CaMP Anthropology

Michelle Bigenho and Henry Stobart on their book, Heritage Fever

August 3rd, 2026

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/heritage-fever-9780197756041

Byron Dueck: This fascinating study examines a recent groundswell of work to enshrine expressive practices as intangible cultural heritage in Bolivian law. The “heritage fever” of the title captures, on the one hand, the explosion of heritage lawmaking in Bolivia and, on the other, the heated competition between communities, regions, and nations to claim particular traditions as their own.

Michelle and Henry, the subtitle of the book is “Law and Cultural Politics in a Decolonizing State.” To what degree was the decolonizing project in Bolivia a facilitating or even necessary condition for the explosion of heritage lawmaking you look at? And to what degree is heritage lawmaking a decolonial practice?

Michelle Bigenho and Henry Stobart: Many factors converged through which heritage lawmaking became a regular feature in Bolivia, even if few of these look like decolonizing practices. Keen interest in heritage making sharpened with the 2001 UNESCO declaration of Oruro’s Carnival as a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” and UNESCO’s subsequent 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Following Evo Morales’ 2006 inauguration as the country’s first Indigenous president, Bolivians wrote a new Constitution (2009) that renamed the country as the Plurinational State of Bolivia and, at least in theory, claimed new levels of inclusion. In the book’s subtitle, we refer to “a decolonizing state” to acknowledge the state’s self-declared “process of change.” As such, in Heritage Fever we take seriously decolonizing as an emic reference laden with hopes and aspirations, even if many of these go unrealized. States indeed are stubborn things. What we see throughout the book are glimpses of decolonizing moves, even if most heritage lawmaking operates in symbolic realms more resonant with mestizo nationalism, often more redolent of colonialism than of decolonization. But readers will find stories in our book about: the heritage-making role of Bolivia’s first Afro-Bolivian elected to the Chamber of Deputies at a time when the Indigenous State (Postero 2017) was on the ascent; a new Indigenous focused committee attached to the Chamber of Deputies that became a key space of legislative heritage making; and the importance to regional heritage making of decolonizing historiography that predated by several decades the founding of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

We also document a democratization of expertise in the heritage-making process, even if many of those building dossiers for heritage lawmaking were not necessarily the culture bearers UNESCO identifies as crucial within the frameworks of the 2003 Convention. Literally anyone could propose a heritage bill, and anyone could present research on the topic to support their bill. Such bills, even if they were not all successful in achieving the status of law, provided novel ways for Bolivians from different walks of life to engage their new state in relation to the politics of culture. In the book, we pay attention to such changes, even as we mark the limitations of decolonizing through heritage making.

Byron Dueck: You wrote this book together and conducted much of the fieldwork jointly. Were there instances when you found you had different or even irreconcilable understandings of interactions, conversations, or events? After practicing ethnography together, do you feel more or less confident about the trustworthiness of ethnographic methods?

Michelle Bigenho and Henry Stobart: This project followed and built on decades of independent solo projects focused on varied aspects of Bolivian music. We also undertook fieldwork together (two trips of one month, a year apart), a new experience for us both, one which we enjoyed immensely. We conducted most of our interviews together, having planned key questions in advance. Here our gendered positions and diverse experiences played out in different and sometimes complementary ways. We did not agree about everything; during fieldwork and writing, we had plenty of debates, sometimes heated. It was usually possible to find ways to compromise, while also accepting that we had different priorities, partially shaped by our different disciplinary backgrounds: anthropology and ethnomusicology.

Back in our respective countries, the US and UK, writing was undertaken at a distance, supported by weekly virtual meetings. The book was co-written throughout, and we tried to read much of the same literature. One of us would write the first draft of a section, which would then be passed across the Atlantic to the other’s desk. After multiple Atlantic crossings and layers of editing (including hilarious confusions between UK and US English), it is sometimes hard to recognize or remember who created the initial draft of a section. A great deal of care and rigor went into our fieldwork and writing in this project, and we often shared concerns about how to represent our research consultants honestly and fairly. Trust is key to ethnographic practice and working collaboratively. Even if this has been challenging at times—we continue to trust in ethnography. If anything, this project has emphasized for us the importance of ethnography and the trust at the heart of it which, with the emergence of AI, becomes ever more important.

