Monthly Archives: August 2017

Keith Murphy on his new book, Swedish Design

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http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100526160

Interview by Ilana Gershon 

You explain in your book that Ikea is “a simple microcosm of the social democratic order” (p. 202), which might surprise some Ikea shoppers who don’t think in terms of a politics of form.  Could you explain how you trace in your book the ways that design in Sweden is viewed as self-evidently a political project?

I think outside of Sweden and the Nordic countries, most people’s familiarity with Swedish design (if there’s any familiarity at all) starts and ends with IKEA, since it’s the largest furniture company in the world, and one of the most recognized global brands. But yes, this doesn’t mean that the long history of ideological links and influences between social democratic politics and design — especially furniture design and industrial design — are easily gleaned by, say, shoppers in Illinois, California, or Hong Kong. But in Sweden, it’s a different story.

The core premise of the book is pretty simple: in Sweden there are lively and vibrant connections between political values espoused as traditionally “social democratic” — equality, transparency, care, and others — and the design of everyday things, including furniture and other home goods (think IKEA), cars (think Volvo), interior architecture, and so on. According to the cultural logic sustaining these relations, everyday objects, just like the state, are designed to take care of people in their everyday lives, and this is not by accident. But what does that really mean? How are these connections between things and politics actually constituted, how are they maintained and cultivated, and who is invested in perpetuating them? Perhaps an even simpler way of phrasing it is, “Swedish design is political, but how exactly is it made to be political?” If shoppers in Illinois, California, or Hong Kong don’t readily recognize the cultural and political background of the furniture carefully staged in IKEA showrooms, but shoppers in Sweden do (at least to some non-trivial degree), that’s an indication (to me at least) that there’s something going on in Sweden that’s worth taking a closer look at.

Of course it’s difficult to analytically apprehend Swedish design — and “design” more generally — as just one simple category, or one more or less coherent thing. You can’t talk about Swedish design without focusing on particular forms — typical modernist forms like squares and straight lines — or particular discourses, social actors, institutions, practices, and more. All of it matters, irreducibly. While design historical analyses tend to center and elevate famous designers and their famous objects, it’s a perspective that often leaves out so many other relevant conditions that render design and designing more than simply stuff and its making. Which is to say, you can’t really just look at one factor, like iconic chairs, or superstar designers, in order to understand the cultural and political significance of design. Instead you’ve got to follow how these factors connect and alight upon one another, across a bunch of different domains. And ethnography is a really good way of doing that.

So in the book I trace some of the different ways in which design has been constructed and cultivated as a sociopolitical project in Sweden, moving between different domains, and focusing on different forms at different scales. I follow the progression of discourses of both “good design” and “a politics of care” in Sweden from their modern origin in the 19th century up through their more recent manifestations in the early 21st. I look at specific social actors, including not just well-known designers, but also politicians and activists from the past, and less well-known designers of the present, to explore the harmonization of ideologies between design and social democratic politics over time. And I examine different institutions and their practices, including the small-scale motions involved in studio design work, and the exhibitionary protocols of museums, fairs, and even IKEA, to show how objects acquire different but complementary meanings in their circulations through social space. All of this is directed toward understanding how design, acting as a method of world-making, gives form — including specific shapes, objects, discursive forms, forms of social organization, political forms, and more  — to the everyday world in Sweden.

How do you think that a strong training in linguistic anthropology shaped your analysis of Swedish design?

There are probably dozens of ways in which my background in linguistic anthropology helped push the kind of analysis I ended up producing in this book, but I’ll stick with three. First, I think linguistic anthropology, especially the version I was trained in at UCLA, really rewards attention to small details. One of the earliest lessons I learned in linguistic anthropology, when I was a first-year undergraduate at the University of Chicago, was that language, a phenomenon so familiar, intimate, and present in our lived experience, is practically bursting with unrecognized meaning, which you can start to see clearly once you turn your gaze toward the details. When I started my fieldwork — which, by the way, was originally more concerned with hand gestures and body language than with design – this attraction to small details was my basic stance for conducting research. So I guess it wasn’t surprising that I transposed that training onto an analysis of common forms in furniture and other designed things, stuff that, like language, suffuses everyday experience but whose complex webs of meaning are typically just barely recognized.

Second, I think theories developed and worried in linguistic anthropology are widely applicable beyond the domain of language (a point that Costas Nakassis usefully articulated in 2016). Of course there has been a longstanding trend in the social sciences and humanities to use language as a model for explaining non-linguistic phenomena (“linguistic magic bullets,” as Charles Briggs has described it). But from my point of view, one of the problems with this trend has been trying to apply an analysis based on linguistic properties onto non-linguistic things, rather than using the theory to understand the properties of the things themselves, for what they are (that is, not trying to make them “look like” language). This is why Pierce is so useful (as opposed to, say, Saussure), because his semiotic is derived from logic rather than from language, which means to analyze material objects from a Piercian perspective, you’re not forced to transduce a language-based model into some other semiotic framework, and thus assume some analytical lossiness in the process. But it’s not just Pierce and semiotics that helped me examine Swedish design. I ended up drawing on Austinian performativity, and, quite unexpectedly, the version of pragmatics offered by Deleuze and Guattari, because these perspectives resonated with how design work is accomplished in the studio. Assumptions derived from Goffman, Garfinkel, and the Goodwins about how meaning is activated and transformed through social interaction, and Duranti’s close attention to the various forms that politics takes across social modalities, all of this undergirds much of my overall analysis. Basically, it feels like (to me, anyway) linguistic anthropological theory is very useful for understanding pretty much anything.

Finally, and this relates to the previous two points, linguistic anthropology really prepares you to pay attention to form. Whether it’s thinking through sociolinguistic variables, allophones, collections of conversational instances or similar hand gestures, and more, we often find ourselves dealing with linguistic features that, from a phenomenological point of view, exist as formally distinct, yet from a social or analytic point of view, are treated as examples of the same thing, that is, as having matching forms. I sort of adopted this idea and ran with it, to see how far I could take it: that social forces work to match different forms in ways that allow them to be seen as examples of the “same thing.” Thus, in Swedish design, squares and equality, chairs and democracy, and blonde wood and care, all of which obviously take different forms, can nonetheless be made to formally “match” one another through complex semiotic processes.

I was wondering if you could explain a bit for readers of this blog one of the very imaginative arguments of your book, an explanation of how designers who are in a profession that is supposed to be constantly innovative manage to create an internationally recognizable Swedish style. 

Part of my argument is that designers themselves are only partially in control of the designs they create. This is obviously true when we look at constraints like the design brief, which can specify things like an object’s materials, size, costs, colors, etc. And clients can often intervene and ask for changes in a given design (this is usually not something that designers appreciate). But there are other conditions that, in combination, tend to lead to the preservation of a particular Swedish design style over time, even as designers themselves innovate in their own work.

I try to trace this across different domains, including in the studio, where designers sit quietly at computers sketching the lines of their objects and talking their ideas through with colleagues. One of the things I began to notice when I watched and re-watched video recording of these interactions is that there is a strong preference for “typical” Swedish design forms, like squares, rectangles, and straight line, that regularly plays out in the ways that designers talk and evaluate their work, accompanied by a dispreference for deviations from this norm. That is to say, emergent designs that “look” or “feel” Swedish tend to get publicly assessed as “good,” while those that “look” more experimental are assessed less judiciously. One effect if this is that “Swedish looking” objects tend to get more designerly attention, and tend to make it through a design process intact. This, even while designers shy away from overly affiliating with some normative concept of Swedish style.

There are other factors that preserve and cultivate Swedish design. Many institutions like museums, galleries, media, government and semi-government authorities, and stores like IKEA all have some investment in stitching together design style, material objects, and social democratic ideology. Designers may themselves see this investment as antithetical to their own individual creativity, however once they release their objects into the world, they lose significant control over how those objects are described, re-described, and displayed. And there’s a network of loosely orchestrated social actors and institutions in Sweden always prepared to render actual tokens of design as examples of a more abstract “Swedish design” type.

There’s more to it, of course, but I want to point out that at different scales and in different ways, language is crucial to the project of cultivating Swedish design. It’s not just about specific objects and their forms, but rather how language and form and political values co-constitute one another in and across cultural domains in Sweden.

If you could imagine the anthropology of design becoming a vibrant subfield, what are the still unexplored questions that scholars could start tackling?

I’m obviously biased, but I definitely think the anthropology of design should become a vibrant subfield. And in some ways it is already! I’m certainly not the first anthropologist to deal with design, although when I started doing this work in the mid-2000s, I did face a fair amount of skepticism. But nowadays there are lots of anthropologists, in North America and Europe in particular, who are turning an analytical eye toward design in one way or another.

There is a bit of a problem, though, in terms of how an anthropology of design might continue to take form. It’s similar to the problem that Alfred Gell discusses at the start of his chapter, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” while ruminating on the anthropology of art: to what degree are anthropologists who study design “captured” by their own object of inquiry? Designers, many design researchers, and – frankly – capitalists of various stripes, love to tout the salutary power of design without fully acknowledging design’s many downsides (of course what this means depends on what particular kind of design you’re looking at). One worry I have is that anthropologists of design get seduced by the very seductive discourses of design that espouse the kind of “goodness” we’ve come to desire in ourselves as a discipline. I often feel myself falling into this trap. But on the other side, there’s also the possibility that anthropology’s sharp critical edge will dismiss design as, yes, a tool of capitalism, and thus an oppressive force that should be pushed back against and heavily critiqued. This is something that I also often feel. It seems to me, though, that a dynamic anthropology of design should tack back and forth between these two perspectives, to not settle on one particular hill, but rather to turn a skeptical but curious gaze toward the vast valley in between, figuring out what design is, as a form of human action, and what it’s doing for particular groups of people in their particular social worlds.

