Monthly Archives: July 2019

Devin Proctor’s page 99 test

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My dissertation, On Being Non-Human: Otherkin Identification and Virtual Space, is based on five years of ethnographic engagement examining identity construction and social practice among the Otherkin, a group of several thousand people who self-identify as intrinsically other-than-human. Otherkin recognize their bodies as biologically human, but their inner selves as non-human (such as wolves, dragons, elves). Because the group meets almost exclusively in Internet spaces, the dissertation follows the Otherkin across platforms—Second Life, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, and Reddit—to trace how digital technologies can be used to mitigate the misfit between their bodies and identities.

Page 99 appears near the end of Chapter One and contains the transition from one large section to another in a discussion delineating “Otherkinity” as a term and an identity category. Here it is, without edits:

***

It is possible that other-than-human-ness has been an intrinsic facet of humanity from our very beginnings—images of human shape-shifting can be seen in the Lascaux cave paintings, created roughly 17,000 years ago (Henneberg and Saniotis 2016). If this experience of other-than-human-ness has, indeed, been occurring all over the world throughout history, it stands to logic that it did not simply stop due to Western modernity and post-enlightenment science. Yet, aside from the Otherkin (and children, as mentioned above) we have seen no large scale non-human identity category in Western, industrialized nations. A possible reason other-than-human experience has not been recorded on a larger scale in the West is that people did not have a name for it. When observed elsewhere, we have simply referred the myriad other-than-human experiences with the umbrella term animism. This same type of animism in Western contexts has not been available as a way to be a human (Hacking 1995, 2006). And now it is: it is called Otherkinity.

An Otherkin is a Kind of Human

As much as Otherkinity is a felt, experienced, embodied state of being, it is also socially constructed. I mean this in the sense that it is a category of identity based around a culturally constructed set of criteria, like being obese, or a woman, or mentally ill. Philosopher Ian Hacking calls these “human kinds,” by which he means “classifications that could be used to formulate general truths about people; generalizations sufficiently strong that they seem like laws about people, their actions, or their sentiments” (Hacking 1995, 352; see also Goffman 1963).

***

This passage might seem, at first, a poor representation of the work, since it mentions nothing of the Internet and contains absolutely no ethnographic content or even a citation to an actual anthropologist. On a more theoretical level, however, it speaks to one of the dissertation’s foundational assertions: that our identities as humans are just as culturally constructed as they are biologically designated. While this dual formation can be seen quite clearly in the case of my interlocutors, I would argue that it is true for us all. The tension between cultural and biological human identity underpins political arguments about which bathrooms we can use and the relationship between DNA testing and membership in particular ethnic groups. Indeed, one of the main arguments that I put forth in the dissertation as a whole is that the Otherkin represent a larger shift in body-understanding from a Cartesian bounded vessel to something more plastic and negotiable, epitomized in growing numbers of people identifying as trans* fluid, nonbinary, and neurodiverse. The term I offer for this wider phenomenon is open-bodied identification. Further, I argue that our increasing interaction in and with Internet spaces—as a technologically-mediated form of animism—helps to foster this open-bodiedness by extending the indexical relationship between our bodies and our identities.

 

Proctor, Devin. 2019. “On Being Non-Human: Otherkin Identification and Virtual Space” Ph.D. diss. The George Washington University.

Devin Proctor can be contacted here: dproctor@gwu.edu

Cited References

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Simon & Schuster.

Hacking, Ian. 1995. “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds.” In Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, edited by D. Sperber, D. Premack, and A. J. Premack, 351–94. Symposia of the Fyssen Foundation. New York, NY, US: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.

———. 2006. “Making Up People.” London Review of Books, August 17, 2006. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/ian-hacking/making-up-people.

Henneberg, Maciej, and Arthur Saniotis. 2016. The Dynamic Human. Bentham Science Publishers. https://doi.org/10.2174/97816810823561160101.

