and a range of other monikers, ESJ very broadly is an interdisciplinary field that has emerged at the intersection of social justice or movement studies and embodiment practices such as meditation, yoga, and ecstatic dance, to name just a few. This is a field, importantly, that is rooted in an overlapping network of communities and sometimes ancient lineages of Indigenous relational ontology, Black feminist theory, contemplative spirituality, and somatic psychology.

Over the course of the past 20 years or so, ESJ has begun to take on a more specific and more urgent shape in the work of adrienne maree brown, Rev angel Kyodo williams, Rae Johnson, Prentis Hemphill, Resmaa Menakem, and so many others whose work is recommended in the book. Very broadly speaking, this body of theory and practice demonstrates how efforts to resist and transform injustice in society deepen and expand when stakeholders are also supported by healing practices that center the personal and relational self. None of this is to say that ESJ is meant to be a solution to injustice, nor is there anyone I know in the field who recommends that embodiment and healing practice replace concrete activist endeavors. If anything, ESJ constitutes a site where people from many different types of academic and social backgrounds boldly experiment with incorporating healing and embodiment practices as a complement to—rather than replacement for—the kinds of things we usually associate with activism (policy change, protest, and so on).

The Living Justice Project (LJ) itself was most active in 2022, when we conducted three ethnographic time capsules during which, over the course of 5 days, as many as 20-25 practitioners co-considered the question “What does it look, feel, and sound like to live (toward) justice in your everyday life?” Using an ethnographic app that allowed us to offer a series of specific prompts as well as open-ended entries, LJP collaborators thus offered a range of material, including photographs, video and audio recordings, screen shots, and text responses documenting their experience of working to enact justice in an often unjust world. The book offers readers access to many of these responses and—although it is organized into several theme-based sections—it does so without much academic analysis or interpretation. In this sense, this is meant to be a public-facing book that differs considerably from a traditional academic monograph or the several journal articles we’ve also produced.

Fanicy Sears: What drew you to start the Living Justice Project, and how did your own experiences shape the questions you were asking about justice, culture, and what it means to live in it, every day?

Sonya E. Pritzker: The Living Justice Project really emerged organically over a period of about two years (2020-2022). During this time, I was grateful to have the resources to be able to immerse myself in a variety of ESJ workshops and programs that—in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol—began to gather considerably more global momentum. Several organizations, for example, began to offer workshops and longer term remote trainings. I attended as many of these as possible alongside my research assistant at the time, Baili Gall. This included multiple one-day events as well as the first 5-month ESJ Certificate Program originally offered by the organization Embody Lab and later taken up by Transformative Change. Such courses offered multiple opportunities to learn, practice, and—perhaps most importantly—establish relationships with stakeholders, including both instructors and other attendees.

In an effort to develop community-drive research, we spoke both informally and formally with these folks during breakout groups, via email, and in one-on-one Zoom conversations. What kept surfacing in those conversations—and what I think gave rise to the central research question—was this: how do you carry this work out into everyday life once the workshop or training is over? That question felt both urgent and deeply meaningful to me, and it shaped everything that followed.

As for how my own experiences shaped these questions—the short answer is: of course they did. The intersection between ethnographic research, embodied practice, and social action has been at the heart of my work for a long time and from the moment I read it, I have also been drawn to what Audre Lorde (1977) described as “new ways of making felt” what we already know, rather than the academic imperative to generate new ideas. That framing felt liberating to me: it meant this project didn’t need to be about finding solutions or offering a novel critique. It could be, as the book ultimately became, an archive—a repository of collective memory, of how people were actually living toward justice in their everyday lives in 2022. That aspiration, I think, was genuinely co-created in conversation with my collaborators and I feel lucky that it resonated with so many people.

Fanicy Sears: As you worked with people in this project, what did you notice about how justice is experienced in the body, not just the idea, but as something people feel, carry, or practice in their daily lives?

Sonya E. Pritzker: I’ve been thinking about how justice and injustice are experienced in the body for a long time. In earlier work, though, I—like many scholars—was focused more on the way that in-justice lands in particular bodies: the way it registers in moment-to-moment interactions that index much broader structures of race, gender, class, and power. I’ve written extensively about how these micro-level interactions hold and reproduce systemic injustice, and about the way this shapes people’s embodied capacity for connection.