In my book I’m offering a close analysis of design in Sweden. I’m not claiming design works this way everywhere (clearly it doesn’t), but I do hope that I’m providing tools for people to use to examine how design works in other contexts. It’s sort of a truism at this point to say that design is political, but one of the things that anthropologists can offer is a critical analysis of how design operates as a political force in different parts of the world. We can also explore design as a mechanism of social control; or as aesthetic hegemony; or as a generator of ideology; or as a mediator between institutions and ordinary people. A design anthropological framework can be applied to more than just objects. It can be applied to cities, processes, spaces, infrastructures, and more, and it will always include people, things, ideologies, and practices, without necessarily excising any one (or more) of them. Basically, I think there are innumerable projects that a design anthropological framework could be useful for.

 Has your fieldwork for this project changed how you buy furniture or other objects for your home?

Yes and no. When I came back from the field, I decided I needed to buy much nicer furniture for myself, because living in a comfortable, beautiful home is — according to the Swedish model — a kind of care. But I quickly discovered that the furniture market in the US is basically split into only two segments: the low-end stuff, like IKEA, Target, and the MDF things at Crate & Barrel; and the high-end stuff that I really can’t afford. There isn’t really any mid-market furniture, stuff that looks nice and is of decent quality, but that isn’t super pricy. So I’ve basically had to stick with IKEA (sometimes moving up from MDF to actual wood or metal!) and some other random used furniture. But I do now pay a lot more attention to how I decorate my place, and how I use color in my apartment, and the materials of the things I buy (I’ve recently entered a cork phase, for some reason). Lighting is important, too. And I’ve recently decided to do what many of my Swedish friends have done: invest in nice furniture slowly, over time, but always prioritizing it as something worth spending money on, because feeling comfortable in your space is a worthwhile goal.

 

 

 

Sylvia Martin on her new book, Haunted

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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/haunted-9780190464462

Interview by Maria Nikolaeva Lechtarova

The integration of ethnographic detail, media theory, and analysis throughout your book creates a fluid space for critical thought, as well as enchantment with the subject matter. Writing multi-sited ethnography is a notoriously difficult task. How did you first decide that having a comparative framework was necessary for your analysis? What structuring insights guided your writing process? 

Thank you. Yes, transnational multi-sited ethnography is very challenging. Due to time and funding constraints, you can’t always spend equal amounts of time in each place (and even if you do, there’s no guarantee that you’ll come away with commensurate observations). Yet multi-sited ethnography is also rewarding, as you acquire various perspectives.

More than a comparative study, I consider this ethnography a connective study. Comparison is built into multi-sited ethnography, as George Marcus has said. Yet there are some fundamental similarities between many entertainment industries around the world, especially commercially-driven ones. So, I intended to “follow the activity” into differently located sites with their own particular histories and contexts, to discover specificities as well as commonalities and links between the industries.

Both the Hollywood and Hong Kong media industries operate at multiple scales, simultaneously, and I tried to capture that. They may present as fairly self-contained and separable from one another. Certainly in the day-to-day production process, people are often deeply immersed within their immediate environments. However, the entirety of the production activities of these two industries is not always contained within the city in which their industry is based. Sometimes filming has to occur on location, across state, national, or regional borders. Or, a production may bring in talent or money from other parts of the world. And in fact, Hollywood and Hong Kong have been directly connected to each for about a century through particular individuals, ideas, and financial investments.

The Hollywood and Hong Kong industries also share a long history of being highly commercial, and both have had to increasingly contend with China’s growing film industry – more directly than most other national film industries. Both are seeing more and more of their projects and their workers physically cross borders for economic reasons. And both have tended to be male-dominated at the studio executive level and on set.

Therefore, despite their differences, Hollywood and Hong Kong share many concerns and issues. This is why I didn’t organize the book into separate geographies; there is no pure “Hong Kong Section” or “Hollywood Section”: neither place exists in isolation. In trying to convey film and television production as a diffused, transnational practice, we move back and forth across specific sites within chapters, which combine findings from both places.

By using the concept of media assemblage as an organizational device in the writing as well as an analytical approach to understand the empirical evidence, I was able to preserve the open-endedness that I often saw. (This open-endedness includes some of the overlap between film and television production in both places, too.)

So, I refer to this book as a connective study because I explore material and thematic links between the two industrial centers, alongside the contrasts. Now, there are a couple chapters that deal primarily with one site, but even those still refer to the other site. For instance, in the chapter devoted mostly to Hollywood, I included observations of Hong Kong filmmakers working at a Los Angeles studio, partly as a way to show how in its own backyard (or, backlot), Hollywood is more transnational in its production activities than even it realizes sometimes – and reliant on Asian labor. In our contemporary globalized world, we often operate in industries or institutions that may appear very geographically contained yet are actually quite porous. As a result, place-based worker identities in the States and Hong Kong have been caught up in issues of nativism and racism in the former and localism in the latter.

Of course, there are some very significant differences between the Los Angeles-based industry and the Hong Kong-based industry, especially in regards to geopolitical and economic power, which I discuss. This is why multi-sited ethnography – from research to writing – means grappling with the tension between compartmentalization and connection. It entails shifting perspectives, or multi-sightedness. I found that people in both industries had their own reasons for emphasizing both the uniqueness of their industry and its unity with other national media industries. Figuring out the contours of this relationality has been exciting

I found your concept of “media assemblages” to be a portable tool for comparing very different media worlds. Ethnography stands as the anthropologist’s media of choice to disentangle and explicate the assemblages in field research by constructively distancing them from the spectacles of the anthropologist’s fascinations. However, if you were going to make a documentary film of this book, how would you envision it? Who would be your intended audience, and how would it compare to the audience of this book? 

Making this book into a documentary is a great idea! I’d focus on my finding about the intersection of religion and media production. Some people are surprised to hear that Hollywood studios skip “unlucky” 13 in their numbered sound stages, one studio having even kept a psychic on its payroll (confirming industry hype about “the magic of moviemaking”!). And folks in Hollywood are intrigued to hear about incense burning on Hong Kong film sets to ensure an auspicious shoot, as well as astrological forecasting. Meanwhile, they themselves may collect St. Clare of Assisi icons (she’s the patron saint of television) to help them through the various challenges of filming – the social and emotional risks as well as physical and financial ones. For instance, when filming a death scene in either industry, concerns about mortality can trouble the cast and crew, immersed as they are in these stylized settings.

Why this particular focus? The assumption that there is an absence of religion in the culture of industrial production remains quite strong among people I talk to in both the U.S. and East Asia (especially the United States). The assumption is fueled by economic rationalization and the Enlightenment narrative of a steady march towards scientific reason. Sometimes people see its presence, but they don’t think about its implications.

Anthropologists know that modernity doesn’t mean the loss of mysticism. And people who study performance or religion know that there is a long history of the two being intertwined. But a public anthropology film that shows actors reading Scripture on set or producers budgeting for the hoih geng lai (“opening lens”) ceremony would help general audiences see that “modern” and technologically sophisticated workplaces are not free of religion and spiritual expressions, especially in industries that hinge on so much uncertainty and insecurity. Anthropologists have a lot to offer in helping people to question received categories. Despite the presumed secularity of commercial media environments, actually, expressions of religion and the supernatural are enfolded, sometimes expected, in the very spaces and practices of these businesses. They can even guide work decisions, such as when and where to film.

Hopefully such a film would generate more conversations about the precarious conditions of media labor, and the experience of contemporary work in general. It would make evident to people that we do indeed draw from a variety of cultural elements to make our labor more meaningful, to legitimize decisions, and to protect ourselves as we work, even (especially) in bureaucratic or mechanized settings. The question could then be raised: what other professional workspaces and activities commonly considered secular are actually influenced by, or inclusive of, expressions of formal or informal religion as well as the supernatural? Trading floors? Science labs? Our understanding of managerial accountability and decision-making may then take on another dimension.

This becomes particularly relevant as we consider the implications of automated labor and robot replacements, especially in an industry that increasingly relies upon computer-generated images and digital doubles to enhance or replace the human form. We should think deeply about what it is that human beings bring to the workplace. In addition to the particular skills or talents we offer, people harbor foibles and fears, inspirations and intuitions; these are not mutually exclusive. Our memories of past experiences and anticipations of future events shape our productive capabilities. Our cosmologies – the way we think about the universe whether we’re atheists or adherents – also play a role in formulating our outlook and our decision-making in the workplace (explicitly stated or not). Although corporations and labor management often discourage you from bringing the totality of who you are to work, and some people become quite successful at partitioning themselves (with recent advances in robotics likely to intensify the pressure to do so), not everyone can accomplish this, nor, perhaps, should we always strive to.

In your chapter on “Affective Labor” you illuminate the critical emotive aspects of film production that often take backstage to the “effects” of film reception. How does industry folklore of criminal involvement and encounters with death during the production process circulate publicly?

The industry folklore of those things has frequently circulated through broadcast and print media and rumors in both places. There is a history of organized crime in both industries, especially in Hollywood in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Gangsters such as Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky remain part of the American popular culture landscape, inspiring books and movies. Years ago the Hong Kong actor, director, and producer Philip Chan, who actually used to be a police superintendent prior to joining the film and TV industry, spoke to Hong Kong and British media about triads in the Hong Kong entertainment world. But you don’t hear too much in the news today about organized crime in the Hollywood or Hong Kong film/TV industries.

It’s also worth mentioning that literally a century ago Hollywood became a magnet for drug dealing and use. News reports and rumors of drug use (some legal, some not) among silent film stars contributed to Hollywood’s early reputation as an immoral environment. Over the years, complicated issues of accountability and ethics arose for actors in particular, a few of whom have in interviews and memoirs referred to being “offered” certain substances by production members or management to help their job performance, whether it be for energy, recovery, weight loss, and so on, somewhat similar to athletes and U.S. combat pilots. Manipulating the corporeal and emotional potentials of its workers – even creating a distracted worker – became a tactic of those who manage affective laborers.

