CaMP Anthropology

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.

https://gupress.gallaudet.edu/Books/T/The-Evidence-Is-Life2

Timothy Loh: I love the framework of pilgrimage/peregrinación that you foreground in this book, drawing upon your interlocutors’ use of this word to “describe their journeys to finding sign language, learning, and community” (p. 4), which you also used in your 2019 Medical Anthropology article. It works so well as a metaphor, especially in the Mexican context. How did you come to realize this as the organizing frame for the book?

Anne Pfister: Thanks, Tim, for these thoughtful questions and for engaging with my book! I also love the evocative metaphor of pilgrimage. This framing arose organically because peregrincación (pilgrimage) was a term several hearing families used as they reflected on the journeys that began when they realized their children were deaf. Pilgrimage is a familiar concept in the predominantly Catholic context of Mexico City where it is part of the city’s bustle, crowds, and movement. In November, for example, pilgrims carry statues and religious paraphernalia through crowded subways to honor San Judas Tadeo who is celebrated as patron saint of the deaf by many deaf Catholics in Mexico City. However, unlike the colorful religious pilgrimages of festival days, the pilgrimages in this book are not about pageantry and performativity but instead about unwavering determination to find answers and often about a leap of faith as families come to find sign language, which, in the medicalized context of Mexico City, is a less-traveled path.

Participants use pilgrimage to represent their search for information about deafness and the trial and error they experience in their journeys. Pilgrimage as an anthropological framework is classic and recognizable, conveying the stages of departure, liminality, and reintegration. These stages map neatly along families’ experiences: they became disoriented by deaf diagnoses, felt isolated as they traveled dizzying mazes of myths and miracles, and finally experienced a transformative homecoming into a signing community where they learn Lengua de Senas Mexicana (Mexican Sign Language, or LSM). More than a simple progression through stages, pilgrimage also captures the arduousness of traversing public medical systems, the traffic and exhaustion as families traversed the city for medical appointments, and their long commutes to and from school (some families spent as many as three hours in transit each way!) that robbed them from time at home and with other family members. I am sensitive to how families are often unfairly blamed when their children do not conform to hearing standards (by teachers, by doctors, by other family members), so I use pilgrimage to underscore the intensive labor and selflessness of families who search tirelessly to find answers and support. Pilgrimage also hints at the sacredness of parents’ labor on behalf of their children, humanizing their desire for communication and their determination as they struggled within structures that often lead them away from LSM, the very resource they eventually find most useful.

Timothy Loh: I was struck by the powerful title of your book—“the evidence is life”—which is a quote from one of your interlocutors, Fabiola. Can you unpack this phrase for us and say more about why you chose this to be the title?

Anne Pfister: The phrase and title “The Evidence is Life” embodies the importance of sign-based socialization in participants’ lives and pairs well with deaf youths’ photovoice images (on the cover and in Chapter Six). Fabiola is a key participant and dear friend, she worked at the school during some of my research and knew the youth participants for many years.  She provided important perspectives, and describes the world expertly and playfully. Fabiola, through her training as a psychologist and through her experience as CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), is knowledgeable about many issues surrounding deafness and LSM. As she described her father’s experience at a deaf, signing school when he was young, she puts into words what many people familiar with deaf schools also know and describe. At signing schools, the most vital learning “…isn’t how much knowledge you have accumulated, but instead how you apply it and how you move about in the world… That kind of life learning is invaluable but difficult to exemplify because there is no real evidence to point to. The evidence is life.”

Adopting this phrase as the title of the book was easy because it evokes the very essence of language socialization, the primary theory I use throughout my analysis. We might understand language socialization as the everyday business of learning and using language and what counts as culture simultaneously. It is the spontaneousness with which we interact within and contribute to our social worlds. In Chapter 6, I present many of the youth participants’ photovoice images, most of which are not specifically deaf but are ordinary images of youth exploring and documenting their interests and preoccupations. I argue that the ordinariness of the images is evidence of how language socialization functions. They showcase how unobstructed access to language allows deaf children to actively express their whims, opinions, and identities, the way hearing children their age might. This contrasts sharply from their experiences prior to learning LSM which they describe as isolating and confusing.

Timothy Loh: I found compelling your approach to community-based research and your use of participatory methods like personal history timelines (chapter five) and photovoice (chapter six). What kind of power and potential do you think these kinds of participatory methods have for anthropologists of communication, media, and performance?

Anne Pfister: The participatory nature of these methods is one of the primary advantages I have experienced; I can imagine anthropologists of communication, media, and performance finding myriad ways to utilize them. By incorporating deaf youth into the research process with participatory methods, they themselves guided the research in ways I might not have imagined had I used only traditional ethnographic research methods. From the start, participants helped shape the research questions by identifying what was important to them. They did this through personal history timelines (visual maps of salient memories) and by contextualizing their photographs and identifying relevant themes. I conducted interviews using photos as guides, for example, and this allowed me to ask questions about things I saw in participants’ images that I might not have otherwise known to ask about – aspects of their lives that included extended family members, for example, or household routines. Participatory analysis is another compelling reason to use these methods. During our photovoice project, deaf youth chose the images they thought were most representative of their experiences and through our discussion we co-created cultural theories using their emic knowledge and their language. These methods can be used in a variety of fields and contexts to prioritize minority voices (here, deaf children’s voices), for advocacy (please also see Pfister 2020b and 2022) to incorporate decolonial pedagogies, and toward democratization of anthropological research (please also see Pfister 2024).

Timothy Loh: Your book is bookended with a foreword by Mercedes Obregón Rodríguez, director of the deaf school you study, and an afterword by Lina Hou, a deaf sociolinguist who also researches Mexico. I appreciated hearing their voices! Why did you think it was important to include them in your book?

Anne Pfister: Mercedes and Lina are both cherished collaborators who provide critical perspectives and I am grateful they contributed. Mercedes was director at IPPLIAP, the deaf school that was my primary research site, for the entirety of this research. Advocating for deaf education and LSM in Mexico is her life’s work. She contributes a practical perspective, about the research site and participants, and regarding the historical and contemporary status of educational institutions and policies which she has helped influence but is stubbornly slow to change. Her perspective also provides one that many researchers seldom seek: the effect of their research on the site and the participants they work with. Lina is a sociolinguistic scholar I admire very much and with whom I have collaborated on a couple of occasions. I invited her to write the afterword because she is an expert in language socialization and currently researches deaf networks in Mexico. Our discussions about the context-contingent paths to language for deaf children and about how structures inform family choices are always interesting (see Pfister and Hou forthcoming). Much of the research that informs this book began in 2012, so I wanted Lina’s perspective on its durability and relevancy to contemporary research on signing networks in Mexico and beyond.