What this project compelled me to do, however, was to think deeply about what justice itself feels like—not just as the absence of injustice, but as a positive embodied force. This is something the political philosopher Judith Shklar (1990) famously pointed to, and it opened up a whole new direction for me. In an article I published in 2025 in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, for example, I drew on Ramona Fernandez’s concept of the “somatope”—essentially, the body-as-place-time—to analyze how our collaborators were talking about social justice. What I found was that, when you actually center the body in how you define social justice, everything shifts. The dominant frameworks—equality as access and rights, recognition as civic responsibility, progress as a future-oriented goal—all get rescaled. Equality becomes something that is felt and enacted relationally across bodies in space and time. Recognition becomes not just an outward gaze toward injustice but a simultaneous turn inward toward one’s own embodied experience. Progress gets reoriented as something available not only in the distant future but in the relational, embodied present.

What surprised and moved me most, though, was how vividly and specifically our collaborators could describe what justice felt like. One collaborator described it as colorful swirls of energy merging and entwining with no lines separating them. Another described it as a constant dance requiring both fluidity and solidity. A third spoke of social justice as learning to hold your lineage as a gift to the circle you inhabit. These weren’t abstract philosophical claims. They were felt, embodied orientations that had very real implications for how people practiced in their daily lives.

Fanicy Sears: Your work pays close attention to language and meaning-making. How did people talk about justice in their own words, and what did that reveal about how culture shapes the way we understand and live toward justice?

Sonya E. Pritzker: This is where my training as a linguistic anthropologist really comes in. I’m interested in language not as a neutral label for experience but as an embodied, relational practice through which culture itself arises and shifts. In the JLA article I mentioned, I examined how our collaborators used language to situate their bodies in relation to the past, the present, and the possible future—and in relation to dominant cultural frameworks for imagining what social justice even means.

What the analysis revealed, in particular, was the extent to which mainstream or dominant ways of talking about social justice—despite being grounded in deeply moral intentions—are often formulated without much sustained attention to the body. Justice is imagined as a landscape of centers and peripheries, of distances that must be crossed or closed. People are positioned in that landscape based on their social location, and progress is understood as a linear movement from a suffering present toward a just future that always seems to recede on the horizon. There’s nothing wrong with these frameworks—they describe real experiences of inequality—but they also have a way of binding people within a relational map where social locations feel fixed and distances between people feel permanent.

What our collaborators were doing, often quite deliberately, was rescaling and remapping those frameworks in what I call—drawing again on Ramona Fernandez—“somatopic” terms, or in terms that put the body at the center of the story. This didn’t mean ignoring systemic structures. It meant insisting that those structures are also inside us, and that transformation has to happen at that scale too.

I’ve also explored this in a somewhat different register in a forthcoming article in Body & Society, where I describe what happens in the body during pivotal moments of learning in ESJ spaces (Pritzker, Sonya E. In Press). Through micro-phenomenological interviews, I found that such moments consistently follow a three-phase structure: an initial impact, a period of resonance or vibration through the body, and a landing phase in which something new seems to settle in and become integrated. What this shows, I think, is that cultural change doesn’t just happen cognitively or discursively—it happens somatically, in the granular moment-to-moment movements of the body as it encounters something that not only disrupts what one has previously taken for granted but also offers a new framework for experiencing justice in a positive sense (that is, not just as the absence of injustice).

Fanicy Sears: What surprised you most during this process? (I am thinking here of stories people shared, ways they made meaning, or how justice showed up in unexpected ways?)

Sonya E. Pritzker: So much about this project surprised and delighted me that it’s genuinely difficult to choose. I would probably say that the thing that surprised me most—and humbled me most—was the response to our initial recruitment email. Within hours of sending it out, every single time slot we had set aside for initial conversations had been filled. We ended up with a waitlist of nearly seventy-five people. And then—this is the part that still moves me—the people who signed up actually showed up. Sometimes months later, for a two-hour conversation with someone they had never met. That level of commitment and trust from the very beginning told me something important about the moment we were in and the depth of the longing people felt to investigate these questions together.