Ben Tausig on his book, Bangkok is Ringing

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Interview by Mack Hagood

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/bangkok-is-ringing-9780190847524

Mack Hagood: Bangkok is Ringing brings us into the center of the Red Shirt protests in Bangkok during 2010 and 2011—a truly historic moment in Thailand that garnered international attention. Was the movement your original object of study when you headed to Thailand as a PhD candidate? What precipitated the movement and what unfolded after you arrived?

Ben Tausig: This massive occupation, and the movement that initiated it, was not my original object of study. Although I was interested in music and politics, and although the Red Shirts had been gaining energy for a while when I began my research, the dynamics of the movement would have been impossible to predict. But on arriving, the occupation of central Bangkok was just underway, and unsettling everything, so it would have been impossible to turn away from what was going on, no less the extraordinary role of sound in the protests. So I turned towards them. And then the movement remained so active – and so central to Thai politics – for so long that it seemed wise to stick with it. Moreover, in time the Red Shirt movement began to find performative echoes in other places, especially parts of the Arab Spring, which only made it feel more relevant.

Mack Hagood: Your book explores the protest movement through sonic performance and media of sounding and listening, revealing “uneven geographies of sound” made up of smaller “sonic niches.” Please walk us through some of these actors and media and how they feed and enact a protest movement.

Ben Tausig: The book is structured like the protests themselves. It is divided into seventeen chapters that vary in length, scope, and tone, and that at different points reflect or conflict with one another. That’s exactly what it was like being inside the Red Shirt camps. They were ad hoc spaces full of internal variations of class, region, and aesthetics. And their sounds often tracked with these differences. I call the subspaces within the rallies “sonic niches” because, like ecological niches, they existed in a state of flux, as well as in profound and dependent relation to neighboring spaces. Moreover, they were highly sensitive, and it wasn’t unusual to hear one of them disappear entirely due to some small change in, say, police enforcement of a public amplification law. Political movements are typically coalitional like this, as Mouffe and Laclau remind us. The elder bookseller whose formative experience of dissent was the Marxist movements of the Vietnam War era may not have much to say to a kid from the northeast who adored billionaire former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. And it follows that the performative proletarianism of the former’s songs for life folk tunes did not always mesh well with the latter’s hip-hop. But they and their sounds found ways to coexist under the banner of a movement that they each believed would benefit them.

Mack Hagood: One of your main theoretical interventions is to dispute the common claim in sound studies that sound is unbounded and transcendent. You make a careful study of how sound is often constrained and you enlist it “to help us understand how agency caroms and fractures, how political actors often find themselves bouncing off walls rather than frictionlessly through them” (6). Can you describe how themes of constraint, blockage, patience, and persistence operate through the book in terms of sonic and political agency?

Ben Tausig: This theme arose from firsthand experience of the protests. They were so densely crowded that one could only ever experience them while partially or totally stuck, for example making long and arduous sojourns (we’re talking hours) across, say, 50-meter stretches of road to buy a bottle of water or find a friend. For those who know Bangkok, this feeling of being stuck is achingly familiar, because traffic is so intense and the roads so poorly accommodated to it (on this as a historical problem, see the work of Claudio Sopranzetti, who was in Bangkok at the same time, and who analyzes mobility very well). In my case, this experience suggested itself first as a metaphor for the ways that sound, as an agent of political force, is likewise beset by many stubborn obstacles. But why stop at the metaphor? After all, protest movements depend upon sound to announce themselves as totalities, to produce an affective sense of unity, and to make specific points emphatically. I began to reflect on the mundane ways that sound did not travel freely at Red Shirt events, and to consider how this lack of mobility could help us think about obstacles to political change, as well as to the performance of a desire for political change.

Mack Hagood: I was thrilled to learn about the cultural and political valences of luk thung and molam, genres of Thai music that some western readers may have encountered through reissues on the Sublime Frequencies label. You also movingly describe some musical moments involving these genres. Can you talk a bit about their history and importance in the Red Shirt movement?