Timothy Loh: Translations and interpretations of various kinds play a big role in your book, even as you write that they can sometimes “dilute [the] power and spirit” of your interlocutors’ words (p.10). You also discuss how many of your interviews in Lengua de Señas Mexicana took place through an interpreter, which you then translated from Spanish into English. How did you think about translating for this book? And, relatedly, how do you hope your book will translate out into the world?

Anne Pfister: I am not a native or fluent signer, so using an LSM interpreter was key during this project. Language is a central focus of this work, so abundant care and consideration went into translating, while realizing that translations and interpretation are never perfect. I am interested in how experience shapes language (and how language reflects experience) so I tried to convey some of the beauty and complexity of LSM by sharing and analyzing common LSM expressions (Chapter 5 and see also Pfister 2020a). Where possible, I left the LSM and/or Spanish phrasing untranslated to avoid diluting the original sentiments. I am currently looking for ways to get the book published in Spanish because I would like this research to be a resource in Mexico and Latin America. Hearing people wield tremendous influence on the lives of deaf children and their families; it is crucially important for hearing people (such as families, doctors, educators, policy makers) to understand the perspectives of deaf youth and their families.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691273143/island-in-the-net?srsltid=AfmBOooW-5giq7V3PN0xLmnFIhC7onakRHbyvm1UQS2rcln2mBNs2G4U

Bert Hoffmann: If the World Wide Web is the same everywhere, what is so special about the internet in Cuba?

Steffen Köhn: What sets the Cuban internet apart is not the technology itself but the social conditions under which people access it. Cubans came online astonishingly late—public Wi-Fi appeared only in 2015 and mobile data in 2018—and this delay meant that digital life arrived abruptly, transforming everyday practices almost overnight. Because connectivity has long been slow, expensive, or unreliable, Cubans developed a whole ecosystem of alternative infrastructures: makeshift Wi-Fi antennas, community-built networks, hard-drive sneakernets, and informal repair workshops. These solutions emerged not as hobbies but as necessities, and they lent the Cuban internet a strikingly communal and improvised character. Digital culture on the island is therefore not just about being online; it’s about finding creative ways around obstacles, building infrastructures together, and carving out small pockets of autonomy in a highly regulated information landscape.

Bert Hoffmann: Cuba is ruled by the Communist Party, and the constitution establishes a state monopoly on mass media. Isn’t the internet a mass medium in Cuba? Or how does the state defend its media monopoly?

Steffen Köhn: The Cuban state has always been ambivalent about the internet—aware of its economic benefits, yet deeply wary of its potential to undermine official narratives. The result is a strategy that doesn’t prohibit the internet but manages it through infrastructural control, high costs, and regulatory pressure. ETECSA, the state telecom monopoly, essentially determines who can get online, for how long, and under what conditions. For years, simply pricing data out of reach for many Cubans functioned as a soft form of censorship. Beyond that, the state monitors online discussion, pressures platforms and group administrators, and deploys an immense propaganda apparatus through its traditional media outlets, which still dominate everyday life.

Despite these efforts, the monopoly is gradually loosening. As more Cubans gain access to mobile data, state media’s ability to control information weakens. The events of July 11, 2021, when nationwide protests spread rapidly through social media before the government shut down the internet, revealed just how much the communicative landscape has changed, and how difficult it is for the state to keep its grip on the public sphere.

Bert Hoffmann: The book offers fantastic insights into the island’s digital counterculture. Can you give us some examples?

Steffen Köhn: Cuba’s digital counterculture is less a set of explicitly political movements than a constellation of creative practices that flourish in the spaces where the state’s reach is incomplete. One prominent example is SNET, the enormous grassroots computer network built by gamers and hobbyists in Havana. For years it operated as a kind of parallel internet with its own chat rooms, game servers, and social media platforms. Equally influential is el paquete semanal, the island’s decentralized “offline internet,” a weekly terabyte of films, series, YouTube content, classifieds, and software that is copied from hard drive to hard drive across the country. Around it, entire micro-economies developed.

There are also vibrant maker communities, like the group Copincha, who design 3D printers, repair electronics that in any other country would be thrown away, or build ingenious Wi-Fi antennas out of spare parts. And in recent years, countless everyday Cubans have turned to Telegram groups to barter food, medicines, and household goods, creating informal digital markets that operate outside the state’s control. Taken together, these practices show a population that has learned not only to use digital tools, but to repurpose them, rebuild them, and inhabit them in highly original ways.

Bert Hoffmann: Today, Cubans not only have to overcome access restrictions. So many of the young and digital-savvy have left the island in recent years—how has this affected the digital communities you describe?

Steffen Köhn: The massive wave of emigration since 2021 has reshaped Cuba’s digital landscape on multiple levels. Many of the most skilled young Cubans—the people who once maintained community networks, produced YouTube content, or repaired and repurposed technology—have left for Miami, Madrid, or Mexico City. Their departure has created gaps that some communities simply cannot fill; certain grassroots infrastructures, such as local SNET nodes or specific maker groups, lost their key organizers and became harder to sustain.

Yet migration has also expanded Cuba’s digital culture beyond the island’s borders. Former network administrators now run chat groups from abroad. Influencers continue to speak to Cuban audiences even as they live thousands of miles away. Technical advice, digital content, and even basic goods circulate through new transnational channels. A striking example of this transnational influence is El Toque, a media outlet now largely operated from outside Cuba, whose daily updates of the informal Dollar and Euro exchange rate have become the benchmark almost everyone on the island uses. Cuban digital culture has thus become increasingly diasporic: diminished in some ways on the island, but amplified and diversified through the connections migrants maintain with those who stayed behind.

Bert Hoffmann: On one side the US embargo and an onslaught of Trump-style digital media outlets, on the other side domestic restrictions, chronic power outages and needs of all kind: If you look into your glass bowl, what future do you see for Cuba’s digital cultures?

Steffen Köhn: Cuba’s digital future will almost certainly continue to evolve in tension with the political and economic constraints surrounding it. The country faces severe infrastructural challenges, unstable electricity, rising costs, and tightening regulations, while Cuban audiences are exposed to increasingly polarized media coming from abroad. Yet the transformations of recent years are unlikely to reverse. A generation has grown up navigating VPNs, circumventing restrictions, using cryptocurrencies, building parallel infrastructures, and using social media as a tool of organization and mutual aid. That experience cannot simply be rolled back.

What seems most likely is the continued emergence of hybrid and decentralized forms of digital life: partially inside the state’s systems, partially outside or against them, and increasingly shaped by the Cuban diaspora. Cuba’s digital cultures will remain inventive and resilient, built as much from scarcity as from aspiration. Even in what feels like the bleakest moment in recent Cuban history, there is a certain optimism built into the Cuban capacity to resolver. As long as official infrastructures falter, people will build their own—and in doing so, they will continue to redraw the boundaries of what is possible.