Byron Dueck: In your third chapter, you discuss a rural encounter called tinku, one of whose elements involves ritual fighting between participants. You also discuss an urban transformation of tinku called tinkus, a folkloric dance representing the rural practice by means of stylized gestures of belligerence. There seems to be little or no overlap between the people who participate in rural tinku and the people who participate in the urban representation of it. Moreover, the most widely circulating representations of rural tinku, whether by protagonists of the rural practice or practitioners of the urban one, seem to be those of outsiders (and some of these representations have tendencies toward exoticism and stereotype). In this context, does the decolonization of representations of tinku seem possible? If so, what might this look like?

Michelle Bigenho and Henry Stobart: The heritage champions of the tinku are indeed outsiders to its rural ritual context; you astutely point to the disconnect we documented among those who practice the ritual and those who champion it or dance a representation of it in the city. Decolonizing tinku may always fail. As mentioned above, however, we focus on decolonizing as an emic category of the state’s aspirational processes. While decolonization is not a metaphor (Tuck and Yang 2012), nor does it ever reference an achieved state (Hodge 2018). A flicker of decolonizing practices appears in the story about the letter of protest, written by an Indigenous organization and addressed to the mestizo folklore enthusiast organizing the global tinkus dance event. We invite readers to take a look at what happened here. Tinkus as a representation of tinku may never be decolonized, but we follow surprising encounters and articulations that happened during Bolivia’s “process of change.”

Byron Dueck: Your book reveals some substantial disconnections between what ethnographers of expressive culture (for example, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists) see as their remit, on the one hand, and what the general public expects of such academics, on the other. Could you say a little about these disconnections?

Michelle Bigenho and Henry Stobart: We encountered these types of disconnections at various levels. People thought an ethnomusicologist and anthropologist should be hanging out in the contexts of rituals and with the culture bearers of these expressions, amassing a proper documentation of this music and dance, something that might even be used in heritage-making processes. To be fair, our past solo projects involved extensive periods of deep hanging out in such contexts. However, the protagonists proposing music and dance heritage laws often did not perform the music or dances for which they advocated. We wanted to know what was motivating them, just as we wanted to understand the legislative processes they faced and understand the perspectives of legislators and heritage technicians.

Another striking disconnection was evident in our interactions with heritage protagonists. For example, we frequently heard people calling for more research. For them, research was understood as collecting data that could be used to substantiate a heritage claim, for example, to support the contention that a tradition or an instrument had historical origins in Bolivia, rather than Peru. Why were we wasting our time reflecting on state processes, rather than putting our energies into supporting heritage claims? For these legislative purposes, our research was useless. On the other hand, we also witnessed how desire for data or heritage proof motivated local people to conduct their own research about cultural expressions. Advocates from competing regions would undertake research to justify their claim to a tradition. This also meant that anybody could be a researcher.

Byron Dueck: In reflecting on the book, I often found myself thinking about the similarities and differences between you as ethnographers of the legal institutionalization of expressive practice and your protagonists as champions of heritage. There is an element of recursion in the study, a kind of “writing the culture of writing culture.” What does this book have to say about representation, or about representing representers?

Michelle Bigenho and Henry Stobart: You capture well the levels of representation involved in an ethnography of heritage making. As two authors, we came at this project through different trajectories. Michelle, trained as an anthropologist, has always seen expressive cultures as lenses through which to consider other objects of study, like nationalism, discourses of authenticity, transnational cultural labor, and indigeneity. Henry, trained in music, has remained grounded in the histories, dynamics, aesthetics and perceptual worlds of music making, alongside its interactions with, for example, agriculture, technology, and indigeneity. We both came to the topic of this research because individually we noticed a change happening in Bolivia in the early 21^st century–a new attention to something everyone was buzzing about: intangible cultural heritage. Our object of study in this book was heritage making through law. Yet we needed to describe or represent in some way the dance/music expressions that were coming under new legal framing. Similarly, those assembling dossiers for a law had to represent the expression they hoped to see enshrined in law. But we operated under different mandates. Heritage champions had to muster representations that would stand as satisfactory evidence for those working in the Ministry of Cultures and Tourism and the new legislative committee we mentioned earlier. We, on the other hand, attempted to find a balance between just enough, but not too much description of materials that could seem tangential to our overall project. We had many debates in our collaborative writing about how much text we should dedicate to the description of the expressive practices central to each heritage-making case the book engages.