Ben Tausig: Amporn Jirattikorn as well as James Mitchell have written about the political history of these genres, as has Terry Miller (in an earlier moment). Sublime Frequencies typifies a relatively new kind of “world music,” a phenomenon that has been analyzed by Portia Seddon and David Novak, among others. Briefly, decades- or even centuries-old genres circulate today in a weird and remediated fashion that requires – decidedly! – a new auditory ethics. That’s a long way of saying that most western listeners who hear mor lam and luk thung are likely to do so through media products that obscure their political valences. In what we might call hipster-colonial commerce, these genres are typically marketed and heard as psychedelic or otherwise exotic – a familiar and regrettably orientalist framing – whereas in practice they contain a rich poetics of exclusion from political power. That poetry can tell us a great deal about how people identify with rurality in Thailand, especially as a moral ground within a country that’s long been a site of unregulated, exploitative capitalist development. The Red Shirts’ use of these genres therefore necessitates a closer examination of the latent possibility of a left-wing instinct that has been unnaturally excluded, one might well say repressed, from political discourse (Communist political parties, for example, are formally illegal). The possibility of the eventual return of the left, even as a kernel, therefore cannot be ruled out after considering how mor lam and luk thung functioned for the Red Shirts. This was an exciting part of the research, and I still hold out hope for this kernel to grow, even though it is an interpretation that has not yet been borne out.

Mack Hagood: I hesitate to pursue this next line of questioning, both because it may simply be a reductive and facile cross-cultural comparison and because it may seem to signal political commitments I don’t own. However, while reading Bangkok is Ringing, I couldn’t help but think repeatedly about the political rallies of Donald Trump. There are so many similarities: a rural political movement sneered at by many among the urban and educated; a wealthy, media-savvy, populist leader who, like Tahksin, benefitted from and perpetuated neoliberalism while also railing against its social ills; a similar ecosystem that sprung up around the rallies of chanting, blaring music, homemade media, and political performativity—even the red color of the iconic MAGA hat! I have often thought that those of us working in the politics of sound, media, and affect studies should be doing a lot more work on Trumpism. What insights did the Thai example provide as you watched these events transpire in the United States? Does your sonic approach provide us ways of understanding what is happening here now?

Ben Tausig: Absolutely. Politically and economically, Thailand tends to foreshadow certain global developments, perhaps because capital is quite free to operate as it wishes there, so it bumbles into crises with less friction. That’s an undeveloped theory, but I am not the only one to notice it. And indeed, Thailand had a billionaire populist before the US did, although one could also draw comparisons to George W. Bush, who was elected at the same time as Thaksin. It is highly ironic that there is even an argument for the emergence of a leftist politics within the Red Shirts, given what a violent, autocratic neoliberal Thaksin could be (he bears some similarities to Duterte). But the fact remains that some percentage of Red Shirts joined the movement in spite of Thaksin, not because of him. One can therefore draw some meaningful connections between the Red Shirts and the American populist right, and it is worth reading Kasian Tejapira’s prescient insights from 2006. But the comparison has its limits.

Meanwhile, yes, I think sound studies can draw some narrow comparisons here. Sonically and otherwise, Trumpism cast itself as a puncture of elite spaces. The Red Shirts cast themselves in much the same way. Their occupations were provocatively staged in the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan parts of Bangkok – precisely the areas from which they as working people were excluded. They blared rustic songs, voices, and timbres in the most refined districts of the country. Some Trump supporters were likewise given, especially in the winter of 2016-17, to entering public spaces that they felt were the province of liberals, and shouting insults as a form of spatialized comeuppance against people (and, ostensibly, a system) they disliked. The comparisons stop, of course, when we consider the racial privilege at stake in the U.S. case study, not to mention the homophobia, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia that explicitly underwrote Trump’s election. But I do think there was a similar value in both instances to using sound to penetrate the spaces of a political opposition.

Mack Hagood: You have taken it upon yourself to self-produce an audio version of your book, which is available on your website. What opportunities and challenges does the audiobook format present to academia?