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/borderland-circuitry/paper

Shulan Sun: How would you introduce the main arguments of Borderland Circuitry in 2026, especially in light of the U.S. government’s increased intervention in Latin American politics over the past few years?

Ana Muñiz: In Borderland Circuitry, I argue three main points. I deconstruct immigration data system processing, sharing, and algorithms to: (1) Map information exchange, a form of digital border construction, between local law enforcement agencies primarily in the Western and Southwestern United States; federal law enforcement agencies in the United States; and law enforcement agencies in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean; (2) Examine how authorities construct people – both US citizens and noncitizens, particularly alleged gang members – as dangerous through technology and target them for forced movement and incapacitation; (3) Consider the way in which immigration surveillance makes life precarious on the individual level; on the macro level, creates an environment conducive to the broad growth of authoritarianism (for example, through the use of homeland security and border control agents to police domestic racial justice protests); and how racial criminalization through digital data enables land destruction along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Shulan Sun: In your methodological appendix, you describe a “scorched earth approach” to access, one that relied heavily on archival research and four Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to compel the state to release its data. You note that this is a method that often gains access once and never again. For scholars interested in institutional ethnography who now face even tighter restrictions on transparency, how does litigation itself function as a form of ethnographic practice? What does it reveal about the inner culture and logics of these agencies that more conventional methods, such as interviews, might not make visible?

Ana Muñiz: Great question! To clarify, I am NOT referring to archival research and the FOIA lawsuits as a method that gains access once and never again, which is what this question appears to imply. Rather, I am referring to conducting an ethnography within a law enforcement agency, releasing a book based on that research that is highly critical of that law enforcement agency, and using the research results to engage in community organizing, policy, and litigation. On a practical level, no law enforcement agency is going to allow me access again to conduct observation or interviews, so I have turned to public records lawsuits to get access to novel material.

For Borderland Circuitry, I first conducted participant observation and interviews with attorneys who represent gang-labeled clients going through an immigration process, either those facing immigration enforcement or those seeking an immigration status change. Through the information gathered from the participant observation and interviews, I expanded my institutional ethnography into organizational mapping and textual analysis through public records requests, and subsequent lawsuits, to access internal documents pertaining to law enforcement information systems.

There are challenges and strengths to every method. One challenge of interviews is that I do not necessarily believe a lot of what people say, so archival methods can corroborate or contradict narratives proposed in interviews. Furthermore, memory is incredibly unreliable. Tracking documents through archival channels enables the researcher to see documentation of what happened at the time, which can be more reliable than what people remember in hindsight. I also think there is a lot to be gained by analyzing the process of accessing these documents, as your question implies. The necessity of filing a lawsuit to simply get a public records request acknowledged, and the subsequent negotiations to compel the release of documents, reveal how law enforcement agencies think of themselves – not as public agencies accountable to a public but as elite private clubs who are entitled to keep public information from the public.

Shulan Sun: Your work moves beyond a simple binary of inclusion and exclusion to engage with scholarship on “differential inclusion,” in which migrants are formally incorporated into the body politic while being positioned within subordinate racial hierarchies. How does the technological infrastructure of interoperability—the connective tissue that allows disparate databases to talk to one another—actively produce this paradoxical condition? In your account, how do data systems not simply record migrant lives, but mediate forms of partial belonging and exclusion at the same time?

Ana Muñiz: For most of my career, I have studied how police, through gang designation, can legally treat Black and Brown men, particularly in working class urban neighborhoods, as a criminalized and dehumanized class. I am fascinated, and deeply disturbed, by how effectively law enforcement at various jurisdictional levels weaponize gang labels to formally incorporate people into the body politic while subordinating them in the racial hierarchy. So, this dynamic is by no means exclusive to migrants but rather, occurs in myriad ways to different politicized and racialized groupings of people, and we should not treat the migrant experience as exceptional in this way. Differential inclusion is a longstanding practice in the U.S. Data systems are merely a new way to do an old thing, and I think it is important we do not get dazzled by the technology aspect.  

However, one thing law enforcement is using technology to accomplish is legitimizing illegitimate designations. For example, it is common for ICE to state that an immigrant is a “known or suspected gang member” and list the source as “database” without specification or evidence. Regardless of its veracity, the allegation’s presence in a database imbues it with an authority and legitimacy. It is information laundering in which the racist and subjective process of gang categorization is washed away from the digital data double.

Shulan Sun: Throughout the book, you describe an “interfacial regime” in which subjective, and at times fabricated, assessments by frontline officers acquire durability as they circulate across local, federal, and international systems. How does this process effectively decouple the border from physical territory? What does this suggest about the future of the nation-state when identity, risk, and deportability can be enforced far from any geographic frontier, including through forms of externalized incapacitation in migrants’ home countries?

Ana Muñiz: I think it is important here to go back to classic work like Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, which conceptualizes the border not only as a physical space but also as an ontological condition. The border can be something one carries in the body and the mind in both generative and challenging ways. Interoperable databases allow questionable labels to attach to one’s body and circulate within and even outside of U.S. territory. I do think we are already seeing physical borders becoming less important in determining exclusion. The nation-state can make anyone foreign through categorization. I think we will see more stripping of citizenship and other statuses based on racialized categories, political expression, and other designations. And the recent example of incarcerating people deported from the U.S. in prisons in El Salvador (including people who are not from El Salvador) points to how these systems of exclusion, forced movement, and incapacitation can develop into global circuits. 

Shulan Sun: While your analysis is deeply structural, the book is anchored by visceral human stories that make the consequences of digital surveillance infrastructures palpable. One case that stayed with me in particular is Karla’s asylum interview, which was transformed from a legal proceeding into an extractive exercise in intelligence gathering and data production. Was this case, or another like it, especially formative in shaping your decision to frame the book around “circuitry” rather than the wall alone? What about this moment crystallized for you the transformation of subjective assessments into what you describe as a “regime of bodily horror” that follows people across borders?

Ana Muñiz: It actually works the other way around for me; the book always started with the circuitry, which I then decided to literally ground – in the land, in the architecture of the wall, in the bodies of people – for several reasons. First, much surveillance work focuses on data flows and assemblages with vague references to how surveillance has disparate effects for people of different races, genders, and so on. I think this work sometimes forgets, or at least does not do a good job of showing how, ultimately, digital data hits the land and the body like a bomb.

