Amanda Kaminsky: This book takes a highly unconventional structure. It begins and ends with a scripted dialogue among various stakeholders, while the middle takes the form of a rich collage of voices, photographs, and ethnographic details. What were your goals when setting out to write this book, and what was the process through which you arrived at its final structure?
Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese: Voices of a City Market is an outcome of the ethnographic research we conducted in Birmingham Bull Ring Market. The book is structured in three parts, and breaks with the conventions of the traditional ethnographic monograph. Part I and Part III represent the voices of characters who engage in dialogue about the research. The characters discuss and debate aspects of the representation of the social life of the market. Part II represents the voice and action, the sound and smell, the taste and touch, of the market over four months. Curating examples of everyday practice in the market enable us to argue that the structure and form of Part II of Voices of a City Market is polyphonic, and represents the heteroglossia of the social and commercial life of the market The text allows the closest possible approximation to real life. It is polyphonic, a diversity of social speech types, a diversity of individual voices. At once a curation and a creation, the text orchestrates the heteroglossic diversity of voices through authorial framing, the speech of narrators, and the speech of characters. These are voices which are not closed or resolved, neither finalised, nor unfinalisable. They are voices that represent the human condition.
Amanda Kaminsky: Multilingualism recurs as a theme throughout this book, both through your interlocutors’ reflections on their own language use, and through the rich descriptions of market interactions. With the exception of a few phrases in Chinese, however, this book is written in English. What challenges did you encounter representing such multilingualism on the page?
Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese: In other books (such as Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective, 2010) we represented different languages both phonetically and in different scripts. For this book, however, we decided to largely translate speech into English. Translations were checked and re-checked. Our decision was made on the basis that the book would be principally published in Anglophone countries. The multilingual/heteroglossic character of the market was one of the most salient and interesting features of the research site.
Amanda Kaminsky: I am intrigued by the character of the Entrepreneur, who appears in the first and final sections of the book to critique the ethnographic project for its lack of profitability. Where did the idea for this character come from? What do you envision the role of ethnographic research to be within a capitalist system?
Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese: The character of the Entrepreneur is important as a counterpoint to the more-or-less liberal orientation of some of the other characters. The discourse of the Entrepreneur offers resistance, which can be a vital catalyst to creativity. Ethnographic research has potential to reveal the inequalities of the capitalist system. It would be good to believe that it can make a difference, and improve people’s lives.
Amanda Kaminsky: Much of the story that unfolds throughout this book centers on a particular butcher shop within the market. As these butchers weigh mincemeat and slice pork belly for their customers, we gradually learn about their backgrounds, their senses of humor, and their hopes for the future. I’m curious about the role that meat plays in the story you tell. What insights into the modern market experience were you able to glean from focusing on butchers, rather than focusing on another industry within the market?
Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese: The butcher stall was a fascinating research site. However, a fish stall, or shoe repair stand, or tee shirt vendor, and so on, might have been equally interesting. The research told us much about the ways in which people from different backgrounds, with different languages, are able to communicate by deploying whatever semiotic resources are available to them. Commerce and trade were key imperatives in this communicative process.
Yael Assor: The book first came out in Hebrew and was then translated to English. I was wondering why did you decide to publish this book first in Hebrew, and why publish it in English at all? Are there any prominent differences between the Hebrew and English versions?
Yoram Bilu: All my books first came out in Hebrew. Since I find it easier to write lengthy texts in my mother tongue, it would have been awkward not to look first for a local publisher. But there is also ideology behind it. Studying phenomena pertinent to Israeli society, I always felt obliged to give priority to local readership (papers are a different story). This holds for this book as well, as It sheds light, among other things, on the peculiarly Israeli face of Chabad and on significant processes within Israeli society (for example, Mizrachim joining Ashkenazi-based Hasidic groups). At the same time, The messianic surge in Chabad is a golden opportunity to study fundamental issues of religious belief and experience, and this justifies publication in English (e.g. the role of culture in shaping basic cognitive processes through which the Rebbe becomes manifest). The English version is a bit tighter.