Ben Tausig: I’ll link self-promotionally here to a brief piece in the Journal of Popular Music Studies that came out this summer, and summarize it by saying that there are enormous opportunities right now for sound studies, as well as music studies, to imagine new kinds of critical published products that combine conventional analysis with audible material. But we also have to be very thoughtful about the economics of these ventures, given where academic publishing is today, and the pitfalls that come with shiny new objects (namely, that scholars could be asked to do even more uncompensated labor than they already perform).

Mack Hagood: Finally, is there any conversation or debate that you find most interesting in sound studies right now? Any current plans or projects that intervene in it?

Ben Tausig:  I am always drawn to deep anthropological work on sound, especially that which addresses people and spaces outside of the United States and Europe. This is a lack that I believe emerged from the early tendency in sound studies to canonize experimentalist composers as well as philosophers of sound, namely John Cage and Murray Schafer, who despite their allegedly global thinking were firmly grounded in traditions of European art music. Cage and Schafer certainly give students of sound a lot to work with, but there are also enormous presumptions in their work about sound and its relationship to nature, gender, race, and modernity. Feminist sound studies is another growth area now, and it has produced some excellent and urgent critiques of the ways that sound studies has defined noise, for example. And as a body of scholarship it comprises probably the most powerful critique of the Cagean and Schaferian traditions. Tara Rodgers and Marie Thompson are two essential thinkers here.

I do have a new project, and it is an effort to think about some of the conversations referenced just above. It is a historical study of the cosmopolitan aural and musical world of Bangkok (and elsewhere in Thailand) during the Vietnam War. The period that Benedict Anderson called “The American Era” was an era of unprecedented economic development, at the center of which was music and nightlife. I’m therefore examining the stories and legacies of musicians – Americans, Thais, Filipinos, Europeans – who were active in Thailand during those years, as well as the asymmetrical auditory relationships between U.S. soldiers and the Thai people who served them in a nascent hospitality industry, including sex workers. The project has already gotten pretty deep and it is lots of fun to combine archival research with interviews and ethnography.

Alex Fattal on his book, Guerrilla Marketing

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Interview by Winifred Tate

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo29202793.html

Winifred Tate: The title, Guerrilla Marketing, evokes advertising, and in fact Amazon lists a number of similarly named advertising books. Why did you choose it?

Alex Fattal: Because it’s dense, evocative, and slippery, like the book’s contents. In a sentence, the book is an ethnographic analysis of the feedback between marketing and military strategies, how each set of experts are learning from the other in their respective efforts to conjugate furtive research, surveillance, and planning with spectacular media interventions. Guerrilla marketing, the term, references a set of trends in the private sphere to camouflage the advertisement; and as the title of my book, it references how the state is marketing a new life of consumer citizenship to guerrillas — the book’s ethnographic ground. The book documents a mashup of these worlds, which the title encapsulates.

Winifred Tate: One of the central arguments you make is that programs that are marketed by governments and consultants as humanitarian and contributing toward peace often, as in this case, involve policing, surveillance and frequent detention of targeted individuals — that is they employ a logic of militarization and ongoing warfare. Can you explain the Colombian case you examine?

Alex Fattal: The program that I studied in Colombia, the Program for Humanitarian Attention to the Demobilized (PAHD), is a special initiative of the Colombian Ministry of Defense. It began in 2003, the year after peace negotiations between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government fell apart. It was in lieu of a peace process and sought to coopt the language of peace policy by “demobilizing” fighters that were really defecting or deserting. It might strike some readers as a picky semantic difference, but one of the key claims that I make in the book is that the temporal difference between war and peace — like other modernist distinctions — matters and should not be relinquished lightly. At the level of academic critique, we see how the two bleed ineluctably into each other, but I do think there is something worthwhile in not giving into the Marshal McLuhan’s prognostication that World War III will be “a guerrilla information war.” His vision is proving increasingly prescient with the confluence of the unfolding of the Global War on Terror and the technological moment, and it’s very troubling to say the least. By theorizing what I call “brand warfare” I am trying to articulate something that is in global circulation. While it’s been interesting to share the work and hear from colleagues about how they find the concept useful in their field own sites, it’s also been disheartening because it points to a troubling tendency toward dangerous new forms of mass manipulation.