Second, above all else, I am a writer. Technology in and of itself does not make for a compelling narrative. We need to see the people whom the technology affects. Relatedly, this is not really about the technology. Policing, including immigration enforcement, is about the promulgation of a racial hierarchy, and technological developments provide only the latest tools in a long line of tools dedicated to this task. Ultimately, the horror of the dynamics I cover in Borderland Circuitry do not have a technological solution. They will only be addressed by facing basic questions about who is considered human and who is not.

The example of Karla was not really a crystalizing moment for me. Rather, it was an exercise I had seen different types of law enforcement (local police officers, federal immigration agents, school police, and more) carry out many, many times. It was deeply familiar. The archival analysis allowed me, for the first time, to trace how the subjective, biased, racialized, and inaccurate assessments gleaned through these exercises travel through different agencies and jurisdiction through interoperable databases. 

However, it is important to remember that these assessments are not just practical intelligence-gathering strategies used by the state. They also shape how the people being interrogated understand themselves and their place in the world. These assessments are intended to terrorize and to humiliate. I write about this in a 2022 article in Critical Criminology entitled “Gang Phantasmagoria: How Racialized Gang Allegations Haunt Immigration Legal Work,” where I argue that this kind of extensive questioning about gang association in asylum interviews constitutes a state mechanism of racial terror.

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

Emerson Yuan-Jhen Lee: For many people, the men’s bespoke fashion industry is undoubtedly a mysterious and mesmerizing field. Before diving into discussion, could you briefly introduce the book’s research focus and central argument? I am also curious to hear how you first became engaged with this field. Since the book appears to be adapted from your doctoral dissertation, was your encounter with this fieldsite connected in any way to your transition into academic work?

Joshua Bluteau: The book is an account of the first and (at time of writing) only anthropological study of London’s bespoke tailors. It begins with a simple question, asking why certain men choose to spend large sums of money on garments that in many cases, to the untrained eye, look broadly like garments that can be purchased off-the-peg in any high-street for a fraction of the cost. In the process of guiding the reader through shops, fashion shows and onto the social media platform Instagram, the book asks fundamental questions about how we behave as humans, including why we dress and how we use clothing as a part of self-making. Fundamentally the book argues that the kind of men who shop at these tailors use clothing as a vital part of their self-fashioning. But this is a complex picture, where the craft of production, heritage of the maker, and the idiosyncratic details available from unique bespoke garments afford the initiated the ability to join a secret club of well-dressed sartorialists.

In joining this club the very notion of individualism through dress is critiqued in this book. This argument takes the reader from the shops and ateliers of London’s most prestigious streets to the digital world of Instagram where clients, admirers and tailors have gathered to catalogue and perform their daily outfits for their digital compatriots. This online network of self-professed individuals forms the basis for the digital arm of this research. Here, by immersing myself in the process of using Instagram in the same manner as my informants – producing daily images of what I was wearing – I was able to explore the impact that habitual digital engagement has on self-making and the ways in which digital interactions are part of an ecosystem in any digitally-connected fieldsite that is problematic to ignore.

The inspiration for this research began as an undergraduate when I read Blue Jeans by Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward. I had no prior experience of the fashion industry, but this book had a profound impact on my thinking and I began to question the lack of anthropological scholarship that engages specifically with clothing and the fashion industry. Miller and Woodward’s argument that blue jeans are a post-semiotic garment – effectively rendering them invisible – led me to the foundational question of this work. I wanted to analyze highly semiotic garments that are carefully chosen and designed to be as visible as possible in a particular context.

Emerson Yuan-Jhen Lee: In Chapter Three, you discuss the backlash toward Joshua Kane’s masculinity and gender aesthetics, which creates an interesting tension with your proposition that contemporary masculinities are moving toward what you call a post-particular form that allows more diverse modes of performance. In your fieldwork, do these expanding expressions of masculinity coexist and negotiate with traditional norms of masculinity? And does the presence of social media intensify this tension?

Joshua Bluteau: Research for this book began in 2015 when Instagram was only five years old. One of the interesting things for me, as the author, is to consider the ways in which the world has changed over the intervening decade. We have seen an increasing shift towards performative modes of masculinity that are shaped and informed by the possibilities afforded by social media. For tailors, a social media presence is now commonplace, which it certainly was not in 2015. Alongside this change, there has come a shift from the use of static images to short form video. All of this has allowed tailors to shape their digital performance and in tandem the type of masculinity that they are selling to the customer who might wear their garments,

In the intervening years the notional idea of the performative male seems to have gained greater prominence. Indeed, the performative male (or matcha male) has become an internet architype in 2024-25. Furthermore, the vernacular use of manosphere, and incel ideology speaks to this, suggests that the internet is increasingly being used as a location for those with similar interpretations of masculinity to gather and perform. The dangers of this are perhaps clear – for my interlocutors the increasing purchase of high-value tailoring, for others a rather more dangerous kind of obsession. My book explores the manner in which extensive digital use can birth a digital self, similar yet succinct from one’s offline self. I argue that if these selves are fed with sufficient content they can acquire agency in their own right and exert this agency over the offline self. This is not framed as grooming within the book, and I think this is not an appropriate term to use in the context of the network of individuals I worked with, however there are glimpses of this when the processes explored in the book are applied to other more dangerous forms of masculinity. As social media becomes more embedded into all of our lives, I suggest that the notion of a specific or particular kind of masculinity will disappear with many possibilities for performances of masculinity being developed. Such performances are supported by networks of users that coexist, but their differences may be intensified by the siloed nature of algorithmically curated platforms,  

For Joshua Kane, he seems to have navigated the last ten years well. His gender aesthetics have, perhaps, helped shaped some of the current ideas about visible manifestations of masculinity within the UK. His clothes are no longer so problematic (despite becoming more flamboyant) and can now be seen on major celebrities on prime-time television and the red carpet. This indicates to me that, while social media can problematise particular kinds of performance, they can also allow such performances to become accepted and elevated to the mainstream.

Emerson Yuan-Jhen Lee: In this book, you adopt a dual fieldwork strategy that engages both the digital and the terrestrial. From my reading, the most significant differences between these two sites lie in the temporality, visibility, and performative conditions that social media produces, which contrast sharply with face-to-face ethnography. Could you elaborate further on the methodological distinctions in conducting these two forms of fieldwork?

Joshua Bluteau: This research initially began as an offline and terrestrially grounded anthropological investigation of tailor’s shops and businesses in London. Some of the tailors who afforded me access were already beginning to use social media at this time, albeit in quite a static manner, to show what garments they had for sale, or to publicise celebrities who were wearing their clothes. Joshua Kane was rather different and had already begun to create a digital brand with social media posts multiple times a day which prominently featured himself. It felt important to see what was happening in this digital landscape that sat adjacent to, and at the same time seemed to overlap with the offline field I was investigating. This initially led to a dual stranded methodological approach with more traditional offline participant observation being complemented with digital ethnography using Instagram where I worked as an observing participant producing content in the same manner as my interlocutors. Notions of temporality, (in)visibility, and performativity were different across both spaces but reflection on this work has led me to the opinion that this was not two parallel methodologies but one blended methodological approach which allowed for a more complex and nuanced view of a post-digital fieldsite.