Yael Assor: On page 259, you write, “Believers experience the Rebbe directly and do not perceive the media that bears his image as standing between the Rebbe and themselves. The ethnographic writing of the anthropologist is a similar kind of mediator; he or she can also vanish from the reader’s consciousness.” Indeed, throughout most of the book, story after story, we read of the Rebbe’s miraculous presence, and to some extent become witnesses of his continuous presence. At the same time, your presence as the ethnographer who mediates these stories to us gets backgrounded. Can you elaborate on your choice to take up this style? Would it be correct to say that by engaging this style, your Chabbad interlocutors were right about your own contribution in disseminating the belief in the Rebbe?
Yoram Bilu: My uncritical perspective in showering the readers with miraculous stories was not unintended. I wanted them to be immersed in the enchanted world of the Meshichistim, in the messianic ecology they constitute, which I find all-encompassing and at times overwhelming. By doing so I myself embodied the dialectics of the mediation process. I agree that some parts of the book can be read as if written from a credulous perspective, though others account for the miracles using social science explanatory models. Aligning my reply with your next question, I have to qualify the “very experience-near book” designation. While I sought to depict the inner worlds of the radical messianists, I relied on texts (probably edited thus adding more layers of mediation) more than on interviews and observations. By doing so, I left unexplored the darker side of experiential worlds of the Meshichistim, where allegedly conflict, frustration, and doubts also reside. Focusing on these aspects would have called for a very different book.
Yael Assor: Relatedly, in the Introduction, the two last chapters and the Conclusion, you still take a more distant point of view, discussing your researcher position, contextualizing this study in contemporary theoretical debates and parallel phenomena. Why did you decide to still incorporate this tone in this otherwise very experience-near book?
Yoram Bilu: See above. Also, my tone has to do with my attempt to calibrate the not-so-compatible fields of psychology and anthropology, which are my combined disciplinary background. Note, for example, that I use theoretical models from cognitive psychology, such as dissonance reduction or signal detection, as departure points in explaining how the absent Rebbe becomes present. My critique of these theories in the book is not designed to supplant them but rather to supplement and enrich them by staying attuned to contextual noises which these theories usually discount. Lastly, I consider myself a modernist at heart, still viewing anthropology as a scientific project (admittedly by stretching the definition of science) and thus necessarily as a comparative one.
Yael Assor: A concept the book centrally engages is “virtual Rebbe.” You argue that “virtual” is not the opposite of “unreal,” but a different form of realness. Can you expand on how you think this concept contributes to current discussions about “religious imagination,” a term broadly utilized to discuss non-physical dimensions of the cultural life (including subjective and intersubjective experience) of religious movements?
Yoram Bilu: Clinging to virtual worlds is in fact at the heart of each and every religion. The sustenance of the virtual Rebbe in messianic Chabad is in this sense just an illustration, albeit uncommon and extreme, of the horizons opened before 21st century believers in cultivating the religious imagination. The rapid development of virtual realities through new technologies may bolster this imagination – as my book shows. Does it mean that a contemporary believer enjoys an epistemological edge over a first century believer? I am not so sure. One could claim that human imagination – free floating, not bound by technology – could expand rather than curtail the religious horizons shaped by the new technologies.
Yael Assor: Throughout the book you offer a very nuanced analysis of how the Rebbe’s presence is maintained with the help of technological means and in correspondence with contemporary world events and global trends. All this made me wonder about the role of American neoliberal ideology in informing this dynamic. I was thus curious about your take on this: do you see such connection between American neoliberalism and the Meshichists’ manner of making the Rebbe present?
Yoram Bilu: Yes, I do see such a connection. After all, Chabad was reshaped in the 1940s and 1950s in America, with its epicenter in NYC. Its technological adeptness is but one expression of adopting aspects of the American ethos and style. In a globalized world Chabad could be viewed as a very successful transnational firm. Note that Harold Blum called Chabad an American Religion. There are some parallels, I think (with all due differences) between Chabad’s expansion and the growing popularity of Evangelical Chrisianity in various parts of the world – and these similarities are not unrelated to a capitalist, neoliberal theology.