We also mark heritage making as a new way of representing Indigenous cultural expressions in the nation-state, even if the representations of representations we trace in the book led more often to nationalist claims before any more profound transborder decolonizing endeavors. Heritage fevers ran particularly high when Bolivia disputed Peru’s UNESCO heritage declarations. Here, good old-fashioned nationalism ruled the day. Indigenous expressive practices have been central to Bolivian nationalism since the 1952 Revolutionary State, in a politics of indigenismo—the exalting of Indigenous expressions as nationalist culture, but without including Indigenous peoples and without transforming Indigenous peoples’ lives. We note the more recent turn of cultural representations as patrimonialismo (from patrimonio, the Spanish word for heritage). Even with its differences from indigenismo, patrimonialismo in a self-declared decolonizing state still produces champions of heritage laws who are usually at least one remove from those who practice the expression.

Byron, we greatly appreciate the time you have taken to read our book, think deeply about it, and pose these thought-provoking questions.

References Cited

Hodge, Christina. 2018. “Decolonizing Collections-Based Learning: Experiential Observation as an Interdisciplinary Framework for Object Study.” Museum Anthropology 41 (2): 142-158.

Postero, Nancy Grey. 2017. The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia. Oakland: University of California Press.

Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1):1-40.
Jennifer Sierra takes the page 99 test

July 27th, 2026

Half of page 99 in my dissertation is taken up by a photograph of a 500-feet-tall cell tower. I am struck by the recursivity of the tower; now, a photograph that takes up most of page 99. In the Shipibo-Konibo and Iskonawa rural village of Callería, the cell tower—so desired for its role in facilitating internet access—now sits in their residential area, next to their school buildings and homes. Imposing and invasive. An ambiguous figure, consistently described by Callería residents as a source of both sadness and happiness, perceived through its size, nearness, and its history of how it arrived there by selling one hectare of Callería’s residential land, where plantain trees used to be grown.

Linguistic anthropologists train to describe the morphology of language. Page 99 forced me to describe the morphology of the cell tower. This is where the semiotic work began. I listened to how the tower was described by Callería residents, its qualia, and also how cell towers are rooted in broader industries that interpellate territories differently. I learned that there are at least four main types of towers: monopole, lattice, stealth, and guyed. Callería’s (depicted in the photograph) is a guyed style, the largest and cheapest to make. Monopole towers are the ones we are more used to seeing in urban areas in the United States. They are just a single tube, smaller and easier to disguise. As I learned from reading complaints worthy of publication in U.S. newspapers, projects to build new cell towers are usually resisted by residents who don’t want such “eyesores” in their neighborhoods (Cotsalas 2007). These complaints are, of course, heard only when they come from wealthy residents, for whom alternative solutions are offered. Not in Callería, a rural territory home to about 300 Indigenous Amazonians who petitioned the Peruvian Ministry of Transportation and Communications for internet infrastructure in 2014. In 2019, the tower was built with sponsorship from the multinational telecommunications company Claro.

My dissertation, “Bateria keyotai kaman (until the battery dies),” is my first attempt to analyze Callería’s process of obtaining internet infrastructure from 2014 to the tower’s birth in 2019, and Callería’s life after the cell tower and internet access were established. The physical structure of the cell tower became a site of semiotic activity that mediated Callería residents’ perceptions of collective self and of how the world beyond the village situated them. Despite achieving the impossible—securing internet infrastructure without an electrical system and before Elon Musk’s Starlink moved to take over the Amazon region—Callería residents learned the cruel logic of the political economy to which even basic infrastructure is held hostage.