In terms of what surprised me during the conversations themselves: I think it was the specificity. People didn’t offer platitudes or policy positions when they talked about social justice. The specificity—that willingness to be precise about embodied experience in the context of something as politically charged as social justice—felt like an endlessly surprising gift. In each and every conversation, such moments really underscored how much trust, vulnerability, and willingness to engage in collaborative inquiry can expand and deepen the ethnographic project.

Fanicy Sears: This kind of collaborative, meaning-centered work can be powerful but also challenging. What felt most difficult for you in holding space for people’s experiences, stories, and cultural perspectives?

Sonya E. Pritzker: There were many challenges in this project, and they operated at very different scales. Most were purely logistical: the sheer scale of coordinating simultaneous research with fifty-four collaborators across eighteen U.S. states and five countries, managing three intensive five-day time capsules, working with a research team that included me, Baili, and several other graduate and undergraduate students, and navigating institutional processes—including convincing the IRB to allow collaborators to use their real names rather than pseudonyms if they chose to. All of that demanded an enormous amount of energy and concentration.

But I think the deeper challenge—and also, paradoxically, the greatest opening—was the work of finding and holding my own right role. As a white, queer, cis, able-bodied researcher at a large state university in the Deep South, I came into this project with a lot of practice sitting with the discomfort of the hidden academic expectations that researchers like me should either solve complex social problems, produce scathing critical analysis, or give voice to marginalized people. As I write about in the book, I find all three of those orientations, to varying degrees, to be forms of the very saviorism that embodied social justice is committed to dismantling. Working through that—in community with the incredible teachers and practitioners I was learning from—meant cultivating a different kind of posture: curious, humble, willing to not know, willing to be changed. That was the most meaningful challenge, and it shaped every choice I made in the research.

Fanicy Sears: Looking back, what are your biggest takeaways from this project, and how is it shaping the way you think about your future research, especially around embodiment, culture, and how people create meaning in their lives?

Sonya E. Pritzker: There is genuinely too much to summarize briefly. But some of the things I feel I’ve learned most deeply include: the profound, irreplaceable value of collaborative research—not just as an ethical commitment but as a methodology that produces something qualitatively different and richer than what any individual researcher could generate alone. I’ve also learned a great deal, at a visceral level, about my own right role in contributing meaningfully to the collaborative project of changing culture. Indeed, this project deepened my conviction that–regardless of our background, position, or proximity to power or our particular skills–we all have an important role to play in the work of creating more just futures. That insight is at the heart of the book, and I hope it’s one of the things readers take away from it.

In terms of future directions: I’m very much hoping to carry both the collaborative methods and the micro-phenomenological approach into new contexts. One project I’m actively developing, in collaboration with Dr. Susan Dewey in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama, involves ethnographic work at a women’s correctional institution in South Carolina. We’re examining conflict resolution and trauma-informed care with correctional officers and incarcerated women, using many of the same methods developed in the Living Justice Project. For me, this feels like a natural extension—a way of asking whether and how the work of embodied social justice might take root in spaces and with communities that have often been left out of these conversations entirely.

Cited References

Fernandez, Ramona. 2015. “The Somatope: from Bakhtin’s Chronotope to Haraway’s Cyborg via James Cameron’s Dark Angel and Avatar.” The Journal of Popular Culture 47 (6): 1122-1138. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12201.

Lorde, Audre. 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press.

Pritzker, Sonya E., and with Living Justice Collaborators. 2025. “Just chronotopes: Embodiment, social justice,and “the somatopic imagination”.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1111/jola.70015.

Pritzker, Sonya E. In Press. “Learning, Embodiment, and the Critical (Micro)Phenomenology of Embodied Social Justice.” Body & Society.

Shklar, Judith N. 1990. The Faces of Injustice. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501778810/politics-of-tranquility/#bookTabs=1

Isla: First, I would like to thank you for conducting this challenging fieldwork, writing stories of these nuns, and presenting us with an alternative way of living and expressing themselves as Tibetans beyond the binary assumption centered on rebellion and victimhood. This ethnography is an invaluable piece of documenting and reflecting on the everyday lives of Buddhist nuns in Tibet, whose access is constrained. Would you mind sharing how you started this research project? As a layperson, how does your Buddhist practice resonate with the research, vice versa?