Other kinds of illegal activities are regularly reported in the media, such as managers embezzling money from actors. Especially in Hollywood, there’s a lot of contract litigation that gets covered by the trade publications and entertainment media. Other forms of potentially illegal activity, such as discrimination and sexual harassment or abuse on film/TV sets, may publicly surface through reportage of law suits, interviews, and now blogs, social media, and leaks, more so in the U.S. than Hong Kong. The amount of unpaid labor in Hollywood via internships has also come under recent legal and media scrutiny.

As for fatalities, news of accidents on set in Hong Kong circulates in print media. The drowning death of a cameraman on a Jackie Chan film a few years ago in Hong Kong (which was a US/China/HK co-production) was reported around the world because of the big names involved on the film. Accidents during filming on Hollywood projects typically appear in Hollywood trade publications as well as American mainstream media. Regarding the very recent death of stuntman Jon Bernecker on the set of the American TV show The Walking Dead, I was glad to see that the L.A. Times included quotes from OSHA about the lack of workplace protections in its coverage. This kind of context and scrutiny by journalists in both places is needed, especially for productions that film on location, where safety is not always so rigorously followed and rushed schedules can lead to very dangerous mistakes.

You weave together a complex, composite image of the Hong Kong and Hollywood film industries by analyzing their overlapping cinematic and occult histories, as well as their common mode of expression – the camera. I enjoyed peeking through the aperture of your ethnography to consider the space of film production as having its own supernatural gaze – one that shouldn’t be met head on, like that of an onstage actor. What were media workers’ relationships to image-capturing technologies in their lives offset, and how did they differ from their professional roles as mediators between worlds? 

When they’re working, they don’t have a lot of time off-set, in Hollywood or in Hong Kong. Between projects, the relationship to those technologies operated for many of them on a continuum. Film and TV are visual mediums. In both sites, it is in many media workers’ best professional interests to be familiar with how their work looks on-camera (depending on their job: their set design, their direction, their lighting, their angles, their bodies, and so on), as well as the latest developments in camera technologies. Many technical personnel in particular devoted some time off the set to these technologies, so it’s a pretty consistent relationship.

Lots of media workers, even extras, wardrobe assistants, and set designers, often described locations or scenery they observed in their downtime with an eye to how they might look on camera. With smart phones, now “everyone” is a photographer or filmmaker and nothing is too esoteric to be captured and curated. Yet industry members striving to remain employed and competitive have for many, many decades been professionally primed to evaluate all the world as a potential film location, to assess any and all surroundings as a possible backdrop. Offset, they are still mediating between worlds: their private and professional ones.

 

 

Sareeta Amrute on her new book, Encoding Race, Encoding Class

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https://www.dukeupress.edu/encoding-race-encoding-class

Interview by Ilana Gershon

By focusing on Indian computer programmers, you are able to point out the ways in which computer programmers have racialized bodies, and how this affects their work lives.  If you happened to find yourself at a dinner party seated next to a Silicon Valley recruiter, what would you want them to know about your book?

My book takes sides. It’s not just descriptive, it’s provocative. It humanizes an incredibly cartoonified subset of laborers. Literally: I discuss cartoons satirizing Indian IT workers in European publications as part of my chapter on perceptions. I’d want her to know that coders from India don’t deserve the reputation they’ve been handed down as fast, cheap, and replaceable. These attributes are a result of the way the industry produces value, primarily by divvying coding projects up into creative and grunt parts, which are then given to different kinds of workers, often divided by race. And while engineers from India occupy director and management positions across the Silicon Plateaus, Alleys, Valleys, and Highways around the globe, this racial logic remains. Upper management coders from India elevate themselves above the uncreative grunt coders from India along the lines of urbanity, caste, and elite versus regional engineering college backgrounds. These divisions also reach service workers, packers, and cleaners who have access to few of the perks that accompany tech jobs.

The focus of your work – IT workers in companies – is different than earlier anthropological work on coders, such as Chris Kelty or Gabriella Coleman’s work.  What difference do you think it makes that the workers you focus on work for corporations?   How do the organizational structures under which people labor affect people’s philosophies of coding?

There is much to recommend anthropological focus on hacking and free software communities, since in those arenas, alternatives to the neoliberal organization of life often emerges in unexpected ways. But, I cannot teach about global IT without recognizing its corporate structure. Last year, the FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) accounted for at least 50% of all Internet traffic. One out of very two dollars spent on the Internet was spent on Amazon. Most of my students look forward to landing a job at Amazon. Like it or not, the Internet is dominated by corporations.

Within corporations, migrant programmers readily identify the contradiction between the ways that code has to move around the world and restrictions on the global movement of people. This makes them skeptical of free software movements because they simply do not go far enough. By likening code to speech, such movements unwittingly support neoconservative political ideologies that sacrifice human well- being in the name of abstract principles. Migrant programmers diagnose this gap between free software and free people, leading them to violate many principles of what is otherwise considered ‘good’ coding, such as leaving comments that explain their work to others.

You argue that one strategy that Indian IT code writers resort to is writing “inalienable” code, and thus making themselves more essential to a company in a context of temporary contracts.  Could you explain a bit what it means to write inalienable code, and what effect this strategy has on the ways that these workplaces are organized?

Inalienable code is a form of resistance. Global corporations compartmentalize temporary coders from India. “Grunts” resist by writing their code in such a way that makes that code harder to hand off to another, making them harder to replace. This is “inalienable code”. My book includes specific examples, like leaving bad comments or no comments at all, so that the coder is the only one who understand this part of the project.

Interestingly, this is widely considered poor programming. When I began conceptualizing things like this that didn’t fit the “good programming” paradigm, I tried to think of these practices in very concrete terms. They were certainly a kind of foot dragging practice, which we know from studies of factory work is a daily opposition to the ownership of time by the employer. I get a kick out of labor practices developed in the 19th century being right at home in the 21st.

“Poor programming” practices were also a means of creating a kind of wealth. These practices take the idea of knowledge work, that knowledge is capital, at its word. Thinking of aberrant coding practices as creating property and stealing time allowed me to think about the kinds of wealth coding might generate. I revisited anthropologist of the Pacific Annette Weiner’s foundational argument about inalienable wealth, in which she examined kinds of wealth that are kept back from circulation. In her scholarship, she describes wealth that, in a social scene that demands gifts and return-gifts, can be held back from these types of exchange. One of her most famous examples is a greenstone (nephrite) axe, which remained powerfully tied to the history of its victories and could only be held in trust on behalf of a group.

Now apply this concept of “inalienable” wealth to coding. The way global technology companies structure employment agreements, coders do not properly own what they write. They cannot normally exert intellectual property rights over the innovations they may make. So, they instead try to create a special relationship to this wealth by taking it out of circulation—by making it the equivalent of a jade axe buried underground, valuable because it is there not because it is freely available for exchange. Of course, these practices of making code inalienable exist in the everyday alongside the exchange of coding labor for a wage, and the free exchange of solutions to programming problems that coders post to sharing sites like Stack Overflow.

You point out many complex ways in which these programmers represent India to the German public, and a particular model of technological development to government officials in the Indian government.  But one of your imaginative arguments is pointing out that these Indian IT workers have a relationship to India as a state that calls forth a third perspective of how workers are part and parcel of state projects.  Could you explain how currently Indian IT workers overseas understand their relationship to the Indian state?

This is a fascinating question right now, and it demonstrates how coding cultures can be open ended and change over time. By and large, most programmers share a soft libertarian attitude towards governments, including their own. The government should set in motion a limited number of laws, and then get out of the way. As IT workers were understood to represent the new face of Indian business, which was higher paying, innovative and relatively free from corruption, IT workers felt themselves to be the best representative of this new, economically muscular, India. But, the turmoil on the Indian political scene in the last few years has shifted the equation. India’s government, like the United States’ government, has become more nativist in recent years. Opinion about the current state of affairs in India varies widely among Indian IT workers overseas. Some support the ongoing efforts to redefine India a normatively Hindu and are not bothered by increasing inequality, pollution, and violence against minorities. Many are deeply troubled by these developments and have begun to feel displaced, neither comfortable at home, nor in the rightist, anti-immigrant regimes in the U.S. and elsewhere.

You argue that these IT programmers are deeply ambivalent about how neoliberal logics recommend people should organize their lives.  How do they use leisure moments as moments to reclaim control over the kinds of working selves they are expected to be and as moments of experimentation?

Migrant programmers from India can recognize the failures of subjecthood under neoliberalism because as migrants, their precarious job status belies their vaunted position as knowledge workers. The protagonists of my book did all the things white collar workers are supposed to do to become successful—say, for example, getting up at 5 am to go jogging. Yet, jogging was not sustainable. They were working too many late nights for that. What happened next fascinated me. Rather than give up entirely, they walked in the local park. I name walking and related practices fragments of a politics of eros, because they inaugurated a conversation on the content of a good life. Such a conversation is otherwise evacuated under the logics of neoliberal survival. I’m not saying that walking is a perfect utopian practice; but, it is a moment when people practice inhabiting a world they want. Anyone familiar with India knows that the caste and class implications of walking in parks are complex. These moments of eros can just as easily flip into moments of asserting upper caste and upper class rights to urban public space. But, if we paint all overseas Indian IT workers with the same brush, that is, as classist, casteist, Hindu nationalists, we run the extreme danger of missing the progressive potential in their resistance to neoliberal work and its companions, such as a certain ways of exercising. Even more egregiously, we may miss the widest applicability of the conversation about the good life. How many of us can say that we are entirely satisfied by the way neoliberal logics govern our selves and our attachments? I think one of the most important tasks for anthropology is to interrogate the degree to which we, and others, are attached to these logics of hard work and self-improvement. For me, it is an ethical imperative to ask about the texture of a good life across class, caste, race, gender, and color divides.