Winifred Tate: In the conclusion, you document how the Colombian government evangelizes this program, showing it off to delegates from other conflict-torn countries such as South Sudan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Somalia and others. Why did the Colombian government do this?

 Alex Fattal: It is part of Colombia’s striving to position itself on the upper rungs of a global hierarchy of security expertise and establish itself as a country that has come back from the brink of “failed state” ignominy, and therefore has knowledge to export. The pony show of the “South South Tour” (which was mostly funded by the global north) was just one piece in a wider re-narration of the nation and served as a performative intervention to create the impression of the government having “solved” the conflict — all while the war was still raging. Kimberly Theidon has aptly described this cunning temporal conflation as “pre-post conflict”. The bi-annual South South Tours were part of the Colombian government’s “mission accomplished” moment, a performance that involved the mobilization of state symbols, bureaucracies, and resources. Anybody who has been following the post-peace accord violence knows how utterly premature such triumphalist projections have been.

Winifred Tate: An important contribution you make is bringing an analysis of the intersections between the worlds of marketing and branding, and government demobilization efforts. How do these bureaucrats and consultants try to sell peace? How do you think these campaigns have contributed to the current skepticism about the peace accords in Colombia?

Alex Fattal: You are very right to point to skepticism as the other side of the coin in such strategies of affective governance. Quite simply, I think the government blew its credibility on peace initiatives during wartime to gain a military and political advantage. When it came time to persuade the Colombian public that a strikingly similar set of programs would be necessary during negotiations with the FARC in Havana from 2012 to 2016 and then during the plebiscite and implementation of the peace accord, it was much easier for the right wing to sew doubt around the motives of the pro-peace camp. It is a telling case of how the right-wing benefits from playing politics amidst a hall of mirrors, unphased by distortions and shameless in taking the non-correspondences between signifier and signified that Baudrillard poignantly highlighted when discussing consumer culture decades ago to its logical conclusion — outright disinformation.

Winifred Tate: A growing number of anthropologists are conducting ethnographic research within government and military bureaucracies. What lessons can you share for anthropologists and others who want to do this kind of research?

 Alex Fattal: Be careful. It’s a fraught field and the rules of the game are in flux. Journalists and academics are in a tough spot across the globe. Ayše Gül Altinay, among others, is being arbitrarily detained in Turkey. The translation of Guerrilla Marketing into Spanish and a few promotional events in Colombia seem to have earned me my first death threat, a picture of a man hanged and tortured that was sent to my Colombian cell phone. (It was a new SIM card and I had hardly shared the number with anyone). Institutions, like the Colombian military, that project such a powerful image of themselves publicly are often hypersensitive and don’t deal well with criticism and they have a kit of repressive tools to use as part of the brand warfare they wage to sure up their often shaky legitimacy. I did my best to convey the scope of my research and its disposition to critical analysis, but despite my best efforts to communicate openly and continually — tensions arose. Embedded ethnography tends to assume an ideological affinity between the anthropologist and her field site, but when that’s not the case things can get tricky. One of the parts of the book that I am proud of is the “Access and Ethics” section of the introduction, which digs deeper into these dynamics.

Winifred Tate: In addition to your analysis of the logic of the demobilization programs, you offer complex and fascinating glimpses into the complexity of ex-combatants’ lives through life-history excerpts in-between each analytical chapter. How do you understand the role and importance of these testimonies of lived experience?