Yasmin Cho: Thank you so much for inviting me to talk about my book. I first visited Yachen Gar in the summer following the first year of my PhD program in the United States. Though I had been fascinated by Tibet for years and was eager to explore the plateau, I hadn’t decided on a fieldwork site yet. Having heard Yachen mentioned almost in passing, I decided to visit to check it out. It soon became clear, because of the difficulty in getting there, that Yachen is not a place one simply checks out. The journey began in Chengdu and required bus transfers in Kangding and Ganzi; each leg of the journey took ten to twelve hours over roads plagued by recurrent construction and grueling traffic. From Ganzi, the final segment involved a dilapidated shuttle bus that ran once a day. This was the most treacherous stretch—a series of muddy, meandering mountain tracks navigated by a severely overloaded vehicle. A Tibetan friend from Ganzi once described the path to her hometown as “hell,” and I found myself in grim agreement. Perhaps it was this initial struggle that subconsciously steered my research toward the material engagements of religious practice. The physical toll and raw sensory experience of being in Yachen became a recurring theme during my time in the field. Upon arriving there, I expected the curated calm of a traditional monastery, but instead, I encountered a sprawling, chaotic shanty town; shabby, self-built huts stood dangerously back-to-back, forming a disorganized and unruly maze. While the presence of monastics, Buddhist statues, and prayer wheels confirmed its identity as a religious community, Yachen felt less like a formal Buddhist institution and more like an overcrowded village of 12,000 inhabitants, including over 10,000 Tibetan nuns.

You ask how my Buddhist practice resonates with my research—a question I hadn’t previously considered. While I deeply respect Buddhism, I can’t claim to be a serious practitioner. Perhaps my lack of immersion in Buddhist practice is precisely what led me to focus on the physical arrangements and sensory realities of this monastic community. Had I been a serious practitioner, I might have prioritized the extraordinary spirituality of the teachers, much like the other pilgrims at Yachen. Instead, my distance allowed me to remain grounded stubbornly in the material lives of the nuns within a supposedly hyper-spiritual environment. Of course, through years of close observation, I found myself pondering the fundamental nature of religious faith. After all, what drove the nuns to endure such harsh conditions was a genuine aspiration toward enlightenment. Ultimately, my prolonged ethnographic immersion ensured that while I stayed focused on the material, I never lost sight of the immaterial dimensions of their religiosity.

Isla: “The politics of tranquility” is your observation of Buddhist nuns in Yachen, including both Tibetans and Han people. It is an alternative or othering practice in everyday life, which is not fully assimilated into the state governance and the confrontational refusal. What is the moment you realized this key theoretical concept? How do you capture this lack of formality without imposing existing theoretical frameworks, such as anarchism?

Yasmin Cho: From a secular perspective, Yachen stood out as a thriving religious community established by an ethnic minority. More specifically, given the prolonged controls and restrictions by the Chinese state on Tibet since the 1950s, Yachen was a surprising political success, however temporarily, accomplished by Tibetans (more precisely, I argue, the Tibetan nuns). But I wanted to know: How did this occur? It seemed to me that the crucial difference in Yachen, which made it different from any previous attempts to create a viable religious community in Tibet, was the quiet and tenacious daily making-do of the Tibetan nuns. Young Tibetan women kept coming to Yachen, huts kept being built by them, and Yachen kept growing despite increasing restrictions from all sides. In Yachen, there were no loud or violent protests, no grand demands or visible forms of resistance; instead, there was ceaseless and quiet doing: building, repairing, decorating, traveling, and making by the nuns. While discourses regarding Yachen’s unusual success are often devoted to the roles of charismatic male teachers and wealthy Chinese disciples, the physical labor performed by the nuns has not been counted at all in what is viewed as glorious success. Despite the size of the population of nuns, their existence—let alone their contributions—remains largely invisible in these accounts. Understanding what the nuns were making, or the way they were producing Yachen itself, requires a different framework, since existing frameworks, such as everyday resistance, fail to account for these physical and mundane components. I use the politics of tranquility to capture what these women succeeded in achieving on a daily basis.