Emerson Yuan-Jhen Lee:  Additionally, I noticed that your concept of immersive cohabitation is not restricted to online interactions but extends into the physical world—for instance, meeting Instagram followers offline. Does this imply that immersive cohabitation inherently crosses the digital/terrestrial divide? How do you understand the blurring of this boundary?

Joshua Bluteau: Immersive cohabitation began as a response to work from other early digital ethnographers who seemed to conduct their participant observation either offline – over the shoulder of their informants using digital tools – or wholly through observation in the digital space. I was inspired by Loïc Wacquant’s ethnographic work in the boxing gym where he trained to be a boxer. This shift from participant observation to working as an observing participant is central to this idea of immersive cohabitation and meant that I developed this idea that I would do as my online informants did, producing images of myself in specific kinds of clothing that this network of sartorialists were interested in. At least that is how I initially conceptualised it. The reality was that as I continued to explore this concept of doing as my interlocutors did, I began to notice that these digital characters were crossing the on/offline divide. There would be images of my interlocutors at events, meeting each other and clearly smashing any notion of a clear boundary between digital platforms and offline life. I followed this approach and have continued to develop immersive cohabitation as a response to the reality of the messy set of interactions that necessarily take place to develop content. This includes the offline creation of content from purchasing garments, attending events, meeting people and so on, through to the posting of content, online interactions and the development of online selves.

Immersive Cohabitation is a highly embodied method for conducting ethnography where the researcher embraces the realities of living and co-existing within and participating with a particular group of interlocutors. It is therefore infinitely shapeable to fit specific research context but the essence of why the researcher is working in that way and the investment in the participation must be prioritised.

Emerson Yuan-Jhen Lee: Many of the research participants in the book are presented with identifiable names—such as fashion brand founders and Instagram users—which appears to be a carefully considered choice. What informed this decision? Is it related to the particular role of visibility in both the fashion world and social media environments?

Joshua Bluteau: This decision was not taken lightly but was important to remain authentic to the visibility in these worlds. It became apparent early on in the research process that the majority of the research participants who had their own fashion or tailoring businesses were very identifiable and that it would be very difficult to anonymise them without omitting valuable details and images. It also became clear from conversations with the brands that they did not want to be anonymised and that visibility was both normal and vital to their everyday work. This fell into stark contrast to conversations with tailors about their clients where it was made very clear that names should not be included. For the social media participants, only open access accounts were included in the research – here a clear judgment had been made to project visibility, and this was respected in the way the research was reported.

 Emerson Yuan-Jhen Lee: Throughout the book, we encounter a wide spectrum of actors: influencers, fashion enthusiasts, compulsive shoppers, and various online participants. When writing the book, did you imagine specific reader groups beyond the academic community? Are there particular ideas or arguments you hoped might resonate more strongly with those readers?

Joshua Bluteau: Yes absolutely. Even within academic circles I hoped that this book would cross disciplinary boundaries, linking the fields of fashion scholarship and anthropology. I also hoped it would have a readership beyond academic circles, with those interested in tailoring, masculinities, and the ways in which social media shapes our sense of self being attracted to this publication. In retrospect I wonder whether the tone of the book predisposes it to a more academic audience, but I still hope others will find it engaging.

I was wary in writing this book with such a heavy focus on the rapidly changing world of social media that it may feel out of date as soon as it was published. I will leave readers to make their own judgement, but my sense is that the fundamental ideas within this book have gone through a period of maturation since publication and are in some way more relevant now than they were as they were published. The Covid-19 pandemic and our increasing shift to a post-digital mode of living and working has had an impact here. Equally discussions of fragmented forms of masculinity, that I discussed earlier, seem more present and the impact of social media on teenagers has become a political area of interest in recent years.

Equally I was aware in the writing of this book that there is a tension between anthropology and studies of fashion, clothing, and dress. This is still the case as I explored in my virtual issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute that addressed clothing. Rather validating, Brent Luvaas and Joanne Eicher’s fabulous book The Anthropology of Dress and Fashion: A Reader was published not long before Dressing Up, providing a clear foundation for a fledgling discipline of fashion anthropology. If any argument from this book should resonate, it should be that anthropology must apply itself to the study of dress, clothing, and fashion to remain relevant and impactful in the 21st century.

https://www.plutobooks.com/product/audit-culture/

Ilana: Reading about audit culture as a professor feels so much like a fish being told “notice this water.”  What inspired you to compare audit cultures and what would you like academics to take away from the comparison?

Cris Shore and Susan Wright: We have often used this ‘fish in water’ metaphor, or more precisely, the difficulty of trying to perceive the contours of the goldfish bowl in which we are swimming. That is precisely the aim of our book: to render visible something that is often unseeable and invisible because it is so taken for granted. We are not trying to compare audit cultures as multiple and distinct entities. Rather, our aim is to trace the genealogy of a particular form of neoliberal governance and power, one that works through similar technologies of measurement, performance indicators, and competitive rankings that are adapted to different political and organizational contexts. Audit is a good example of how regimes of power work through the normalization and naturalization of their own arbitrariness. The spread of audit culture has become so pervasive and entrenched that it is now the water in which we swim, and it barely registers as abnormal or something that can be challenged.

What inspired us to interrogate this phenomenon was a recognition that these technologies were affecting our own lives, reshaping our sense of academic professionalism, and changing our work practices, particularly in the universities where we were employed. In the UK, this started in the 1980s with Mrs Thatcher’s reforms of the public sector and continued into the 1990s through the spread of New Public Management (NPM) and marketisation.  As a result, we were being constantly impelled to focus on things that were being measured and audited (such as efficiency savings and productivity), and that was pulling us away from devoting our time and energy to the teaching, research and pastoral care that we thought were important according to our sense of professionalism. The idea of auditing, which originally entailed practices aimed at verifying the reliability of a company’s financial accounts, was now being applied to organizations throughout the public sector. Now every school, university, charity and professional body in the UK was having to prepare itself for scrutiny and inspection by external auditors by creating the paper trails, records, and minutes that would make them supposedly auditable. What struck us about this process was the transformative effect it had on those organizations, including changing the behaviour and subjectivities of those who worked in them. Auditing had morphed from a simple set of techniques designed to promote trust in the veracity of a company’s financial accounts into a powerful instrument of management and a platform for extending neoliberal governance.