Perry Gilmore on her new book, Kisisi

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Kisisi Cover

Press link: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1119101573,subjectCd-AN43.html

Kisisi was published in cloth, paperback, and e-editions by Wiley Blackwell in 2016

Interview by Alma Gottlieb

reposted from her website: http://almagottlieb.com/2017/05/interview-with-perry-gilmore-about-kisisi-our-language-the-story-of-colin-and-sadiki/

Kisisi (Our Language): The Story of Colin and Sadiki chronicles a charming and, indeed, remarkable friendship that developed between two five-year-old boys—one (Sadiki), the son of a traditionally pastoralist Samburu family in Kenya working as a wage laborer for wealthy British landowners; the other (Colin), the son of a white American couple of means, both students, living in Kenya for 15 months of graduate research.

When they first met, the age-mate boys found themselves drawn to one another . . . but frustrated by their lack of a common language. Slowly, they developed their own language (dubbed “Kisisi” by Colin’s mother, Perry Gilmore), combining bits and pieces of Swahili and English into a constantly-evolving pidgin that they, alone, understood. Narrating the development of this unique pidgin, the book combines the engagingly personal voice of a proud and loving mom with the sharp observer’s eye of a trained anthropological linguist.

Renowned linguist, Deborah Tannen, has this to say about the book:

It’s part linguistic analysis, part gripping story of culture contact, part deeply moving memorial to a life tragically cut short. This book will fascinate anyone interested in language, children, or human experience.

The 136-page book has five chapters, and Gilmore writes like a dream. Once you start it, I dare you to put it down.

You can find a link to a sample chapter here (“Uweryumachini!: A Language Discovered”):

If you’d like to request an exam copy for a course you teach, follow this link.

You can find Perry Gilmore’s contact information here.

I recently interviewed Perry Gilmore online about the book. Here’s what she had to say (AG = Alma Gottlieb; PG = Perry Gilmore):

PG portrait

Perry Gilmore

 

AG: In the Prologue, you write of Colin and Sadiki:

[T]heir invented language helped them construct new identities and resist, transgress, and transform the marked postcolonial borders and harsh inequities of economics, race and culture that engulfed them and dominated the social power relationships and language ideologies that engaged all aspects of their daily lives (xvi).

As such, you call the book

a human story of irrepressible expressive creativity and the politics of language and oppression . . . an ethnographic exploration of young children’s critical and resilient discursive agency in their innocent yet effective quest for language equality and a place for their friendship on the rigid borders of their vastly different language and cultural worlds (p. xix).

Similarly, in the final chapter, you write:

“the children’s language . . . [created] opportunities for them to cross deeply entrenched colonial borders as effective change agents and as an official effective language policy makers” (p. 95).

Those are impressive claims. How would you respond to skeptics who might doubt the ability of five-year-old children to disrupt the intertwined and entrenched legacies of colonial domination and racism in East Africa?

Colin and Sadiki Planning a Pretend Hunt

Sadiki (left) and Colin (right) planning a pretend-hunt

PG: I agree that these are impressive claims! But I am convinced that they are reasonable and accurate insights about the social dynamics that Colin and Sadiki’s border-crossing friendship generated – for them and for those around them.

In the early pages of my book, I express the hope Colin and Sadiki’s story will be able to amaze the reader. The boys’ story urges us to look more closely and see all children with a little more awe, wonder, and respect.

I, myself, was almost incredulous when I first discovered that, before two months, the children were communicating non-stop and with great facility in a Swahili- sounding language that only the two of them understood. My own shock, disbelief, and curiosity prompted me to record their language carefully and document the full range of their social interactions. In 1975, when these events occurred, I, myself, was doubtful that Colin and Sadiki – at only five years of age – could actually be displaying such creative linguistic virtuosity, strong agentive social roles, and active resistance to the existing language ideologies and conventions that surrounded them.

Having been an elementary school teacher for six years, a language and literacy curriculum developer for school-age children, and a graduate student in developmental psychology with a focus on language acquisition, I had a strong background in child development and behavior. All that I had ever read about children and about language at that time completely defied what I was witnessing.

In Kisisi, I present what I hope is a range of convincing contextualized behavioral evidence to demonstrate not only the children’s language virtuosity but also their effective and impactful social agency. No doubt, some might be skeptical about the ability of two five-year-olds to interrupt an entrenched and oppressive colonial order. I, myself, initially struggled with these more speculative ethnographic insights. For example, I could answer questions about “what” they were speaking with empirical linguistic descriptions that identified specific lexical innovations and new syntactic constructions. I could answer questions about “how” they constructed meaning and negotiated shared information in an empirically detailed discourse analysis that, line-by-line, examined their turn-taking utterances. However, to answer questions about “why” they chose to invent and continue to use their own private pidgin language instead of the Up-Country Swahili that they were expected to use, I used an ethnographic analysis that is necessarily more exploratory in nature and more interpretive in identifying underlying meanings.

A skeptic – or any reader, for that matter – could, and probably should, question my ethnographic interpretations about the children’s resilient and transformative agency. It was my task in the book to provide enough of their story to convincingly demonstrate their effective resistance in a rich description. I hope I accomplished that. As with all ethnographic work, however, I did not and cannot “prove” my analysis; instead, I explore its underlying meanings.

The case of the boys’ friendship, and the ephemeral invented language that helped create and sustain it, presents a provocative extreme along a continuum of possibilities in examining language choices and behaviors in social practice. The example also provides a lens for understanding how young members of language communities use and think about language – how they clearly exercise language choice, change, and possibility.

It is only in recent years, especially in the new and growing field of the anthropology of childhood, that children’s agentive behavior and early language ideologies have been recognized and explored. In earlier anthropological studies, children had generally been seen as the recipients of generational cultural transmission, rather than seen as contributors toand co-constructors of their own worlds. The role of children as language innovators and de facto language policy makers has been largely understudied, undocumented, and even ignored. This case of language invention provides documentation of children’s language creativity; gives insight into the agentive roles of children as language innovators in multilingual contact situations; and sheds new light on questions of language genesis, change, shift, and maintenance.

Even two-year-olds make their own decisions about language choice in multilingual settings. For example, in my Indigenous language work in Alaska, I saw young Yu’pik mothers in tears when their two-year-olds could understand everything their mothers said to them in Yu’pik, but would only answer in English. Somehow, much to the pain of their families, these very young language learners had made their own decision to choose the dominant English language over their Alaska Native heritage language. Examples like these are widespread and clearly demonstrate that very young children can and do resist existing language ideologies and exercise their own language choices.

Colin and Sadiki’s isolated and remote rural situation contributed to their more extreme language innovation, collaborative language choices, and social practices. I have argued that the children, by choosing to sustain, expand, and develop their own private language, resisted the dominant language ideologies that represented the hegemonic, racialized, post-colonial order of newly independent Kenya. Their public uses of their private language made a symbolic statement about what I describe as their “cultural critique” of an oppressive regime in which their own cross-racial friendship was considered by many as a violation of social norms. The boys refused to docilely participate in the existing colonial order and rejected the Up-Country Swahili language that was designated to keep that order in place. They resisted being socialized into a language ideology they rejected, and instead created a new language ideology that allowed a safe and celebrated space for their friendship. Sadiki and Colin used their language to deconstruct a colonial culture of fear and silence and reconstructed their own counter-culture of courage and voice.

Their resistance and language ideologies may not have been articulated with theoretical vocabulary, but they were boldly enacted. The boys did not resist through anger or aggression. Instead their effective, border-crossing agency was accomplished through loving verbal art and play. Their joy-filled language practices challenged the oppressive colonial culture that surrounded them, identifying them as a distinct and separate speech community that valorized its own social justice values and allowed a space for their treasured border-crossing friendship.

Colin & Sadiki-Proud Pretend Hunters

Colin (left) and Sadiki (right)–proud pretend-hunters

AG: What a persuasive response! I dare a reader to remain unconvinced. . .

In the book, you point out that, until recently, scholars of language overlooked children’s linguistic experiences as unimportant. How does your book contribute to developing scholarship about children’s language practices? Does what you observed about the development of Kisisi suggest anything about the origins of our species’ linguistic abilities?

PG: For centuries, speculations about the origins of human language and the genesis of new languages have presented daunting questions for philosophers, language experts, historians, and scientists. These questions had always fascinated me. My primary reason for being in Kenya in the first place was to study baboon communication. This type of ethological fieldwork was in part driven by a fascination for primate studies and its potential for illuminating the origin of language in the human species. The study of nonhuman primates in their natural habitat was a relatively new research practice at that time. Naturalistic, long-term primate studies promised to be a valuable source of information concerning possible models of early hominid behavior and communication. I had no way of predicting that it would be my son’s unplanned and serendipitous close friendship with his Samburu neighbor that would offer me an even more provocative language origin story!

Ethnographic studies of young children’s language socialization were just beginning to emerge as an area of interest and significance. In striking contrast to earlier widespread Piagetian language studies, which characterized children as developmentally egocentric and incapable of modifying their speech for an interlocutor, newer observational studies showed strong socio-centric abilities of very young children and even babies. For example, Elinor Ochs (1977) demonstrated that her infant twins were able to take conversational turns and repeat each other’s pre-linguistic babbling utterances. These findings in the late ‘70s defied the long-held Piagetian claims of egocentrism. Of course, Ochs’ work had not yet been written or published when I witnessed Colin and Sadiki’s socio-centric language invention.

The infamous “forbidden experiments” recounted by Herodotus and others, the failed and poignant attempts to teach feral children to speak (e.g., Itard’s Wild Child, and the case of Genie), questionable research proposals designed to create a new pidgin language by isolating speakers of different languages on a small island (e.g., Derek Bickerton), the study of a new sign language created by deaf children in Nicaragua, twin languages – all these cases were seen to hold the promise of finding the secrets of language origins and genesis. The study of pidgin and creole languages has similarly been seen as a fascinating place to see language develop and change over time.