To state it more clearly, I define the politics of tranquility as an alternative form of political agency exercised by the nuns. This politics is quiet, material, and—crucially—indifferent to how the state tries to label it. It emerges when marginalized groups face power on an such overwhelming scale that this power tries to redefine who they are and who they cannot be. The politics of tranquility in this regard is the exercise of sovereignty over oneself, which is fundamentally different from resistance. Resistance usually implies a target; you are pushing back against an oppressor with the intention of overturning them. Someone who is practicing the politics of tranquility doesn’t react to repressive force but remains indifferent to it. Through the sheer tenacity of living, the nuns instead cultivate what I call minor forces—small, subtle shifts that can set the stage for macro-political change; this comes from a term I borrowed from Erin Manning’s (2016) idea of a “minor gesture.” By simply continuing to do and be without pausing—and by refusing to let external pressure determine their actions—they engage in forms of life that might look non-political to an outsider, but these very practices generate significant political outcomes.

Isla: “Padmasambhava’s sparkling golden body, erected on the high hill in Yachen, looks down into the valley with his wholesome compassion (figure 10). This giant statue gazes directly at Achuk lama’s bedroom and monks’ quarters. It is as if Padmasambhava has forgotten those who actually molded his body by laboriously carrying mortar and bricks to the hilltop for years, as if his blessings pour onto Yachen’s monks who are largely temporary residents but not onto the nuns who are Yachen’s permanent residents as well as its builders. The compassionate body of this ancient master on the hilltop, a sacred phallus soaring up to the heights, is unable to find his way back to the majority of his disciples living and building in the valley below who have yearned for his blessing for so long.” (Cho 2024, 61-62)

This is my favorite paragraph in the book, your poignant feminist critique of Tibetan Buddhism in a tranquil mood. I think your writing reflects the politics of tranquility. Could you share the story or thoughts that inspired you to write this?

Yasmin Cho: I appreciate that you sensed a politics of tranquility in my writing, an effect I hadn’t consciously intended. I first noticed the Padmasambhava statue on the hilltop in 2011, when only its base was taking shape. At the time, I didn’t understand the scope of the construction, but I found it unsettling that only the young nuns were tasked with hauling bricks and mud from the riverside to the summit. Where were the monks? Over subsequent annual visits to and a long-term stay in Yachen, the statue grew into a massive monument visible from miles away. Its completion transformed Yachen’s appearance, shifting it from a nomadic shanty settlement into something resembling a formal monastery. However, knowing the years of rotating labor the nuns endured, I was shocked by the statue’s orientation. From the nuns’ quarters, the figure is seen either from the side or from the back. The monument decrees, instantly and instinctively, who belongs at the center and who is relegated to the margins. The irony that the majority of Yachen’s residents—its actual builders—live outside that center is conveniently dismissed. Both figuratively and physically, the nuns remain behind once again. I was fortunate enough to observe the whole processes of the statue-building that involved years of labor by the nuns, their faith toward the statue, and the final product and its gaze. The story of the statue powerfully shows how Yachen was being built and how its actual builders were being dismissed at the same time. By documenting the statue’s construction, I wanted to redirect attention to these long-neglected builders. Ultimately, a story can often reveal these stakes far more powerfully than academic analysis can.

Isla: In Chapter 4 “New Gestures,” you carefully describe the gender structure in Yachen and highlight how their bodily presentations in annual exams and medical practice overturn the gender norm in Tibetan Buddhism. However, I deeply resonate with you that the gender norm in nuns’ mundane everyday life is more challenging to change, or for women. Do you notice any gestures in the daily lives of Tibetan nuns and their Buddhist practices? Do you have any advice on making gestures to shake the gender norm in mundane and material settings?

Yasmin Cho: Your question prompted me to rethink the nuns’ daily lives from a fresh perspective. In the chapter “New Gestures,” I focused primarily on how the nuns’ bodily presentations—typically viewed in conventional contexts—transform within specialized settings like medical training programs and annual exams. It is important to clarify that the presentations of medical nuns or exam takers are intrinsic to their daily lives and Buddhist practices. While these moments may seem sporadic—clinicians practicing for a few hours a day or exam takers performing on stage once a year—these scattered blocks of time are constitutive of who they are. They are periods when the nuns transcend their conventional selves. Beyond these formal settings, your question led me to consider new gestures within their spatial practices, such as building, repairing, and decorating. While erecting a small hut may seem like a mundane physical activity, it is far from purely functional. As I argue in chapter 3, the act of building and decorating is also the act of making a political claim to a space of their own—one in which they can be free from both state surveillance and monastic gender norms. Viewed this way, these spatial activities are undeniably new gestures within their daily lives.