References

Cotsalas, Valerie. 2007. “Red Flags for a Flagpole Cell Tower.” The New York Times, September 23, 2007, sec. Real Estate. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/realestate/23lizo.html.

Sierra, Jennifer. Doctoral dissertation. “Bateria Keyotai Kaman (‘Till the Battery Dies): The (Im)Possible Digital Life of Shipibo-Konibos in the Peruvian Amazon.”
Tamara Dee Turner on her book, Dancing at the Thresholds

July 20th, 2026

https://iupress.org/9780253075888/dancing-at-the-thresholds/

Interview by Jane Goodman

Jane Goodman: The idea of the threshold figures in the title of your book and is prominent throughout your analysis. How did you land on the concept of threshold? Is this something you brought to the research, did it emerge through the research, or did you come to it while you were writing?

Tamara Turner: The concept of thresholds emerged across ten years of fieldwork and as I sat in dozens of diwan rituals and searched for ways to describe what I observed. As part of understanding the context of diwan, I reflected on Sufi epistemologies and the fact that the notion of liminality or the in-between emerges again and again. This isthmus between two spaces turns up in the Arabic term, barzakh. However, as I sat through Algerian rituals and felt what was transpiring, those notions didn’t quite fit. Rather than a kind of liminal, third space or in-between space, instead, what I observed was a both-and overlapping space–a kind of two-way contact territory where two or more supposedly opposite notions, feelings, or discourses meet and co-mingle. In that overlap, the borders of opposing concepts blur. The juncture where they meet initiates a threshold where one can be either in both modes at once or can move wholly into one or the other. For example, certain trance songs simultaneously call forth both the energy of an unruly animist spirit and a noble Muslim saint, expressing both Muslim and non-Muslim sensibilities in one phrase. Trance dancers literally dance at the thresholds of conscious states, moving in and out and between various registers of trance. Diwan practitioners, negotiating epistemologies of religion and therapy (seen locally as opposites), similarly debate what they identify as the mixing of sacred and popular contexts in the performance of diwan music even while traces of the sacred can never be cleansed from popular performances: diwan practice resounds the thresholds connecting and complicating polar opposites.

Jane Goodman: You say that you learned about the relationship between music, affect, and trance primarily “through [your] own moving body” (22). Can you tell us a bit about your own embodied or felt experience of attending diwan, particularly given that you were presumably inhabiting multiple roles: you are yourself a musician and were learning the stringed instrument ginbri; you participated in the ritual via trance dancing yourself or by tending to those around you; and you were simultaneously present as an ethnographer attending to the various sounds, colors, and forms of dance/trance while also keeping an eye on your recording equipment. What was the experience of inhabiting and navigating these multiple roles like for you?

Tamara Turner: Indeed, throughout my fieldwork I inhabited so many roles and oftentimes, simultaneously. I didn’t want to miss anything in a ritual that might prove critical later to my analyses. So, in every ritual, I set up an audio recorder, I photographed, took videos of key moments, and scribbled copious field notes. At the same time, I didn’t want to be only up in my head, but also present in my body so that I could experience and potentially learn to feel diwan as it is intended. I was striving to stay open to the stirrings in my own body, not only as part of the participation element of fieldwork, but also as part of my conviction that our bodies pick up on cultural cues and can teach us in ways that go beyond the limits of our minds. To this point, I see myself aligned with Jeanne Favret-Saada and fellow anthropologists writing on embodied epistemologies. (I published a separate book chapter where I zoomed in on this particular aspect). I did learn how to trance dance—having watched others trance for so long, I followed their lead on how to move my torso, arms, and legs. I listened for sensations in my body and let my body lead me as to what it wanted to do. As I did so, I received explicit verbal and physical instruction from ritual leaders, including being told when to get up and dance again or when to move back because my turn was over. This kind of guidance and learning was invaluable. Being in the ritual space with other trance dancers was the sort of embodied learning that shaped my understanding. Being out there, moving to the music in the right way, without impeding or bumping into others and, as a woman, being covered in drapes so that my vision was blocked, proved a lot harder than it looked. Being right there in the space for the direction from ritual leaders gave me glimpses into how both individual and collective healing processes unfold together.