Filing personal tax returns, with the power of Spotify
Matti Eräsaari, University of Helsinki
Anna-Riikka Kauppinen, University of Cambridge
In May 2020, ahead of the deadline for filing personal tax returns, the Finnish Tax Administration shared a Spotify playlist called ‘Final Countdown’. Featuring songs such as Marianne Faithful’s ‘What’s the Hurry?’, ‘Let’s Get It Started’ by Black Eyed Peas, and ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, the playlist provides the soundtrack to shepherd the citizen through the painstaking journey of filing personal tax returns. This is the annual display of fiscal aptness involving an enlightened citizen who navigates one’s tax deductions for household expenses, maintenance obligations, union fees, mortgage interest, and so forth. Somewhat optimistically, the playlist also included The Beatles’s ‘We Can Work It Out’ and ‘We Are Family’ by Sister Sledge, finally ending on Elton John’s ‘I’m Still Standing’. Appearing like a sports coach on the running track, the Finnish Tax Administration accompanied the playlist with a set of inspirational slogans: “Deadline is approaching! This list will give you a kick. Come on, come on! U can do it! It shall be all right! Believe in yourself! Forward!” (English phrases italicized)
To lighten up what is generally considered as one of the most arduous, time-consuming annual bureaucratic tasks, the Finnish Tax Administration harnessed Spotify to engage with the Finnish taxpaying public. The Spotify playlist is one of the many mediums through which the Finnish Tax Administration has sought to craft an approachable public image. On Instagram and Twitter, they post tax-related memes, in addition to informing about looming deadlines, latest regulations, and answering citizens’ tax-questions. On their Soundcloud page, a series of podcasts called ‘Tax Meditation’ was recently released, featuring a calming female voice guiding the listener through the latest tax rules and advise, whilst their YouTube channel features the“Tax Whisperer”, a bearded hipster breathing tax advice with a playful smile on his face.
The Finnish Tax Whisperer
It would be hard-pressed to frame these expressions as neoliberal artefacts of bureaucratic self-fashioning (‘getting close to our customers’), because of the element of self-satire that inheres in each and every one of these examples.
So why are the Finnish Tax Administration turning into hipsters now? Lotta Björklund Larsen (2017) has shown how Sweden’s tax agency nurtures or shapes compliant taxpayers who willingly take part in maintaining a Nordic welfare state. In her analysis, this is a question of legitimacy rather than image: the wide coverage of public welfare can only be maintained for as long as the tax agency enjoys the taxpaying public’s full support. The same applies for Finland, where a recent survey revealed a whopping 98 per cent of Finns consider taxpaying important for maintaining the welfare state. Obviously such figures hardly call for the full-scale charm offensive of the Finnish Tax Administration: it is very hard to improve the agency’s high rating.
The adoption of a new, playful public image seems to rather coincide with the introduction of the agency’s new online portal, which automatizes many functions previously settled in person together with Tax Administration officials. The campaign appears to have been highly successful insofar as the vero.fi portal is concerned: critique has been non-existent. But all this also coincides with wider changes that the Finnish tax authorities are tackling with: in 2017 the Finnish government passed a bill which allows Finnish citizens to own shares in Finnish businesses through nondisclosed foreign securities. At the same time, the tax authorities have, since 2019, allowed high earners to declare their tax records secret; up until 2019 the Tax Administration provided the national media with a public list of Finnish taxpayers who earned more than 100,000 euros in a year. The media, on their part, produced ranking lists of the nation’s highest earners and highest net-taxpayers, a publication appearing every November that some right-leaning quarters call the National Jealousy Day.
Finns turning out for National Jealousy Day
However, since 2019, the transparency of these lists has become subject to doubt. Both changes, owning shares through non-disclosed foreign securities and making tax records secret, signal a departure from a long-standing policy of high-degree public accountability. At the same time, the public demand for the transparency of tax records remains – in 2020, Finnish newspapers did investigative work on those high-earners who declared their tax records secret, publishing separate lists of these individuals and demanding answers for their decision.
Where the Tax Administration enjoys a remarkably high public support, even the slightest threat to public accountability matters. Against this background, the Spotify playlist for filing personal tax returns, Tax Meditation and Tax Whisperer craft an image of the kind of public institution that engages in self-deprecating humour, isn’t too glamorous (for example, the ‘sports coach’ on the running track with Europe’s ‘Final Countdown’ in the background), and that could still be considered as being on the ordinary taxpayer’s side. Whether a product of an outsourced marketing consultancy or an internal PR brainstorming session, the newly released social media artefacts of the Finnish Tax Administration demonstrate the shifting dynamics and affects of state-citizen fiscal relations. In Finland where playfulness does not quite capture how citizens engage with the Tax Administration in practice (with utmost seriousness!), filing personal tax returns with the power of Spotify and engaging in meditative practice listening to Finnish tax legislation signals the newly found possibilities of digital media for shaping taxpayers.