As for your last question, if it refers to the nuns in Yachen, I am not in a position to offer advice on making gestures to shake the gender norms within the mundane and material settings of Yachen. However, in a general context, I would suggest that—just like the nuns—performing small actions repeatedly that facilitate moving one’s life forward, however insignificant or unsuccessful these actions might look at the beginning (again, “minor forces”). I would keep in mind here again a lesson from the Tibetan nuns from Yachen: that small daily actions for oneself, not reactions to the external situation, can nudge a situation toward a new possibility. The term gestures already carries a sense of subtlety and quietude; as I use it, it also requires bodily engagement. Repeated small and quiet physical actions in daily contexts have tremendous potential—they can even build a giant community, as the Tibetan nuns proved through Yachen.

Isla: Yachen underwent changes, demolition, and reduction after 2017. How do you view or carry your connection with this project? The preface is written in Okahandja, Namibia. What is your current project?   

Yasmin Cho: Yachen’s dramatic changes were, in a sense, anticipated, by practitioners and visitors in Yachen, given the volatile political climate of the Tibetan plateau and the scrutiny faced by booming monastic communities. Larung Gar, another large encampment in Sichuan province, had been targeted by the government a year earlier; its size was halved, and thousands of monastics were forced to leave. Rumors had already begun to circulate that Yachen would be next. Despite the partial demolition of Yachen, I believe the politics of tranquility endured. The nuns I knew were likely to act and adapt to their immediate circumstances without overthrowing existing systems, without vocally criticizing mainstream discourse, and without agitating law enforcement. I was fortunate to experience Yachen at its peak and witness this politics of tranquility in its full expression. The demolition of Yachen—at once expected and sudden—served as a visceral, physical reminder of the Buddhist notion of impermanence. During my stay, I built a tiny hut in the heart of the nuns’ quarters where I slept, ate, and wrote my field notes. That structure vanished in a single day along with those of my neighbor—as well as my neighbors themselves (they were forced to leave). Perhaps the sense of security and stability is indeed an illusion—an attachment of the mind, as Buddhism teaches. In this light, Yachen’s presence and its subsequent absence are, themselves, embodiments of living Buddhist knowledge, which I experienced firsthand.

Politics of Tranquility engages deeply with the field of material religion, emphasizing mundane, bodily, and sensorial practices. I am now applying this same focus on mundane, bodily, and sensorial practices to the question of whether—and how—Buddhism functions as infrastructure in the context of Chinese Buddhism’s global transmission in China’s increasing presence in the Global South. I encountered an NGO that originated in Taiwan and had connections to Sinophone regions across Asia. It was spearheading development and charity initiatives in several sub-Saharan African nations. My fieldwork took place on their school campuses (Namibia and Madagascar), where they have established boarding schools for vulnerable African youth. My interest in the material and everyday aspects of life continues to drive this project, particularly as it intersects with the discourse on Global China. There is also a fascinating recursive element: The project circles back to Tibetan Buddhism, because the NGO invites many Tibetan monastics to participate. There is still much to explore, but for now, I am looking at the exciting interplay between the global transmission of Buddhism, cross-strait geopolitics, and the relationship between faith and doing good.

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/atmospheric-knowledge/paper

Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr on their book, Atmospheric Knowledge

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/atmospheric-knowledge/paper

Timothy Cooper: The book is a meeting between two scholars on volumetric and motional forms of attachment to the world. Not only is it highly original in form and content, but this is also a book of great eloquence. Like a good album, this is a book that achieves its full impact when read as a whole. I think this impact comes from a sense of poetic juxtaposition between your different fieldsites, and the fun of the relay baton being passed from chapter to chapter. Compared to other fields, co-authorship is a rare thing in anthropology. I’d love to hear more about how this collaboration took shape.