The study of Colin and Sadiki’s language adds to this literature in captivating ways. It is a rare, first-hand account of an emerging language-in-the-making. Most of the examples of “new languages” are anecdotal and discovered after the fact. I was in an unusual situation whereby I could document the boys’ language practices as they occurred over time. Invaluable also was the benefit of seeing all of their behavior in social context. The ethnographic details of their situated everyday language practices were unique compared to other studies. These ethnographic data allowed for a more “emic” interpretation of the functions, uses, and meanings of their communication in context. This “ethnography of communication” approach enabled me to describe the children as members of a vibrant (if tiny) “speech community” who used their new language for specific purposes and in specific situations. I did not simply provide a structural description of their “language” in a vacuum but in the context of their complex, multilingual social life.

What can Colin and Sadiki teach us all about human language and about children’s language? One reviewer, a linguist and pidgin/creole scholar, has commented that Kisisi “shows that two five-six year old children can create a new grammatical system” and it “can happen fast.” I suggest that the boys can teach us many things about children and language. What seemed to me at first to be a small and simple story of two children inventing a language turned out to be a story that was complex, nuanced, and multilayered. Their experiences raise many profound questions causing us to rethink common assumptions about children and about language. Their “not-so-simple” story provides provocative insights about some very big ideas concerning language origins, children’s innovative language competencies, and the significant role of play and verbal art in language genesis. Their experience provides compelling evidence concerning the agentive roles that very young children can exercise in language and culture resistance, choice, and change.

Sadiki and Colin’s language began in response to a pragmatic need to understand each other in order to be playmates and friends. Their early genesis of an original, simplified Swahili pidgin served that immediate function, facilitating their play and budding friendship. As time went on and their close bonds deepened – even as they had learned and used other local languages – they continued to use and expand Kisisi, its linguistic form and structure, and its semiotic functions. It was fun. It was secret. It was theirs. It was an artistic verbal spectacle that surprised and captivated unsuspecting audiences. Their new language bonded them as much as it reflected their bonds. They created a secret language with a public function. Through their language use, they carved a new, exclusive, and symbolically resonant space, a separate universe for their controversial friendship.

Their experience taught me that we scholars of childhood need to view all children’s language, in its many complex forms, as inevitably intertwined with the lives and meanings of the children who use it.

Colin & Sadiki Closing the Paddock Gate

Colin (left) and Sadiki (right) closing the paddock gate

AG: You lived in Kenya, where the events described in this book occurred, some 40+ years ago. Some people might think that the data are too old to be relevant; others might think you’ve forgotten too much by now to write accurately about the events. Can you talk about the advantages of waiting so long to write about past events?

PG: Producing what Johannes Fabian would describe as a “late ethnography” that (re)presents and interprets historically situated events and practices, I have written this account forty years after I experienced it. I had deliberately accumulated a substantial archive during my time on Kekopey Ranch in Gilgil, Kenya. Like so many who had come before me, I intended to write a book about my time in Africa–although I originally thought my book might be about my life with the baboons I was studying. With that in mind, I was very meticulous about keeping lengthy journals and records. I also kept carbon copies of all the letters I wrote to friends and family back home. And I kept copies of the audio cassette voice letters we regularly sent back and forth to the States. Those voice letters included rich descriptions of our activities and environment, as well as many instances where Sadiki and Colin told jokes, recounted events, and sang songs for Colin’s grandmother, other relatives, and close friends. Because I was fascinated with their new language, I made regular tape recordings of Sadiki and Colin’s language interactions in a range of contexts and kept detailed notes about and translations of their developing language.

At the time, I was a professional writer for a nationally funded educational laboratory, Research for Better Schools, Inc. (RBS). I was on leave to do the baboon research but was able to do freelance writing for RBS drawing on my Kenya experiences. I mostly wrote children’s poetry and short stories for an anthology for a reading and literature curriculum we had been developing. (I had a wonderful supervisor at RBS who arranged for me to continue as a long distance writer on our project. This was amazing since it was long before fax machines, e-mails, Skype and scans! The international packages took six to eight weeks to arrive at their destinations.) I did this writing for the entire time I was in the field. The poetry and stories I wrote were largely focused on the boys and necessarily captured many subtle details and evocative descriptions of their daily life events.

The letters, journals, notes, recordings, and RBS writings all provided an extremely rich archive for me to draw on, decades later. Even forty years on, the accounts seem vibrant and vivid, and the now-digitized recordings bring the children’s giggling voices right into the room. I also maintained a growing library of local books, newspapers, documents, and articles that captured the local colonial life of the period. Furthermore, I drew on the parallel memories of many colleagues, friends, and Sadiki and his family, who lived with us in Kenya at the time. Many of them were kind enough to read early drafts of the book and/or talk with me about these past times and events.

You ask about the advantages of waiting to write about past events. One of the most exciting advantages of writing the book now is that over these decades, the field has grown so rich theoretically, and that has allowed me a range of theories, concepts, and language to work with that did not exist before. When I was first examining their behaviors, we didn’t really have the theoretical frameworks or the critical language to fully describe or understand what the boys were doing. Post-colonial studies, critical ethnography, language socialization, power and hegemony, decolonizing methodologies, agency, resistance and language ideologies didn’t yet exist as areas of study. I was better able to capture all aspects of their profound and complex story by relying more heavily on more recently developed ideas as central issues in telling their story. It was as if the field finally caught up to the boys!

AG: Ha, yes. We sometimes talk about scholars being “ahead of their time.” In this case, two five-year-olds proved “ahead of the scholars’ time”!

In that regard, in the Epilogue, you suggest that Kisisi offers pedagogical implications for language learning (including bilingual education) that could prove useful to teachers of students at various levels and in various contexts. Can you share some specific ideas you might have along those lines?

PG: Ethnographic inquiry about children’s language practices can inform and often enlighten educators. Ethnography can expose children’s language competencies that hide in plain sight, often unnoticed and unimagined. Kisisi can provide one ethnographic account of young children’s competencies that might help teachers look at their own students differently. Teachers might be encouraged to use an ethnographic lens in their own daily pedagogy. An ethnographic eye can reveal otherwise unseen or unrecognized competencies. Ethnographies like Kisisi can present strong counter-narratives to a dominant, destructive, deficit discourse that unfortunately persists in many educational settings. In a time when deficit arguments continue to hang heavy in US educational circles – fueled, for example, by the so-called “30 million word gap” research (Hart and Risley 1995, 2003), which falsely argues that low-income children in the U.S. at three years of age have been exposed to millions of fewer words than have been their wealthy counterparts – it’s a good time for teachers to use an ethnographic eye to confront the unequal power arrangements that obscure the potential linguistic talent, virtuosity, and strength we need to recognize and nurture in all children. By paying close attention and documenting children’s everyday talk, teachers can identify competencies and start to work from from a resource-rich stance rather than a deficit bias. All students come to schools with naturally creative and flexible multilingual and translanguaging capabilities. Colin and Sadiki are not unique. They demonstrate the fluid language abilities that all children are capable of. What is needed is a safe and respectful space to use language(s) in ways that enhance rather than threaten children’s identities and ideologies. When teachers create those meaningful contexts, language learning and use will flourish.

AG: Speaking of which . . . President Trump began his presidency with an executive order founded in deep suspicion of immigrants and refugees. Your book seems founded in the opposite aim: the urge to find the common humanity linking young children from radically different cultural traditions, historical contexts, economic resources, and life options. Have you had any reactions to your book from readers who might have approached it from something closer to Pres. Trump’s position of skepticism? More broadly, do you think your book, and others like it, can make inroads among those who hold deep convictions about the unbridgeable divides separating people via discourses of “otherness”?

PG: In an era of division, I have had very positive responses to Colin and Sadiki’s story. I believe the boys touch a place of hope and optimism in the hearts of those who have read the book. In this Trump era, Sadiki and Colin’s story reinforces a vision of building bridges, not walls. I think it sparks a yearning for deeper human connections with the “other.”
Colin and Sadiki Running in the Tall Grass w Perry Gilmore

Perry Gilmore, Colin and Sadiki walking through tall grasses

AG: Who do you hope will read this book—among scholars/students, policy makers/politicians, and the general public? What’s your fantasy for the impact that this book could have, if it were read by the right people?

PG: I hope a wide array of people will read the book. The two boys offer us a beautiful lesson in humanity. Love and play are at the heart of their creative language virtuosity and their healing, social justice transformations. I hope those who read the book will forever after watch all children with more awe and wonder! Linguists, anthropologist, educators, policy makers, and the general public can all find something in the book for them. The boys have left us a unique gift – a rare language legacy; and a human story of irrepressible expressive creativity and resilience in challenging the politics of language and oppression.

And, finally, I wrote this book as a memorial tribute to my son, Colin Gilmore, whose life was cut short by a drunk driver when he was only 18 years old. One clear hope of mine is that readers will remember Colin and the courageous and loving lessons he and his dear friend, Sadiki, left us.

Kit Woolard on her new book, Singular and Plural

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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/singular-and-plural-9780190258627

Interview by Ilana Gershon

The title of your book, “Singular and Plural,” invokes familiar grammatical categories, but the subtitle “Ideologies of Linguistic Authority….” suggests they have another meaning here. Why did you choose that title, and what do those terms have to do with linguistic ideologies?

Those two terms cropped up so centrally in public discourse about the Catalan language during my fieldwork that it was hard to resist a linguistic pun (and I’ve always had a weakness for those in my titles, anyway). Among historically minoritized languages, Catalan has made an unusually successful bid to become a public language since Catalonia regained political in 1979. That change has involved not only political institutions, but also a shift in the ideological foundations of linguistic authority, and that shift has been from stressing linguistic singularity to plurality.