Alex Fattal: The testimonials, which are accompanied by Lucas Ospina’s wonderful drawings, do a lot of work in the book and they have been one of the elements that has really impacted readers so far. They give the analysis another dimension by bringing the discussion down to the level of everyday life, not in a way that is illustrative of my interpretations but rather in ways the exceed the interpretative frame, allowing readers who are unfamiliar with the Colombian context to feel the intensities and trajectories of lives marked by the conflict and their many layers. The stories also open a space for readers to make connections to the chapters — the placement of each of the testimonials is not haphazard. I think the testimonials widen my otherwise narrow focus on the convergence of marketing and militarism and allow the book to be about much more at the same time. Including them also relieved some of my sense of guilt about not being able to include many other stories that I wanted to include. So many former guerrillas shared their life experiences with me and I wish I could have included their stories too. My editor, Priya Nelson, did a wonderful job gently influencing the manuscript. The one piece of advice I just couldn’t take was to cut the testimonials down further. For me, I wanted to make sure the arc of often-difficult childhoods, joining the guerrilla, life inside the FARC’s ranks, the decision to leave, and the challenges of reintegration came through; and it was hard to abbreviate that arc, especially with so many compelling stories.

Winifred Tate: Similarly, your film Limbo, centers on the recounting of one such story. What is the film about?

Alex Fattal: The book could have easily been twice as long, but I left some large pieces out, such as a chapter on the psychological world of ex-combatants and their dreamscapes. I decided to spin that off into a short film called Limbo, which was shot entirely in the back of a truck that I transformed into a camera obscura. The article I am writing now is about former guerrillas’ dreams and the film project as a form of ethnographic surrealism, which strives for a dialectic between the ethnographic impulse to render the familiar strange and the surrealist impulse to render the strange familiar. The film, unlike much of what has been featured from the Sensory Ethnography Lab, takes narrative seriously, while also creating a sensorial space in the back of the truck. The truck becomes a confessional, psychoanalytic space that, unlike the couch, is in constant motion. The idea is to take the viewer on an oneiric journey through one former guerrilla’s life. Like the testimonials in the book, the film shows how the aftermath of being in the war lingers, it is an aftermath that is accentuated by a form of demobilization that, as I argue, is often complicit in the remobilization of former combatants, fueling cycles of conflict and peace policy that Colombia has been in the throes of for the last thirty-five years. It’s a trend, that sadly, is continuing through the post-peace accord present.

 

 

 

 

 

Jessica Chandras takes the page 99 test

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    Page 99 of my dissertation, titled Multilingual Practices, Education, and Identity in Pune, India, is a first attempt at bringing readers into an ethnographically informed composite sketch of a partially fictionalized student interlocutor. The passage is from a chapter titled “Learning English while Learning in English” and in the chapter I analyze various examples of code switching in English across classrooms in multiple schools and education levels. I generalized the student, Siddhika, from interviews, days of participant observation, and excerpts from classroom recordings that exemplify code switching practices among Hindi, Sanskrit, English, and Marathi, the regional language of the state of India where I conducted my research. The context in which the switching occurs, whether it is in the form of morning prayers, instructional directives, or transitional chatter, was important for my research and analysis. The best way I could convey all of these aspects together, I felt, was if I brought readers into the classroom with me through narrative vignettes. More importantly, I wanted to allow my interlocutors and their experiences studying in and among multiple languages to speak for themselves as much as possible. The passage below begins my third chapter on how English language code switching practices contribute to attitudes and meanings attributed to different languages.

    Pradnya Teacher leads the group of students upstairs, passing pictures of school events and motivational posters showing smiling cartoon animals telling students in English that it is good to help others and reminding them to wash their hands. The Mini KG, Junior KG, and Senior KG students stop in the hallway outside their brightly painted classrooms in the Kindergarten wing of the school. Rather than being in the school where there are so many students constantly moving around and making noise, Siddhika thinks to herself how she prefers to be at home with her aji, Marathi for grandmother, who sneakily passes sweets to Siddhika while she cooks her favorite foods. But she knows she must now start going to school like her older cousins and neighbors who carry around large books in their overstuffed backpacks. Being at school still makes her nervous though, that’s why aai, her mother, packed an extra change of clothes in her backpack today, just in case she wets her uniform again.