Patrick Eisenlohr: Thank you for this great opening question, it is a pleasure for us to talk to you! Both Indian Ocean and the Pacific worlds are constituted and sustained by movement in several ways. As an anthropological-cultural musicological team we have collaborated on the sonic, sonic motion and the theme of transoceanic connections for years. The dominant approach to emotional attachments in and through sound is treating them as largely akin to discursive formations, often directly linking them to specific identities and politics. We have been looking for alternatives that take the sonic more seriously as a modality of knowledge in its own right that cannot be exhausted by such discursively elaborated identities and politics. This brought us to sonic events as felt-bodily motion with their vague meaningfulness that cannot easily be pinned down. That said, in our book it is obvious who of us is taking the lead voice at which points, depending on the sites and kind of events. And yes, for us it is wonderful and enriching to have this dual perspective on all these settings and our method which, aiming to do justice to the sonic, at the same time is also theory and epistemology.

Timothy Cooper: One of the many ways of reading this rich book is as an intellectual history of atmospheres, particularly as it emerged out of German neo-phenomenology in the late twentieth-century. Why do you think atmosphere became an object of philosophical concern at this place and time when it did?

Birgit Abels: The core Hermann Schmitz’s work was published between 1964 and 1980: his System of Philosophy, which positions the felt body and felt-bodily experience central to human experience. With it, Schmitz continued a tradition that had perhaps not been entirely obscure, but certainly not mainstream either in any way. He did attract a small circle of like-minded scholars but remained an intellectual maverick throughout his lifetime. He basically rejected the entire European philosophical tradition after approximately 400 BC — with Plato, everything went wrong, if you’d asked Schmitz. And so, Schmitz’s project was in many ways an undoing of European philosophy and a re-appreciation of human experientiality of the world. His demeanor as an academic was similarly aloof: he had little love for the academic circus he, as a university professor, was bound to be a part of. He systematically wrote against everything the European university stood for, and he didn’t seem to mind his outsider status too much. Perhaps Schmitzian atmospherology really was some kind of sheet lightning for the academic discipline of Philosophy: a sharp reminder that one could think about the world very differently, and that perhaps, one should!

But why in the second half of the twentieth century? In some ways, Schmitz was avantgarde. Here was an old white man who critiqued aspects European ontologies and very certainly also the presumed authority of European thinking before Postcolonial Studies, Sensory Studies, and Indigenous Studies took the bull by its horns. Mind you, he never cared to engage in conversation with these debates when they emerged, he’d just continue doing his thing. In other ways, he really was quite the opposite of avantgarde, for instance in his project to reach back to the crossroads immediately after the Pre-Socratics where in his mind, European philosophy simply took the wrong turn. It’s hard to say why this stubborn intellectual, unfazed by the academic game of peer recognition and driven by a good number of arguably brilliant ideas as he was, appeared on the stage of 20^th-century philosophy exactly when he did. But he did leave an imprint on it. And some of his ideas, after a considerable period of gestation, now seem to be more instructive than they were when Schmitz was alive.

Timothy Cooper: Another way of reading this book is as an invitation to look to the performing arts for an alternative epistemology with which to treat atmosphere as a condition of knowing. Could you say more about how you see the modes of sonic performance studied compare? In what ways do you think your various sets of interlocutors might see these modes of performance as commensurate?

Birgit Abels: We indeed argue that the performing arts harbor a kind of processual knowledge that invites a distinctly atmospheric type of relating to the world, of finding both connections and ruptures with our various environments – be they physical, social, cultural, or historical in nature. This is not a factual type of knowledge, we’d rather describe it as knowledge-as-discovery. In this discovery, the felt body is key in navigating sound and physical motion (manifesting as music and dance, respectively): it picks up the energetic flow of atmospheres. This ability to experience and respond to atmospheric suggestions of motion is part of a kind of epistemic literacy that has long been overlooked in both music studies and cultural anthropology. It’s interesting, therefore, to look at different modes of sonic performance and put them in perspective, especially since the underlying ontologies of sound and structured movement can be vastly different. And yet, thinking through them as atmospheres reveals strikingly similar dynamics – regarding their felt-bodily efficacy, their affective potential, and the genre-specific atmospheric literacy they require, to name just a few of many. Our interlocutors might not see the specific musical situations as comparable in terms of their structures, acoustic parameters, or cultural history; neither would we. But in many conversations during our research, they articulated a sense of distinctly sonic affectivity they viewed as key. Mind you, this is not a pseudo-universalist idea of some magical quality that is inherent to music; rather, it is, certainly in the case of South Pacific music epistemologies, practical knowledge, derived from lived experience, of a given chant’s innate capacity to transform social and spiritual environments.