Ilana: You describe the spread of indicators and ratings as a form of populist numeracy that conceals its own context, and I was hoping you could expand on why you view this as a form of populism.

Cris Shore and Susan Wright: This is not about populist politics in the sense of a project that actively seeks to foment disruption, divisiveness and polarization to capture votes by offering easy solutions to complex societal problems. Rather, the spread of indicators and rankings and metrics is the latest iteration of a much longer process where statistics have been central to state building and the art of government. In the book, we link the wide acceptance of this form of governing-through-numbers to the role that indicators and rankings now play in mass society and popular culture. For example, the raft of TV programs and game shows that invite audiences to rank or vote for contestants such as Bake Off, the X Factor, Love Island, America’s Got Talent; or websites that ask users to rate services such as Trip Advisor, Yelp, and Booking.com. We’ve also witnessed the spread of online platforms and apps that invite consumers to rank individuals for their performance such as Amazon, Uber, and Rate My Professors, and even wearable technologies to measure one’s own performance, health and fitness. It is this penetration of the logic of measuring and ranking into popular culture that has enabled the growth of auditing to be taken for granted. Social media platforms and marketing campaigns regularly use gamification techniques to create implicit or explicit rankings among users that further popularize their rating systems; as Gramsci highlighted, hegemony is most powerful when it incites pleasure as well as becoming common sense.

Ilana: In reading your book, I was struck by an inversion of Austin’s insight that for performative utterances to be effective, the conditions have to be felicitous.  One cannot be sworn in on a copy of Das Capital, it has to be the Bible. You point out so many ways in which various forms of corporate failures – both failed techniques and failed organizations – never seem to be efficaciously recognized as failure, while all too often public organizations that most of the participants experienced as good enough or even flourishing are framed as failures by audit techniques.  This leaves me wondering – what does it take to make failure visible?

Cris Shore and Susan Wright: From a managerial perspective, the political conditions for audit are extremely felicitous, as audit technologies have become the central tool in a logically sealed system of management and governance. It works like this: First, central government devolves responsibility for service delivery to lower-level agencies and uses performance indicators and rankings to regulate and hold these agencies to account. That requires the agencies to develop a top management that is incentivized to focus on the metrics and performance required by government rather than what is happening in the day-to-day, front-line work of delivering services. A separation between management and workforce allows management to ignore failures, of which the workforce is only too aware. When marketisation and managerialism fail, the usual response is to say that the fault lies with the workers, or that an organization is not sufficiently competitive or efficient, and to demand further management reforms and marketisation. This enables New Public Management to be impervious to its own failures.

What does it take to make failure visible? There are several steps needed here. The first is to change the way to measure what counts as success. We are asking the wrong questions. There is need for a revolution in how we understand the value and purpose of professional work, even within the audit and accounting industry, and how we evaluate and incentivize organizations and individuals. The second, which we elaborate in our conclusion, is that we need to keep reminding people of the costs of audit culture and the damage it inflicts. This means de-naturalizing it and showing how it could be otherwise. The problem, as we highlight, is that policymakers and politicians have repeatedly ignored the systemic failures of the audit industry because powerful vested interests benefit from the status quo and stand to lose from changing it.

Ilana: You compare audit cultures in so many different countries in this book – Denmark, the UK, China, Australia, the United States, and so on.  How is audit culture affected by the kind of government one has – democratic, competitive authoritarianism, and so on – or is the type of national government irrelevant, and if so, what is it about audit culture that it can standardize across so many different systems and governments?

Cris Shore and Susan Wright: Audit culture is not a system of standardization. It is a rationale of governing and set of techniques that can be adapted to different systems of governance, national as well as international. A good example of this is the European Union’s Open Method of Coordination, particularly as it was used in the so-called ‘Bologna Process’ for harmonizing higher education across the EU member states and beyond. The idea of harmonization was to create a common language for describing – and accrediting – different higher education systems to promote student mobility and mutual recognition of their qualifications. However, the result is that there are now 49 different national higher education systems all of which use the same language to describe themselves. This veneer of what we, with Don Brenneis, have elsewhere termed ‘commensurability’, enables the European Higher Education Area to market itself globally as a region based on apparently coherent, compatible educational standards.

Although audit culture was initiated by neoliberal Western states, it is easily adapted to authoritarian regimes and non-Western countries. Its appeal to rulers lies in the fact that it is a coercive and punitive form of accountability that relies on control at a distance and external inspection and through the use of constant surveillance and measuring, works to instill habits of self-management and self-discipline.

Ilana: I know that this wasn’t the focus of your book, but while reading, I couldn’t help wondering if the spread of audit culture can be connected to the growth of conspiracy theories and disillusionment with the classic liberal order.  What do you think?

Cris Shore and Susan Wright: The spread of audit culture is linked to neoliberalization and therefore to the ideological repudiation and dismantling of the post-war liberal order and the welfare state consensus in the UK and elsewhere. Our book does not explore any link between disillusionment with the liberal order and proliferation of conspiracy theories. However, audit culture has helped create the conditions for loss of confidence in the institutions of democracy and for fueling loss of trust in professions. Given that audit culture is supposed to be about evidence-based decision making and reliable and robust metrics, when people see that the management of organizations or governments relies on spurious and arbitrary numbers, one could speculate that this may also fuel mistrust in science and facts: but this is speculation and not a causal explanation for the rise of conspiracy theories.

Ilana: I am so glad that you end the book by offering readers hope and useful strategies, and was wondering what you most wish academics would begin implementing these days.

Cris Shore and Susan Wright: Having spent most of our book analyzing and critiquing audit culture we wanted our final chapter to look forward by considering more positive alternatives and how to achieve them. Hope has to be allied to a strategy for change, and we identified four different strategic scales where actions should be taken. 

The first is to use the spaces and opportunities that are available to us, as academics and members of organizations, to reshape our teaching, research and service in ways that accord with what we think we should focus on as professionals. For some of us, that room for maneuver may just be our own classrooms or lecture halls; for others a congenial department or project may provide opportunities to act collectively. Some research projects offer chances to resist the competitive, individualized and hierarchical ethos that neoliberalisation engenders, and promote collegial relations based on critical encouragement and kindness on an inter-institutional and even international scale.

The second scale involves using critical reflexivity to analyze the workings of the whole system in which we are situated and understand how to overcome the constraints and focus on what matters instead of what counts. There are not many good examples of higher education achieving this but, as we illustrate in the book, some other sectors have experience from which we can learn. The key lesson here is to establish working environments and relations in which academics are trusted to exercise their own professional judgement to take initiatives and set the standards by which they should be held to account. That requires a change in local management so that it becomes facilitative and supportive rather than concerned with adherence to managerialist requirements and to decontextualized performance measures.  To change local management, government needs to change the ways in which it calls managers to account. That means more deliberative and narrative-based accounting and less reliance on abstracted metrics.