Traditionally, Catalan has been defended as Catalonia’s “own” language and billed as the defining criterion of the distinctive essence or “singularity” of Catalans as a people. But for more than half a century now, the majority of the population has been of immigrant, non-Catalan speaking descent, creating an uncomfortable ideological tension. Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a trend to talk about Catalan society as pluralistic and plurilingual (in pointed contrast not just to monolingualism, but to “bilingualism” with Spanish). Catalonia is now defended – and marketed – as at one and the same time linguistically singular (with the Catalan language as a distinctive brand), and socially and linguistically plural: more open, multifaceted, and fluid than Castilian Spain. It’s important to grasp this in order to understand the surprising strength and complexity of the Catalan sovereignty movement, which is coming to a head right now, with a referendum on independence set for October 1 that has been declared illegal by the Spanish government in an unresolved standoff.  Most outside political commentators try to impose on this either a traditional Romantic nationalist vision of a clash between two primordially distinct ethnolinguistic groups, or else a purely economic motivation, but neither captures the actual, more complicated dynamics, especially their sociolinguistic dimension.

In this age of Brexit, Trumpism, the National Front, etc. outsiders are always surprised and skeptical that there is no xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric in the Catalan independence movement, but there really isn’t (which is not to say that there’s no xenophobia in Catalonia, that’s another story.) This is not a nativist social movement, and that’s consistent with the developments in linguistic ideology that I found in the period just before the current sovereignty movement broke into the public eye.

To understand the basic argument of your book, readers have to understand language ideologies that locate their authority in authenticity versus ones that locate their authority in anonymity, and how these two forms are co-constituted.  Could you explain these and their significance as though to a curious and enthusiastic undergraduate (who isn’t even tempted to text and is nodding vigorously)?

That would be a pleasure…language ideologies allow one language rather than another to look and sound authoritative, giving institutions and speakers legitimacy and persuasive power in people’s eyes and ears. That power is why such ideologies are important (so I hope you won’t be tempted to text yet). What I call anonymity and authenticity are just two of the possible ideological bases, but these are the ones that have dominated in modernity. Languages that draw on the authority of “anonymity” are represented as neutral, belonging to everyone rather than any place or group in particular, able to express any perspective, and available for all to take up. Not surprisingly, they are the dominant languages. We use the term anonymity to capture the way they can come to be perceived, quite literally heard, as a deracinated “voice from nowhere.”

In contrast, the value of ideological “authenticity” is reserved for languages heard as the voice of someone and somewhere very particular. Linguistic authenticity belongs only to speakers who can claim to be rooted in that particular experience. And in turn the language is taken to be suitable for expressing only that particular perspective. So, authenticity ends up limiting the range of a language and its speakers in the name of valuing it, and creates a sense of illicit appropriation on the one hand or betrayal of one’s true self on the other for those who break the mold. This means that these language ideologies are not just important public matters, they can also be intimately intertwined with individuals’ sense of identity, and bring them personal pain as well as joy, as my informants poignantly recounted to me. (Are you still nodding in vigorous agreement?)

Ideologies are historical creations that take work to sustain, and they can change over time.  I found such changes across the lives of my individual informants as well as in public controversies, and even in linguistic humor, one of my favorite sources of evidence for language ideology. The struggle between Catalan and Castilian for social terrain and persuasive power used to be waged mostly in terms of authenticity – that “singularity” and territorial rootedness of Catalan –  but now there are competing claims to anonymity and cosmopolitanism made for each language. Catalan activists work to debunk Castilian assumptions of the privileges of linguistic anonymity – ‘it’s just a more useful language for everyone; let’s be rational’ – at the same time as linguistic policy and use of Catalan in schools has disrupted the constraints of authenticity that prevented immigrant-descent “New Speakers” from taking it up. I was especially struck by an emerging conception of what I think of as a post-natural sense of personal authenticity as a project, in place of the traditional Romantic vision of the essential, primordial self wedded to a first language. This newer DIY self, no doubt linked to the neoliberal vision of which we are often critical, values willful choice and multilingualism in place of a primordial and seemingly natural relation to language.  I saw this new stance as much in my interviewees’ accounts of how they grew from their earlier monolingual selves as children of working-class immigrants to comfortable bilinguals or multilinguals as I did in public rhetoric. This is one of the ways in which the conception of Catalonia as “plural” appears.

Part of what makes this book such a valuable and insightful take on language ideologies is that you build on decades of research in which you can explore how people’s attitudes and practices have changed over time.  In addressing changes to how authenticity and anonymity are co-constituted, you evocatively claim in your conclusion that “Around the world, people are no longer so certain just what a normal language is.” (304)  How has this uncertainty affected people’s relationships to theirs and others’ linguistic identities?

Catalan speakers and activists have long wished that Catalan could just be a “normal” language, and they even call the goal of extending the use of Catalan “normalization.” By “normal” they mean a language that is used routinely, without fanfare, in any domain of social activity by anyone. In “normal” societies, the thinking went, people “normally” use just one language for all their communicative purposes. We linguistic anthropologists take it for granted that such anonymous monolingual normalcy rarely actually occurs, and where it does it takes work to maintain. But dominant state nationalism became so banal, as Michael Billig has put it, that the work of constructing this “normalcy” remains as invisible to many social scientists and political commentators critical of minority linguistic movements as it does to everyday speakers.

Our era of globalization is unsettling such assumptions. The “normal” languages of the European nation-states, even the larger languages like French, German, and even Spanish that were the model for this normalcy that Catalanists longed for, have surrendered economic, educational, and media functions to global English.  It’s now “normal” for university programs throughout Europe and the rest of the world, and not just post-colonial societies, to function in English; for scholars and professionals to have to publish and work in English or perish; for people around the world not just to consume but to produce even transgressive cultural forms in English. The idea of a standard variety as somehow naturally the best form of a “normal” language has also been challenged by the so-called superdiversity resulting from large-scale transnational immigration as well as the digitally mediated celebration of nonstandard forms, whether in Sheng, AAVE, Estuary English, Rinkeby Swedish….  So, in many parts of Europe and beyond, some formerly taken-for-granted, valued forms and functions of “normal” language are in doubt. This shakes foundations of privilege and of institutions and also creates new forms of inequality and exploitation. But it also opens up ideological space for individuals to form new relationships with a broader set of linguistic forms, and to take pleasure in doing so. I’ve never been known as an optimist about anything, but this is a positive aspect of what I’ve seen developing in late modern Catalonia, in the decades since I first started my research there.

Quite a bit of research on bilingualism privileges high school students’ language ideologies and linguistic choices, yet your longstanding fieldwork in Barcelona shows that this might overlook how language ideologies change over a lifetime.  What does your decades-long research reveal about how language ideologies transform, and why focusing on high school might be too limiting for certain questions?

In hindsight, I guess it’s obvious that people change and we’re not all who we were in high school (fortunately, usually). By the same token, people’s stances toward languages can change, and their uses can follow as they move into the workplace, higher education, romance, parenting. But our sociolinguistic research has put such weight on that adolescent period as both fraught and decisive – for good practical as well as theoretical reasons, and yielding great insights – that I for one lost sight of the obvious. Maybe I should be embarrassed to admit how surprised I was when, twenty years after I had last seen my teenaged informants as pretty determined monolinguals, sometimes ashamed and resentful about the challenge of entering a Catalan-speaking social world, a number of them told me how they had left those fears and constraints behind: “Me, I’ve changed a lot!”  Children of immigrants who had felt shut out from Catalan as teenagers, whether by others or by their own fear of failure, spoke as adults of their pride in exercising new linguistic skills and in leaving behind shame about mistakes and inauthenticity as childish concerns. Of course, change can go in the other direction as well, and ethnolinguistic lines can harden just as they can blur, but most of my interviewees told me of their pride and satisfaction at what they saw as growing up linguistically.

I’d like to take a moment to mention the tremendous gratification that returning to my research site and finding these earlier informants twenty years later brought me. Maybe this is familiar to more traditional anthropologists, but I do urban ethnography in a metropolitan area of some four million people, using a patchwork of methods.  I had little expectation of finding the students from a high school classroom study twenty years earlier (and we could talk another time about the social conditions both of my expectation and the outcome). It was the most moving experience of my research career to get their phone calls or emails (some from Australia and England) answering the letter I had sent to their old addresses out of the blue, and to talk with them and learn what thoughtful, complex adults had grown from the perennial teenagers of the ethnographic present engraved in my mind. One of them still had the notebook I had given each one at the end of my research when they were fourteen, and he showed me that he still used it to jot down brief ideas for his music projects. In fact, he just emailed me this week to say again how much it meant to him as a teenager and still means to him now – thirty years later! – that someone came from such a distance not only to ask about a teenager’s opinions and experiences but to write them down for other people to learn about. I hope he finds that I did justice to them in this book.

Sam Byrd on his new book, The Sounds of Latinidad

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https://nyupress.org/books/9781479860425/

Interview by Ilana Gershon

If you found yourself at a party explaining that you recently published a book on the music playing in the background, how would you describe The Sounds of Latinidad?

bWhen I explain my research, folks often express surprise that the genres of Latin American and Latino music I studied have such a vibrant scene in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Most often their question is, “Why Charlotte?”  The Sounds of Latinidad is a book not just about Latino immigration, but about how the city influences musical production and consumption and how musicians and their audiences position themselves as urban subjects.  In the case of Charlotte, you have a globalizing financial center whose banks were key players in the 2008 financial crisis.  Latino immigrants were recruited to build the bank towers and continue to fill many of the low wage service sector jobs that support the finance industry.  Latino immigrants are still a very invisible population culturally– they are very visible politically in the sense that Mexican and Central American migrants are the target of much anti-immigrant vitriol– but musically most people still tend to think of the South as a black and white place: birthplace of the blues, country, gospel, or more recently, indie rock, southern rap, etc.  Latino musicians are changing that by bridging U.S. and Latin American genres, becoming southern and Latino.  The sounds of latinidad, and the contributions of other recent newcomers- Asian immigrants, Irish immigrants, northern transplants- are transforming the music of the region to a more globally engaged, diverse field.  But there still remains that feeling, that soul that makes the music southern.