In diwan there are many forms of trance and not all of them involve the spirits inhabiting bodies. Some forms of trance might be compared to absorption or dissociation precipitating on a dance floor. I considered myself to be learning how to master these forms of trance in diwan, while my interlocutors saw my states as involving spirits and nonhuman entities. From their perspective, the spirits were interacting with me; I just didn’t realize it. This difference in perspective was ripe with learning potential.

Jane Goodman: Did this project mark your own psycho-spiritual pursuits in ways that you continue to cultivate? For example, did you develop an affinity for any particular spirit, and if so, (a) how did you experience this? and (b) Is this affinity something you can foster outside of Diwan?

Tamara Turner: Absolutely. Long before I embarked on this research, I wanted to better understand what healing and wellness could mean across cultures and across different orientations to the world. Although my family were not particularly religious, I had always had an interest in psychology, health, and in the wisdom traditions of other cultures. My father was a professor of sociology with specialties in the sociology of deviance as well as religion and medicine, so I grew up with big questions about how humans make meaning and understand their place in the world.

I also grew up composing and playing music. It was as a composer that I wanted to learn other non-Western musical vocabularies and this curiosity led me to ethnomusicology. When I first discovered Moroccan gnawa music in the mid-2000s, something in me knew I had to go there and learn more. The combination of ritual, psychology, medicine, healing and music encapsulated everything that I wanted to pursue. After completing an MA on ritual musicianship in Marrakech, and through a series of serendipitous events, I set off to explore Algerian diwan in 2013 and that began the long journey to publishing this book.

In terms of my own personal experience across ten years of fieldwork in Algeria, I noticed that I had emotional affinities for certain songs. I will never forget the first time I found myself sobbing to one song and had no idea why. My Algerian friends announced that that was my song and from that time forward, the musicians made a point to play it for me. Later in my fieldwork, other songs stirred strange sensations in me too, and I collected them as my favorites. Some of these were from the Hausa repertoire which is often skipped in ritual because it comes very late in the night. I discuss this part of my journey in the book because it served as a primary form of learning. I aimed to be open to my body and what was happening and I let my Algerian friends guide me in the process.

Moreover, it did not escape my attention that – with the colonial history of anthropology and the pattern of outsiders determining what they understood to be what is going on in another culture, as if they hold a position of epistemological authority – that my Algerian friends informing me what was going on with my own intimate bodily sensations and experiences, whether I agreed or not, was a delightful miniature reversal of those power dynamics.

Jane Goodman: The diwan ritual leaders (moqeddemin) were critical to your project. Describe how one moqeddem marked you in particular ways.

Tamara Turner: The most profound relationship I had with a moqeddem in Algeria was with Moqeddem Jallul Motam from the city of Saida, who is quoted and mentioned throughout the book. Jallul still practices many of the old ways, striving to keep the ritual protocol in line with his ancestors’ recommendations, and sticking by what he grew up with. His knowledge of the spirit world called to mind the Songhay sorcerers in Paul Stoller’s work. It was clear to me that what I learned from Jallul was just scratching the surface of his knowledge and lifeworld. There was so much he couldn’t share with me but gave me only hints of, such as the danger and risk in working with the spirit world where not all entities are benevolent. As I mentioned in the text, the role of the moqeddem in Algeria is dying out and there are few people left who still perform the role as it was intended: the commander of the spirit world and the one who protects the energy of the ritual. Jallul could command a room with a single glance. In one of the first conversations we had in 2013, I recall his challenge to me to really try and understand diwan. He had been quite disappointed by journalists who occasionally went to Saida to learn about the diwan ritual. He had never been satisfied with their depiction of the practice and what I would later understand to be the ways that Black communities in Algeria are still portrayed. It was my single intention to do justice to the countless diwan practicants, like Jallul, who so badly wanted to be taken seriously and acknowledged for their own wisdom.