The third scale entails reforming the audit industry. In our conclusion we recount the raft of reports that have clearly identified the systemic failures and fraud that is rife in the audit and accounting industry and the reforms that are needed. The problem is that governments lack the political will and resources to put these reforms into effect.  Governments typically depend on the Big Four accountancy firms for their expertise in drafting policies and legislation with the result that there is a revolving door for auditors between the public and private sectors that undermines any serious attempt to address conflicts of interest or prevent institutional capture. Those conflicts of interest have been exacerbated by the Big Four’s expansion into advisory services, which now count for most of their revenue (and include aggressive tax avoidance strategies). Despite repeated fines for botched or fraudulent audits, calls to separate their auditing from their advisory arms continue to be ignored. After the collapse of Enron, with only four major international accountancy firms controlling the market, they have become too-big-to-fail.

The fourth scale concerns the societal need to restore democracy. Audit culture has seriously eroded the foundations of trust and accountability in liberal democratic society and will continue to do so unless checked. Ironically, the need for reliable financial accounting has never been more urgent.  We are not against auditing or accountability as there clearly needs to be greater transparency and probity in the world of financial accounting. But the instruments of financial accounting should not be used as principles of organizational management and governance.  We also need a system that more clearly connects to – and reflects – the work of public professionals rather than externally-imposed calculative systems based on numerical assessment. The ideas for this are already well developed in the fields of critical and deliberative accounting. The key point here is that we need a system that restores trust by involving all the people engaged in a field of activity (the deliberative dimension) and by generating narrative accounts rather than numbers. Acting on these four scales, we believe, is the way to reverse the damage caused by audit culture and restore democratic accountability in our organizations and society.

https://sunypress.edu/Books/U/Unscripting-the-Present2

Elaine Lu: If you were to describe in one sentence the core argument of the book, what would that sentence be, and why?

Timothy Gitzen: Despite the security panics that seek to govern and control queerness, queer youth have become creative experts in laterally maneuvering through diverse experiences that cultivate their queer sexualities at a time when queerness is more contested than ever.

My book, as you have noted in a below question, oscillates between critical legal and policy analysis and discourse analysis of queer media texts. I do this because the discourse analysis must be contextualized within critical legal and policy analysis, that the sex panics that weave through the United States seek to control and govern how we interpret and treat queerness and queer youth. But that is only half the story. The other half—the more liberating and perhaps hopeful half—is the plethora of contemporary queer popular culture media artifacts that do not ignore the precarity of being a queer youth in the U.S. but offer glimpses into how to cultivate durable and even hopeful lives amidst such precarity.

Elaine Lu: How does framing sex panics as security panics shift our understanding of queer youth and of current legislative battles around queer youth?

Timothy Gitzen: Security panics are panics about the future that get actualized and acted upon in the present, and in so doing, they displace violence that takes place in the present for the sake of a future that may or may not happen. Part of what I noticed in my research is that while sex panics are hardly new in the U.S. or Europe, the securitization of sex manifests concerns over sex and children as a concern over the future of the child, of sex, and of queerness. Actions that then take place in the present—say, book bans or Don’t Say Gay laws—are rooted in a security logic that imagines children’s exposure to queer materials and the seemingly negative effects this will have on children, namely the child will become queer as a result of this exposure.

To frame sex panics as security panics is to attend to both the long history of sex panics in the U.S. while demonstrating what’s new with this current batch of sex panics. Doing so also requires a new analytic for interrogating these renewed sex panics, one that examines the entanglements of sex and security. As I define in the Introduction to my book, securitization denotes  “(1) individuals’ and populations’ search for safety from and inside an insecure, injurious, and discriminatory state and general population; (2) the active targeting of marginalized populations as threats to the security and coherence of the state and general population; and (3) the state and general populations’ mobilization of fear to enthrall participation in securitization practices and to target those marginalized populations” (pg. 13). Crucial in this three-part definition is how states and populations not only target marginalized populations, but how the state and population are inherently injurious, insecure, and discriminatory. To refract sex through this definition is to notice how new security logics that orient us towards future catastrophes are enacted in the present moment, categorizing nonnormative sex as threats to our security and facilitators of that imagined catastrophe.

Recognizing the securitization of sex is to also acknowledge the globalization of security, especially in a post-9/11 world, and how sex is never just sex; it intersects with concerns over race, gender, ethnicity, immigration, refugees, terrorism, ability, and nationality. Others have certainly drawn much needed attention to this, but what my book offers is, again, that reprieve of thinking about how queer youth, in particular, navigate such contexts. If queerness is a threat, then queer youth are framed in this paradigm as threat-makers, as the locus of queerness and its threatness. Acknowledging this framing is necessary if we are to reckon with not only the securitization of sex, but the ways queer youth are treated, discursively, legislatively, politically, economically, and socioculturally.

Elaine Lu: While reading the book, something that always lingers in my mind is how people’s past experiences and presuppositions about the future get delivered and enacted in the present, yet dynamically evoke, highlight, or even constitute social-cultural context in the future. As mentioned in the book, though banning books is happening in the present, the logic behind such action is based on people’s collaborative presuppositions about the future, as if “learning about gay makes their children gay.” I wonder how you would describe the temporality of the present sex/security panics in relation to the past and the scripting of the future? How does the circulation of queer TV shows/media content contribute to “unscript” the present?

Timothy Gitzen: My book discusses two kinds of temporalities: the first one is predicated on security logics that, as you’ve noted in the question, sees the future, informed by the past, enacted in the present. We see this kind of temporality throughout the sprawling security apparatuses and assemblages globally: past information feeds the security machine that will forever crave more information, and what the machine spits out is its best guess as to what will happen in the future. This is happening with AI as well; what is important to remember is that “past” need not be a distant past but could be as seemingly contemporaneous as the present moment—minutes, seconds in the past still constitute a past that can be mobilized to inform future predictions. Crucial for this security logic is preemption: security governance seeks to prepare for the future, not necessarily prevent it. This could be because they know that there is no preventing the future catastrophe, as with a future pandemic. But this could also be that by allowing the future to happen, as Foucault argues, the state can mobilize the uncertainty and insecurity of that future and govern through it. If we fear the future, then that fear is a powerful governing tool for states.

Such future orientation is, as you note, a scripting of the future as much as it is a scripting of the present. The anticipation of the future—of the child becoming queer—is potent enough for sex panic proponents that they take actions in the present in preparation of that future. That act scripts both the present and the future, for the technology of scripting seeks to sieve the threat from the nonthreat through its enactment and practices. But, as I note in the Introduction, queer youth find ways to get stuck in that sieve.