When you describe Latino musicians as workers, you point out that the different bands you studied did not all choose the same paths towards being a band.  Some focused on appearing as professional as possible by showing up on time sober, others on seeming to have as good a time as possible, which can involve considerable amounts of alcohol.  Some spent hours and hours rehearsing, others met only to perform.  I was wondering if you could explain some of the working dilemmas that Latino musicians face in particular that allow for such a wide range of strategies?

In chapter 4 of The Sounds of Latinidad, I thought it vital to consider the working conditions of Latino musicians as work.  Far too often, we tend to conflate the extroverted performance styles that many musicians have and the casual way musical performance permeates our leisure time with play, as in musicians are just playing and not really doing difficult labor.  But my research showed how Latino musicians embody the precarious nature of work that is affecting nearly everybody it seems in a globalized neoliberal capitalist economy: they work gig to gig, receive low pay, are non-union, work irregular and sometime unpredictable hours, at times suffer from wage theft or work for “exposure”, and are subject to the vagaries of the consumption economy.  Their experiences are representative of the larger Latino immigrant population.  Their varying performance styles serve as a way for Latino musicians to define themselves and be defined by their audiences, in a way to “brand” themselves, but also to be part of the musical communities that are renegotiating what it means to be Latino in the face of stiff cultural opposition and misunderstanding on the part of non-Latinos in Charlotte.  In other words, for Banda TecnoCaliente, being professional and sober is part of their desire to present a positive image of Mexican immigrants in the face of negative stereotypes of their compatriots in the mainstream media and even from within the local Latino community.  For bands such as Bakalao Stars, having “as good a time as possible” is part of a strategy to use the consumption of Latino culture to bridge genres and connect to audience members of diverse Latin American origins and to non-Latino audiences.  In terms of working dilemmas, Banda TecnoCaliente has to differentiate themselves from other local bands of regional mexicano music to get hired by festival promoters who see bands as interchangeable parts.  Bands that play in bars and restaurants often employ a strategy of drinking and socializing with their audience to make them feel at home, this can lead to the dilemmas of substance abuse and marital infidelity, but also the further casualization of musicians’ labor as they break down the “fourth wall” of performance.

Given that genres for Latino musicians can so significantly signal race and class, how do these interpretations of what different genres index shape the songs of other artists they choose to cover?

 Musicians play what they know.  One striking aspect about Charlotte’s Latino musicians was their wide-ranging tastes. I subscribe to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea that taste is a socially-constructed facet of a person’s class background and habitus. Genres rules can often limit through their rhythm and sound, and through their association with a class identity.  While there is much of this constriction in Charlotte, there also is much borrowing from the diverse streams of culture that immigrants from across Latin America bring to the city.  Because there is no one dominant nationality (and thus genre) that takes precedence, I sense musicians’ openness to trying new ideas.  This is also reflective of  the cosmopolitan nature of popular music genres in Latin America– where Colombian cumbia reinvents itself in Argentina and Mexico, bachata travels outside Santo Domingo,  reggaetón welds together Puerto Rican and Panamian ingredients, or Latin American rock fans grow up idolizing Gustavo Cerati (Soda Stereo) and Slash (Guns N’ Roses). Musicians in Charlotte, I argue, have tried to compile a canon of important songs that they consider vital to cover regardless of genre through an informal process of debate and experimentation during performances. They also engage with their perceptions of what southern music is, integrating blues, jazz, and other American genres into their styles as they interact with local non-Latino musicians.

Some musicians were torn between identifying as Mexican or latinidad, what shaped those decisions and did those decisions change over time?

 “Latino,” “Hispanic” and now “Latinx” are almost entirely United States-specific terms. All the recent immigrants I met identified with their nationality first- Mexican, Venezuelan, Dominican, etc. (and sometimes even the region within the home country) and then begrudgingly Latino or Hispanic next.  I see identifying as Latino as a process that happens as immigrants become long-term residents of the United States and negotiate their new identities as immigrants by interacting with state bureaucracies where they check Latino/Hispanic on forms.  “Latino” also becomes a way to include other immigrants in a common group identity. “Latino” is much more acceptable to the second generation who grows up using the term as part of US identity politics, but increasingly are also the children of mixed-nationality or mixed-ethnicity marriages.  For musicians, the context is important; for certain genres retaining national identity is vital (regional mexicano, for example) while others allow for a more pan-Latino identity.

 You mention that musicians have to be seen to treat their audiences well by giving out a few copies of CDs and so on.  Could you talk a bit about how they use social media to manage this as well?  Are the social media expectations different for Latino musicians than they are for other types of musicians?

  This is a phenomenon to consider in the context of neoliberal economic shifts and the deep (and often devastating) changes technological innovation has wrought on the music industry.  It is now accepted practice for musicians to basically give away their recordings to audiences online (either directly, or though streaming services).  Bands make money through live shows and commercial royalties, if they make money at all. Charlotte’s Latino bands give away CDs to connect with their audience, to convince them to come to future shows, and share the music by word of mouth.  But they also want a tangible product that shows discerning listeners the quality of the music’s production and arrangement (sometimes done at a professional studio with great expense, often on a personal computer using recording software).

Social media is transforming the band-audience interaction.  Innovations like live videos on Facebook allow bands to post rehearsals and shows as they happen to encourage fans to attend, while event pages facilitate publicizing concerts, and band pages become places where people comment and make connections.  It can be a way for an up and coming band to rapidly build an audience.  But does social media presence just become a branding exercise that encourages slick imaging and promotion over musical quality?  Are musicians with less online technological expertise or financial resources, particularly recent, working-class immigrants, being left behind? We shall see.

Nina Sylvanus on her new book, Patterns in Circulation

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http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo25126083.html

Interview by Ilana Gershon

If you found yourself sharing a taxi to the AAA conference with a media anthropologist studying Chinese soap operas, how would you explain your book’s major points?

It’s funny that you mention soap operas since some of the names that are given to the (pagne) cloth that features at the heart of the book are named after (or inspired by) the characters of popular Ivorian and Latin American soap operas. A pattern called “Ricardo’s suitcase” for example is named after the hero of a Brazilian telenovela, and there are many others that broadcast images about power and politics, beauty and wealth, and romance and conflict between men and women in global West Africa. I’d probably continue to talk more about the framing and analytical connections between television, cloth, and the global-local mediations of popular culture, but let me get to the book’s major points.

In the book I take a mundane object –the pagne or the boldly patterned wrap that women wear in large parts of West Africa—to trace its origins, paths of circulation, and its technical and social production from Holland to Java, from Togo to the broader West African region, and now from China back to Africa. Drawing upon archival research and multi-sited fieldwork, the book theorizes the material economies of this iconic commodity (so-called Dutch wax cloth), born out of 19th-century Dutch colonial efforts to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, and reborn as a cultural and status marker for West African women. I think of this wax-printed cloth as a vibrant object and an assembled commodity, whose fabrication is uniquely entangled in both imperial circuits of commerce and more recent controversies over piracy and appropriation.

At the heart of this work are two metaphors. First is a visual metaphor: “pattern”–the idea of (memorable) recurring forms that we see and recognize across time and space. Secondly, there is “dense materiality” –the notion that there are properties inherent in the cloth that gives it material agency, and yet it is manipulated by its wearer and brought to life by the body. Through analysis of the cloth, my book reveals the making, unmaking and remaking of relationships between things, people, and the institutions that govern them. While the material object is at the center of the story, the book pays close attention to its various uses and to the way it extends out into different spaces: into the market, into the world of national Togolese politics, and into factory floors in Holland and China.

 

Chapter 3 focuses on analyzing wax cloth as a medium central to political spectacle and the formation of Togo as a nation, I was hoping you could talk a bit about the analytical implications of engaging with cloth this way.  Taking cloth to be a medium particularly well suited to the political in Togo allows you to add to Benedict Anderson’s argument about how national identity emerges, and am hoping you can talk about how using cloth makes this a specifically Togolese form of nationalism.

To answer this question is to address the chapter’s central arguments about how a material object such as cloth helped forge national identity in intimate and public terms in Togo. I have to start with the Nana Benz’s role in the representational order of the nation. The term Nana Benz refers to the powerful Togolese cloth traders who controlled the West African wax cloth trade from the 1950s to the 1990s, until political crisis, neoliberal reform and Chinese knock-offs derailed their hold on the economy. Named this way because these market ‘mothers’ used their wealth to buy the Mercedes Benz cars, which they then lent to the long time president-dictator, the Nana Benz built their financial power by controlling the circulation of cloth and embedding the cloth’s semiotic power (and their branding power) into the order of the nation. The Nana Benz made the nation both intimate and palpable, by trading on national associations in the popular pattern names they bestowed on pagne, thus enabling ordinary Togolese to partake in the narrative of nation-building through their everyday consumption of cloth.

Anderson’s argument about print capitalism is useful for considering how wax cloth (pagne) reached the masses, solidifying communal identities while registering national, ethnic, and gender differences. This is what makes cloth a particularly well-suited medium to the political and the specific brand of Togolese nationalism. The efficacy of this particular type of cloth and its association with Nana Benz-style nationalism is reflected in the common stories Togolese remember about the cloth traders, which offer insights into the way the Nana Benz (and their powerful stock in trade) captured people’s imaginations.  My analysis draws out the “dense materiality” of cloth and the way it can at once evoke sentiment and move imaginaries and bodies while grounding the political and the nation in its materiality and visibility. Because cloth provides a surface for multiple narrations and representations (the literal image layered onto the cloth for everyone to see and the bundle of unbridled meaning it generates and that is open for manipulation) it was made to work as a medium that inscribed and disseminated the political spectacle and embodied power. For instance, when the portrait of the Togolese dictator Eyadéma (in power for nearly 40 years) appeared on cloth, the fabric literally captured the body politic during political spectacles when wearing the presidential party pagne became practically obligatory.