    The intimidating Mangal maushi, which means “aunt” and is what the students are told to call the saree-clad women who help in their classrooms, tells Siddhika to place her backpack against the wall and line up. “Warghakade tev, backpack. Linemadhye ubi raha!” Mangal maushi announces in her booming voice, as Pradnya Teacher begins the morning prayers. “Good morning students!” Pradnya Teacher shouts over the din of all the students bustling to line up in the narrow hallway. “Good morning teacher!” Siddhika shouts along with her classmates. “Don’t yell, students! Answer quietly,” Pradnya Teacher retorts, “Stand straight. Hands at your sides. And start.” Siddhika begins reciting the national anthem and then Sanskrit and English prayers that they learned on their first day of class. 

 

    Page 99 also nicely provides a window into my writing process. I eased myself out of research by drafting ethnographic vignettes from my field notes to convey what life of burgeoning multilingual students is like in India. Reflecting on this practice in the process of beginning to write my dissertation now brings a smile to my face. I remember my confidence growing by returning to my notes and making cohesive analytical excerpts emerge to begin my writing stage. As this exercise increased my momentum and enthusiasm to continue writing, the lingering traces of imposter syndrome began to disappear.

    It was after drafting this passage and getting favorable feedback from my committee that I then decided to use vignettes for prologues and epilogues in each chapter of my dissertation, honing my skill and passion for narrative writing to convey my research and analysis. My dissertation explores different avenues of multilingual life and studies in Pune, Maharashtra and after receiving constructive comments on this passage I more confidently included analyses from some unconventional methods such as map making and autoethnography throughout various chapters. I like to think that this passage is the first trial and permission I granted myself to creatively craft a dissertation that spoke to my interests in communicating my analyses, present my research experiences, and the voices of my interlocutors through thoughtful and novel ways.

Jessica Chandras. 2019. “Multilingual Practices, Education, and Identity in Pune, India.” George Washington University, Ph.d dissertation.

Jessica Chandras, Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology

jessicasu87@gmail.com

Juan del Nido discusses his dissertation about Uber

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Page 99 is home to one of the most linguistically precise segments of my dissertation, concerning the construction of a legal case against Uber in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by five taxi drivers’ associations on the night of the 12th of April, 2016. The case was set in a language of urgency and accusation and routed through a “writ of amparo” – an Argentine legal device designed to be expeditious and that judges have to react to quickly, lest a claimant’s fundamental rights are irreparably harmed. The right in question was the right to work, taxi drivers claimed, knowing but not explaining in that document that the temporalities of technological novelties amid a population anxious for modernity benefitted Uber, which had launched its platform at 4 pm that very same day.

This micro-anecdote, specific and dry, does more justice to Madox Ford’s test than he himself may have sought, for in a sense my entire research hinges on the events of that day. I was in Buenos Aires, my hometown, researching the political economy of the taxi industry in a 13-million strong metropolitan area largely unaware at that time of Uber’s expansion plans. The day before the 12th Uber existed only in people’s imaginations and the companies’ social media taunts; the day after was the first of an economic, political, legal and cultural conflict centered on the industry I had come to know quite well. Buenos Aires was then the latest installment of a world saga, epic and viral, but also a deviant: when authorities declared Uber’s activities illegal and ordered it to leave, Uber refused to go, claiming Uber was what “the people” wanted. As an industrial conflict turned into contempt of court, the conflict became an exceptionally fertile site for a series of infrastructural, temporal, technical and economic imaginations about what constituted progress, modernity, and political virtue. At stake in the conflict, summed up in that page, was whether an order beyond the political existed or not; how some Argentines understood what it was made of, who belonged in it and how history had drawn its lines, and ultimately, how a post-political order would grant the Argentina that the middle classes imagined as theirs a place in the world .

Juan M del Nido. 2018. “Uber in Buenos Aires: an Ethnographic of the post-political as a modality of reasoning”. 2018. Ph.d dissertation. Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK. .