Turner, Tamara. D. (2023). Learning to trance: The affective grounding of becoming another body in another place. In E. Pierini, A. Groisman, & D. Espírito Santo (Eds.), Other worlds, other bodies: Embodied epistemologies and ethnographies of healing (pp. 153-171). New York: Berghahn.
Kristin Snoddon on her book, Being Understood

July 13th, 2026

https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/being-understood/?SF1=work_id&ST1=CVIEW-67dd512c2ee28

Tsung-Lun Alan Wan: In your book, your discussion of signing songs really stood out to me. From my experience in Taiwan, signed songs are a highly contested genre. Historically, when the Taiwanese government attempted to erase regional variation in Taiwan Sign Language, they hired hearing experts and special education teachers to compile sign-language dictionaries, including books of signed songs (!), which were then criticized as promoting signed Chinese rather than Taiwan Sign Language by the signing community.

In many hearing-led signed-song performances, lyrics are translated word by word into signs, handshapes are modified for choreography, and signs are sometimes invented for aesthetic effect. As a result, these performances may become unintelligible to deaf people, while allowing hearing performers to enjoy a form of supposed sign language that overlooks deaf perspectives and sign-language conventions. In contrast, the work of some deaf artists in Taiwan seems much closer to what you describe in your book: they begin from the meaning of the lyrics, select appropriate signs, and then adapt them rhythmically and aesthetically to the music, but this is not as popular as those led by hearing and circulated among hearing people.

For readers outside the U.S. who may not be familiar with the American context of signed songs, could you share why you chose translation/interpretation in signed songs as a research topic? What made this genre theoretically or ethnographically important for you?

Kristin Snoddon: Thank you for sharing these insights and experiences from the Taiwan context. I did not know about the government’s attempts to erase regional variations of Taiwanese Sign Language. To understand how signed songs can provoke controversy, it may be important to consider how sign languages are often viewed as a means to an end–a translation–that also functions as a vessel to convey something–such as signed Chinese and cultural artefacts from hearing communities like music. It’s another issue as to how signed Chinese (like signed English) is often presented as a standard, hegemonic language variety when so much that makes sign languages intelligible to deaf people is missing from manually coded Chinese and English.

The artist whom I interviewed in my book, Robert Bhola, had disparaging words to say about many hearing-led signed-song performances. But as you say, some hearing people–who are apparently the majority of song signers on the Internet–enjoy creating and consuming this work. I do not think deaf people in general are usually as interested in signing songs or viewing signed translations of popular music–but this can also be culture-specific, and many deaf people enjoy various forms of musical participation.

When I began to explore the topic of deaf interpreters and sign language ideologies, musical translation in signed songs was a research topic that inspired me, because I found Robert’s work–like that of other deaf and hard of hearing song signers like Rosa Lee Timm–to be inspiring. This was due not only to the artist’s sign language proficiency but also to being able to convey the essential message contained in a song. This makes the signed song an artistic creation in its own right. In my book, deaf interpreters are presented as exceptional facilitators of intelligibility. With signing songs, this extends to making intelligible what might otherwise be inaccessible and beyond ordinary language, such as the tone and instrumentals of a song. Theoretically and ethnographically, I was interested in the struggle to cross borders when there are sensory asymmetries and unequal access to semiotic resources. To make something intelligible, you need to understand what is intelligible to the other person–to know something about what it is like to live in that person’s body. I do not think the message always gets through, maybe because the other person also needs to be willing and open to receive it.

Tsung-Lun Alan Wan: I really like the phrasing: “the struggle to cross borders.” It made me think of a point you make in the book: that some hearing people assume communication with deaf people must be mediated by a sign language interpreter, while in some situations, other modalities such as email and the chat box during a video meeting may allow for a more direct form of interaction between deaf and hearing interlocutors. I had previously tended to assume that, compared with writing things down, communicating through a sign language interpreter would be a more respectful way for hearing people to interact with deaf signers. But your discussion helped me see that, what matters may be whether the hearing interlocutor is willing to participate in the struggle of crossing borders with “sensory asymmetries and unequal access to semiotic resources”.