Timothy Cooper: When I think of atmospheres in relation to media technologies and environments, I think of the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s memorable opening to Film, gramophone, typewriter: “Media determine our situation [Medien bestimmen unsere Lage].” This idea that media studies is the study of conditions for being inspired much recent materialist and environment scholarship on media and its infrastructures, as well as work that considers elemental forms like waves and oceans as media. Your Atmospheric Knowledge shares some of the same themes and concerns, similarly foregrounding mediatic conditions—examining how material substrates and elemental forms of mediation shape and are shaped by social contexts, and produce uneven, differentiated effects. In the study of atmosphere do you see any use in distinguishing between conditions and contexts, and if so, is atmosphere a condition or a context of mediation?

Patrick Eisenlohr: Mediation depends on a distinction between that which is mediated and a knowing entity that interacts with that which is mediated. In our book, we highlight the role of atmospheres, including sonic ones, in hailing and bringing about the differentiation of felt-bodies from a surrounding milieu. That is, atmospheres play a role in producing such a distinction. At the same time, atmospheres furnish a kind of prior and primary environmental knowledge that manifests at the level of felt-bodies (as distinct from physical bodies). But this is only possible if there is something to begin with, namely felt-bodies (as different from a disembodied cogito as subject), that is sufficiently differentiated from a milieu so that the latter becomes environment. Seen from this perspective, atmosphere is definitely condition and not context of mediation. Atmospheres can, however, be plural and shifting, so in a somatic encounter with a new kind of atmosphere this atmosphere then also appears as a new and different context of mediating environmental knowledge. On Kittler—I have always admired him as a brilliant and disruptive thinker. But his radical technical materialism with a bellicist slant was famously dismissive of humans, their subjectivities and bodies. Kittler could also not have cared less about socio-cultural difference. In contrast, our approach is very interested in humans. It is grounded in a phenomenology of the felt-body as underqualified and open, subject to downstream specification and differentiation in many different directions, thereby getting closer to that which anthropologists and musicologists usually write about. At the same time, taking the human subject as felt-body also makes our deep kinship and interconnectedness with other nonhuman animals blatantly obvious, think about our felt-bodily ways of interacting with companion mammals, for example. Embodiment exceeds humanity, and such interspecies interactions also often revolve around atmospheric suggestions of motion.           

Timothy Cooper: In the book’s handling of the temporal character of atmospheres in relation to the Shi‘i material, atmospheres attain a political impact as containers of possibility and potential. Yet they are closely tethered to a Muslim eschatology beyond the human horizon. In the Pacific cases, ancestral oceanic presences exceed human perception yet actively mediate navigation and orientation. Can you say more about what kinds of mediation might resist or exceed atmospheric knowing?

Patrick Eisenlohr: Yes, in my research I have been fascinated by the parallels between the emphasis on the temporality of latency in Shi‘i eschatology and ritual practice and latency as the temporality of the atmospheric. After all, in the latter we are not so much dealing with motion, but the suggestion of motion. But you are right, the former is part of a divine order beyond the human horizon, while the latter is centered on a phenomenology of the felt-body that does not rule out the divine but is also intelligible without it. Taylor’s immanent frame certainly comes to mind here. There is a gap between realizing that divine cosmology exceeds a felt-body perspective, and the sum of anthropological studies of religion in the last 25 years according to which religion is about mediations that necessarily address felt-bodies in order to make the divine sensible and knowable. This latter perspective of embodiment is even shared by those who reject the notion of religion and find the notion of mediation too Protestant. There are certainly kinds of mediation that are not atmospheric knowing, think about the propositional aspects of speech acts, for example. But I cannot think of mediations that are not also atmospherically embedded and conditioned. To continue the example, spoken utterances are also always vocal and sonic events, and a pre-reflective sensing of sonic quality and motion is often the initial and micro-temporally prior way in which speech acts are apprehended. Atmospheres are always and already there.