This leads to the second mode of temporality, what I call radical presentism. This works on two fronts. Firstly, if future catastrophe is being actualized and used to govern in the present, then the present is where attention is required. We need to detail and excavate the present violences that are carried out in the name of that future catastrophe. Book banning is happening now, and as a result, queer materials are targeted as a threat in need of control and even eradication. That’s a present problem that we must address. Secondly, and more to the spirit of radical presentism, queer youth have to  creatively navigate this precarious present in which they find themselves. Some are told to hope for a better future—that things get better, later—but not only is it unfair to tell queer youth that they must defer a hopeful and dignified life for the future, but the future is uncertain, and things may, in fact, get worse. In some of the queer popular culture texts I survey, I noticed a push against future deferment and an embracement of the here and now, a sort of minute by minute durational attention to time. To live and experience each minute—to recognize the uncertainty of the future and thus focus energies on here and now—is to be radically present, to have hope now instead of later.

These popular culture texts work to unscript the present concern over the future by attending to moments when plans go awry, when the future is not actualized in the present and instead, the present enables the lateral maneuvering of queer youth. This happens, as you note, in their circulation—that exposure to these kinds of popular queer texts provides an alternative narrative that work to unscript both in their materiality and their discursive formation.

Elaine Lu: TV shows, films, or comics in general are such unattainable texts, as Bellour argues. How should we comprehend and interpret the interaction between texts contained by the screens and the people, the viewers, the spectators’ reactions to these texts?

Timothy Gitzen: Samuel Chambers (2009) writes that reading queer texts can tell us something about the world we live in, that even though these are texts written, directed, and produced by adults, there is still something of value in what they say about queer youth. Skam, however, is an interesting text to discuss, as I explore in Chapter Two, because social scientific research was carried out prior to and during the filming of the show to try and capture the teen experience in Norway. That the show was so popular as to be adapted in half a dozen different countries, all following similar but somewhat unique storylines from the original, says something about the resonance of this show with its decidedly teenage audience.

That said, this book is not rooted in Communications Studies or even an Anthropology that is concerned with audience reactions. That is outside the purview of this book. Skam alludes to that interaction between text and audience, but the points I make are oriented more towards queer readings of queer texts to cultivate a theory of queer youth sexuality at a time when queerness is being framed through security logics. But as I noted in the previous question, the circulation of these texts, I argue, do unscript the security panic scripts of the present moment in both their material circulation and presence and in their discursive formation of narratives that challenge future-oriented narratives of queer sexuality.

Elaine Lu: The issue of current sex education or avoiding queer relevant content sex education described in the book reminded me of the problem of selective discipline, scrutiny, and opportunity hoarding in educational institutions, influenced by both educators’ cultivation and parents’ active cultural transmission. Hence the question: how does securitization in schools reproduce educational and social inequalities, national anxieties about sexuality, and the future? How can such a form of sex education potentially influence students’ subject formation and neoliberal agency?

Timothy Gitzen: Chapter Five is perhaps most relevant to this question, for in that chapter I detail specifically the place of the school and education in subject cultivation. I recognize in that chapter how liberal and even progressive schools that try and create safe spaces for diverse student populations miss the mark as they neglect, or refuse, to acknowledge and grapple with the causes of inequity and discrimination. Both CJ Pascoe and Savannah Shange are key voices in this discussion, and so I would direct readers to their pathbreaking work on schools, liberalism, and progressivism.

What my chapter offers is a textual reading of school situations where things get messy and even icky for queer youth. In the example from Shameless, where the gay Ian is having sex with his fellow JROTC member behind the bleachers at school, we see how Ralph’s utterance of “pound me like an Iraqi soldier” elicits disgust and confusion in both Ian and, most likely, the viewer. Complicating this narrative further is that Ralph is Asian American, and so the interplay of race, ethnicity, sex, and war interlace Ralph’s own identity and the gay sex the two boys are having at school. In this moment, queerness becomes icky, not because of the queer sex, but because of Ralph’s mid-sex utterance. A critique of Liberalism can account for this, for even though Ralph is queer and Asian American, his utterance tied to his JROTC status demarcates good and bad queerness: to be a good queer is to support war and the military, while a bad queer bucks against that.

This is on top of these restrictive forms of sex education that seek to control queerness even more, whereby all queerness is bad. As such, and as others have demonstrated, this adversely affects how queer sexualities are cultivated in youth. Again, this is somewhat outside the scope of my book as I am concerned with discursive formations of queer youth sexuality. What I can theorize or, rather, hypothesize is that the restrictions of sex education usually means that queer youth are looking elsewhere for answers to questions they may have. This could be friends, parents, but, most likely, the Internet, and as we all know, the Internet does not lie.

Elaine Lu: Returning to the theme of futurelessness in the end, I’m curious about how the notion of “world ending” reframes queer youth not as hopeless but as present-oriented subjects? What does it mean for queer youth to “maneuver laterally” instead of progressing toward a normative future?  

Timothy Gitzen: Lateral maneuvers are not beholden to a future-oriented telos of growing up, thus it is important to give queer youth some breathing room, some space and time to make mistakes, to figure things out, or to just do and act in the present without worrying about how this contributes to their growth. Now, one might say that all experiences contribute to one’s growth, especially during a person’s teenage years. But I think there is a difference between growth and subject cultivation: all experiences may contribute to one’s cultivation of a queer subjectivity, but that’s not necessarily beholding to a neoliberal sense of growing up whereby growing up is oriented towards future productivity and contribution to capitalist growth. That’s the type of growth radical presentism and lateral maneuvers—and the methodology of unscripting—all attend to, for even if, as explored in Chapter Three, queer youth in the US are presented as neoliberal subjects oriented towards individuality, in practice that’s not how sexuality operates.

I think world ending as a concept may present as a problem in need of addressing, as explored in my book, but that may also be the point of queerness: it ends worlds. And is that necessarily a bad thing? I am currently working on a book manuscript about queer theory at the end of the world where I ponder on this very question and issue, the ability of queerness to end the world. Of course, what world are we talking about? Who stakes claims to this world; a world for whom? The end of the world is a generative space and time to think with, especially within queer theory, because it again taps into the ickiness or murkiness of queerness—that queers fuck up and, in fact, may cause the world to end—but why is that necessarily a bad thing? I think positing different ends to the world can generate interesting discussion in queer theory that does not assume that queer ends to the world are something to be avoided; rather, perhaps they are to be encouraged: let’s end the world, but on our own terms. And then, in true abolitionist fashion, let’s remake the world into a just and equitable place. Some may call this utopic, but I think that’s the point.