This also reminds me of a small scene I recently witnessed in Taiwan. A deaf mother was ordering food at a bento shop. The staff at the counter took out paper and a pen, assuming that she would need to write down her order. The customer signed “troublesome” in TSL, which the staff obviously did not understand. Then the customer pointed directly to the items on the menu. At that moment, the staff seemed to realize that, within that semiotic environment, the deaf customer did not need paper and writing at all. The menu itself, pointing, and the shared material setting were already sufficient for communication.

I found this small moment of boundary negotiation very interesting. It seems to show that communication access is not always about introducing an additional mediating tool or person. Sometimes it is about recognizing and learning to use the semiotic resources that are already available in the interactional environment, hence a collaborative way of doing communication. Would you say that this is a fair reading of your argument?

Kristin Snoddon: I agree that it can often appear more respectful to the deaf person to communicate via a sign language interpreter, and indeed it is often the default mode of communication for deaf academics working with hearing colleagues and students. However, some of my favourite moments have taken place when the hearing interlocutor–such as a student, faculty colleague, or an audience member during a presentation–understands me, and I understand them, and we exchange ideas even when the interpreter does not know what we are talking about. I think this can also be a mark of successful interpretation since the interpreter does not manage the discussion. As John Lee Clark said to me once, we should try and hear what lives beyond translation and what lives in the gaps.

The scene with the deaf mother ordering food resonates with me–while it was kind and well meaning of the staff to offer a paper and pen, it is much quicker to point at a menu. I think there is also a point to be made here about distantism–what John calls a standing apart, an insistence on adhering to normative communication via sight and hearing. In the scene you describe, the pen and paper offered a more detached, formal, and logocentric way of communicating that appears almost circumlocutory as compared to simply pointing at a menu.

So I agree with you about communication access and efficiency, and making use of resources in the environment to achieve immediate goals. Part of making this work is collaborative–what Mara Green refers to as the willingness to co-construct meaning when there are sensory asymmetries. The other part is creative–seeing how to make use of the affordances of objects and instruments that another person who typically faces fewer communication barriers may not have previously realized were latent in the environment.

Tsung-Lun Alan Wan: Yes, distantism seems to be a very important entry point here, and it was one of the concepts in your book that felt truly illuminating to me. I agree that distantism speaks to many of the issues you discuss in the book, including the possibility of more direct collaborative communication rather than a more circumlocutory form of mediation through a third material object (or person). This also connects to the third part of your book on ethnography at Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. There, the focus seems to move away from translating music into signed song and toward a more direct experience of music through fleeting vibration, touch, movement, and affect. You frame this partly in terms of epistemology, which seems to suggest that how we define certain forms of interaction as more direct, and others as “standing apart,” is itself grounded in culturally specific understandings.

This makes me curious about the role of modality here. Is modality as decisive as the formulation of distantism, with its critique of the dominance of sight and hearing, might seem to suggest?

I once met a young deaf-blind man at a disability studies forum in Taipei. When he introduced himself to me, he explained to me that he could not see sign language, so he didn’t think about learning it. I mentioned that tactile signing has been developing in the United States, but he did not seem especially interested. For him, it was more desirable to have hearing people speak into a microphone, have their speech converted into text through AI speech recognition, and then enlarge that text on his iPad screen so that he could still read it (also the way he received language from me).

In this case, he seemed to believe having our interaction mediated by AI speech recognition and a tablet interface is a more direct way of communication, compared to involving a third party human interpreter (it is also likely because he has never experienced tactile signing, so for him of course it is more distant). This makes me wonder how we can take seriously the problem of “standing apart” without assuming in advance that certain modalities are necessarily more direct, more intimate, or more connecting?