 

During the course of your research, how to be a successful trader transformed to such a degree that who was or could be successful shifted dramatically.  Could you explain how trading cloth changed to such a degree during those ten years that the Nana Benz was replaced by the Nanette?

One of the most dramatic events that fundamentally changed the nature of the regional cloth trade was the 1994 currency devaluation of the West African CFA franc: when the price of cloth doubled over night and practically turned an everyday consumer good into a luxury item. At the same time, shifts in global production, the liberalization of Togo’s political, economic and public spheres and the undoing of the old system of cloth distribution, which had granted the women traders exclusive retail rights to the (Dutch) designs, all weakened the Nana Benz’s place in the market. With the breakdown of national protections in post-Cold War Togo –amidst the crisis of the state, the unraveling of the dictatorship and national structures (Charlie Piot describes this process brilliantly in Nostalgia for the Future)– the Nana Benz’s position as entrepreneurial nationals diminished, if it wasn’t devalued all together.  So when this system fell apart, a new set of female Togolese entrepreneurs, the Nanette, began collaborating with Chinese companies to produce better and better imitations of Dutch wax, undermining the very basis of class distinction in Togo as well as throwing wax cloth production and distribution into chaos.

Over the course of a decade-long fieldwork (2000-2010), I witnessed the struggles, and in some cases the financial ruin, of the old guard of cloth entrepreneurs whose profit margins continued to decline while some Nanettes accumulated fortunes. Although the Nana Benz initially denigrated the new China prints that the Nanettes distributed to cash-constrained consumers as fakes, some of the older women entered the China trade with varying degrees of success. For the new trade required a new kind of entrepreneurial subjectivity and savvy, including the ability to operate multiple trades at the same time.  As subtle neoliberal actors, the Nanettes fashioned themselves entrepreneurially through the flexibility of cloth, moving themselves and cloth in and out of Chinese factory floors. But tinkering with cloth design, engineering copies while teaching Chinese manufacturers about the qualia of cloth — its texture, color, and smell— to enhance its sensuous and aesthetic properties is also a high-risk affair. I saw several Nanettes ruin themselves when the containers of cloth they had commissioned arrived at the port with unsellable (that is, faulty) merchandise. Navigating the fluctuations of a market where profit is made from the speed of copying and moving things transnationally, requires a distinct set of entrepreneurial dispositions. A successful Nanette not only appropriates neoliberal logics but she mobilizes an autonomous set of practices and subjectivities by constantly moving herself and cloth, cultivating close relationships with powerful port brokers, and involving herself with innovative open-source design and production.

 

What does the story of China’s role in Africa look like when one begins by looking at the trade relationships surrounding cloth?

The circuit of capital built in the corridor between Africa and China is often portrayed as the new axis of South-South exploitation in Western media and policy discourses. Lurking behind this new axis are often ideological fears about the decline of the West in the world and the appearance of new global empires. Simplistic descriptions of Chinese neo-colonialism fall short in accounting for the complex ways that objects enter into and make social life, history and transnational trade. Looking closely at the materiality of trade and cloth allows moving beyond clichés about new forms of colonialism to ethnographically study what Chinese investment in Africa means for the people who work and live there.

What I try to show in the book is how China-in-Africa or China-in-Togo for that matter is made through complex patterns of coproduction and cross-positioning. Nanettes traveling to China leverage considerable agency with Chinese manufacturers who depend on the women’s deep knowledge about the qualia of cloth and consumer taste. These are intimate encounters, when traders spend weeks at a time on a single factory floor and become producers of their own brands. Which does not mean that traders and consumers view the dominance of Chinese goods on local markets as unproblematic. There are many symbols, metaphors and stories that are associated with Chinese traders who dupe the population with low quality goods in the city. Yet beliefs about the aggressive business practices of Chinese traders are often contradicted by the traders’ actual practices.

I am currently in Togo to work on my new project on Chinese investments in the Lomé port (Harboring the Future) and have had time to reconnect with the China-trading women in the market. While some complain that there is no longer money to be made in Chinese cloth (partially because there is too much of it), others speak of a strengthened partnership with their Chinese manufacturers. Certainly, what this trade relationship surrounding cloth reveals is the patterning of a new phase of global capitalism–whether that is capitalism with “Chinese characteristics” à la Aihwa Ong or a new form of (last) frontier capitalism remains to be seen.

 

Goebel interviews Lauren Zentz on her new book

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http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?K=9781783098460

Interview by Zane Goebel

Briefly, what is this book about?

In this book I explore the history of power and human movement throughout the Indonesian archipelago in order to understand the scaling of language forms that has taken place over centuries, during colonialism and the development of the post-colonial state, and now in an Indonesia coping with the processes of ‘globalization’. I collected my data during a 2 month stay in Central Java in 2008, a 10 month stay in the 2009-10 school year, and another 2 month stay in the summer of 2013. My participants were English majors at a Christian university; I spent the 2009-10 school year teaching courses in their department ranging from Sociolinguistics to introductory speaking for first year majors. I recruited my focal participants in my Fall 2009 Sociolinguistics course. Over the course of our year together I interviewed the participants in individual and group settings, and spent time with them and other students outside of classes over dinner, coffee, church, or at their family homes.

In this book I first discuss the theoretical concepts I used to interpret my data, then I explore the history of power and migration throughout the archipelago. I relate this history then to the development of Indonesian as a national language, and to contemporary use and ‘loss’ of Javanese, the primary local language of Central Java. Finally I discuss the overwhelming presence of English in Indonesia, and how the ‘state project’ generally relies on and resists English and its presence in the country. In all, this is an examination of how these three languages fit within the national project, and how the state continues to try to influence the ways in which they are used and the ways in which they are tied to the national, local, and global identities of their citizens.

Which field(s) do you think your book engages with the most?

This book engages with the fields of Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, and Applied Linguistics. I’ve been a lifelong ‘jack of all trades, master of none’, and so I prefer to reach across disciplinary boundaries as much as possible in trying to gain a holistic picture of my research context. It is in this sense that I find it useful to rely on the label of Applied Linguist, as through this title I feel less beholden to any one field, and I feel like I can drive my work toward my long-term end goal of improving societies through education, language learning, and intercultural exchange. I am also not a fully ‘pedigreed’ Linguistic Anthropologist, and so it is possible that a reader from the field of Linguistic Anthropology will find my work ‘not anthropological enough.’ And so again, the application of the Applied Linguist label, I feel, allows me more freedom to take my work in whatever directions I feel interested in for the purposes of the project at hand and for my own long-term goals.

Who have been the main scholars that have inspired you as you have written this book?

I have most strongly latched onto in my work the writings of Jan Blommaert, Alastair Pennycook, and Monica Heller for theory, and onto Anthropologists of Education for my methods, namely through foundational coursework with Perry Gilmore for Discourse Analysis, with Norma González for general field methods, and with Richard Ruíz for Language Policy studies.

Besides the normal suspects of Linguistic Anthropologists, Applied Linguistics folk and Indonesianists, who do you see as your main readership?

This is clearly a book for graduate students and professionals in the field. I hope that readers will take away from this book the importance of situating our work within deeper historical contexts. Part of this importance for me comes from the desire to explain that Indonesia’s current historical context is not the way it is simply because of the development of the nation-state in reaction to European colonialism. Many of Indonesia’s current sociolinguistic facts are due to human currents and power dynamics that have been going on for far longer. Those deeper historical dynamics are possibly much more evident on islands farther away from Indonesia’s political and cultural ‘centers’ like the islands of Java and Sumatra. It is probable that in Java we in fact see some of the consequences of colonialism and statification as much more influential in contemporary life, or at least that we see them quite differently across contexts within this one expansive country.

What do you think were your best strategies to help you get this book completed?

For me the answer was keeping a schedule. I’m no proponent of one size fits all solutions, but for me, having a life outside of my work is a serious key to maintaining sanity. During summer writing periods I would keep a regular 8-5ish work schedule with exercise before or after (or in the middle if I was getting antsy) work time, and I would take regular work breaks consisting of a walk outside (100 degree Fahrenheit heat be damned!). During semesters, I would limit teaching work to teaching days, and I would keep the other days of the week as research-only days. Tasks like grading were reserved for times when I was too tired to do much thought-intensive work.

As you wrote the book and reflected on your research methodologies, did anything strike you as something in need of change?

For me the biggest thing was adding the historical component. As I began writing my book I just felt that this was an empty story without that. So I spent a lot of time during the writing process digging into historical accounts of how Indonesia has come to be. Another important thing to me was taking time to problematize terms that earlier I did not have the time nor the experience to problematize; words such as ‘globalization’ and ‘translanguaging’/’polylanguaging’/etc. For the former I reached across disciplinary boundaries to see how other fields approach this term, and for the latter I took more time to delve into writings on these topics, from across linguistic fields.

Has this book motivated you to start the next book/project? If so, then can you tell us a little about your new work.

I’m not sure if writing a book inspires anyone to write another one! But I will admit that having written a first book makes me feel more confident in having a go at another one. That being said, I am currently reminded daily that having this experience under my belt does not make a second project go any faster or smoother. I have moved on to two new projects – neither in Indonesia – and starting from scratch is simply starting from scratch, no matter whether it’s your first, third, or fifth research project. It all just takes lots of time, reading, data collection (and revision and revision and revision), note taking, and patience.