Kristin Snoddon: I agree there is a potential tension between the critique of distantism and that of autonomy in communication. The critique of distantism arises in the context of deafblind communicative practices, where there has been a movement to foreground direct experience and contact instead of trying to emulate normative communication. In this case, normative communication has often meant communication through a sign language interpreter because this is a normal practice in sighted deaf communities–many deafblind people are or have been part of deaf communities prior to losing their vision. The Protactile community in the USA arose in the context of deafblind community members having to talk with each other through interpreters and not being able to communicate directly. For direct communication with each other, they needed a language based on touch, which is Protactile. So I agree this is a culturally specific understanding of distantism that privileges tactile (and olfactory) modalities, including proprioception, over sight and hearing. Many social norms for appropriate behaviour and language needed to be overcome in order for this understanding to arise.

But the point of anti-distantism arguments is to claim residence in the world as an autonomous being, despite these social norms that govern human behaviour and language. I advance this critique of distantism in my book when writing about deaf people’s direct experience of music at Trinidad Carnival instead of via a song signer or interpreter–the latter is also a logocentric orientation toward music and understanding compared to being immersed in the experience of Carnival. So I would argue that the young man you describe is acting in accord with an anti-distantist view that supports autonomy if he is choosing to communicate using speech-to-text technology. There is no right or wrong way to use language as long as it works for us.

There is a social movement to share Protactile with deafblind community members and interpreters or co-navigators through training workshops because learning Protactile opens up communication for many people. I know that encountering signing deaf communities and learning sign language changed my entire life. However, there needs to be an opportunity and an incentive to learn a new language and modality for communication.

Tsung-Lun Alan Wan: The final question — in the last part of your book, you discuss how the intersection of deafness and queer identity may further marginalize gay deaf people in Trinidad and Tobago, especially when hearing sign language interpreters may refuse to interpret LGBTQ+ content because of their homophobic beliefs. You also show how PT, a deaf Caribbean interpreter, intervenes in this situation and also does work translating LGBTQ+ identity terms for the local LGBTQ+ deaf community. I found this to be a powerful example of linguistic flourishing, one of the core concepts in your book. We know that, in neurodiversity advocacy, there is more and more discussion on flourishing in relation to individual well-being and the creation of conditions that allow neurodivergent people to live well. It is nice to see linguistic flourishing theorized from the perspective of deaf epistemology. Could you say more about how you understand linguistic flourishing in relation to “being understood”? What might this concept allow applied linguistics to see or ask differently, and how would you like the field to engage with it further?

Kristin Snoddon: I am glad that you recognized the presence of linguistic flourishing in this chapter through sign language practices related to Trinbagonian LGBTQI+ identities. In some ways, this chapter was the most difficult for me to write with respect to my positionality as someone who is an outsider to Caribbean and LGBTQI+ communities (not to mention deaf interpreter communities, since I am not a DI). The issues of positionality and difference are fundamentally related to understanding because there are central aspects of identity and experience that we can never understand firsthand if we do not share a particular social identity and lived experience with someone else. At the same time, I believe there is a common desire to be understood, including by people who are different from us, which may be felt more by those whose experiences are minoritized. This includes understanding our own experiences as part of a process of self-actualization.

Experiences of not being understood and of communication barriers are a central part of deaf lives. Because these experiences and barriers shape language practices, I would like the field of applied linguistics to engage with them further by exploring their impacts when there are sensory asymmetries. In the context of deaf epistemology, linguistic flourishing happens when there is an anticipation that what we are saying–in whatever form this takes–will be understood. In the chapter, PT describes learning a language to identify and express their own experiences as a queer person, and how this in turn opens up the possibility for new experiences and ways of building identity. But these processes rely on having access to alliances and coalitions with various kinds of people that can support flourishing.
Jeffrey G. Snodgrass on his book, The Avatar Faculty

July 6th, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 29th, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 22nd, 2026

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

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

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

References

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

June 15th, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

June 8th, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 1st, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

Van Gennep, Arnold. 1977 (1909). The Rites of Passage. Routledge & Kegan Paul.