References
Björklund Larsen, Lotta 2017. Shaping Taxpayers: Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency. New York: Berghahn.
Kim Fernandes: In your book, you argue that your participants (who are parents of dual heritage children and are themselves bilingual British South Asians) have a “relationship” with the Heritage Language. You intentionally use relationship as a metaphor to acknowledge the dynamic and often shifting ways in which one’s identity and the use of language are connected. For anyone who may not yet have read your book, would you be able to say a little bit more about what inspired this framing?
Sheena Kalayil: My starting point within this research was to try and find out whether people maintained their Heritage Language(s). As I began to listen to my participants talk about how they view their Heritage Languages, I began to reflect on my own experiences with Malayalam, my Heritage Language, and to realize that it was indeed a relationship. While I was talking to my participants, I also saw my own understanding of narrative inquiry shift. All of the participants – well, except for one – were older than me, by at least a little bit. They were all in what I would describe as ambitious or prestigious jobs. Their jobs all required a particular set of professional skills, and they were not going to let me write the story of their lives. They wanted to tell their life stories in their own way. So, our interviews were very much jointly constructed between us. The participants were driving the narrative of their lives, deciding what they wanted to talk about in the interview setting, and the way they were talking helped me construct this idea of having a relationship with their identity and language.
Multilingualism is very complex, and it should not be investigated through one approach. In my book, I wanted to show that monolingual interviews with participants can provide just as rich, just as useful, if not more useful, insights into the study of multilingualism and multiculturalism. In particular, I wanted to address the discourse around multiculturalism in the UK, which I think differs from US discourse in some ways. A lot of people assume that because the UK is multicultural, it will be a multilingual country. And while the multiculturalism is celebrated, it is also often considered a problem – you’re celebrated on the one hand and problematized on the other. If you’re an ethnic minority, even if you’re married to a white monolingual person, society expects your family to be multilingual, and there’s a sense of disappointment in situations where this isn’t the case.
Kim Fernandes: What inspired your choice of narrative inquiry as a method for the book? How did you work to build a narrative environment that allowed participants, as you point out, to move away from strictly linear understandings of space and time, and to instead generatively reconsider the ways in which language learning intersected with their understandings of time and space?
Sheena Kalayil: You know, in another life, I would have loved to be an anthropologist, and have done an ethnographic study. But with this study, it wasn’t the right time in my life to do that, and I wouldn’t have been the right person to be doing it. For me, a researcher has to really believe they are the only person who can be doing the study that they are doing. Being a writer, too, storytelling is important to me – and so the idea of just letting people tell their stories was very appealing to me. I began by reading about narrative research, but I came up against very canonical approaches. When I thought about them, I also thought, well, if somebody asked me those questions (say, for instance, about the one critical incident that had really got me thinking about my use of Heritage Language), I would not be able to pull out just one incident, because our lives are made up of so many incidents. I was also thinking about the ways in which we don’t really understand what’s happening when we are young, and often, you only get a sense of what happened as you grow older. So, too, there’s a retrospective building of a story. The other thing I took on board was that my participants are busy people and not everybody is comfortable with talking about themselves – so I didn’t want to start a research project which would die a quick death because people either found it too onerous to participate or I just wasn’t setting the right tone.
I quickly realized that a researcher should not just bank on the commonalities they might share with participants and assume that they are able to ask any kind of question or talk about anything. I’m not comfortable talking about a lot of my own life or family dynamics, so I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable answering certain questions. I was also aware that there were many things that I didn’t have in common with my participants. At one point, then, I decided to think of a narrative inquiry on my own terms. That is, asking people to tell their lives using interviews as my research tool and adopting a theoretical framework which respected how they chose to drive their narrative. I believe this approach allowed me to do the participants and their narratives justice. And through the messiness that arises from semi-structured interviews, I never felt like I was imposing my own research strategy or structure on the data. Instead, after transcribing the interviews and using Bakhtin’s theories of chronotopes, I was able to pick the aspects of the interview that the participants themselves were trying to highlight to me.
Kim Fernandes: At the beginning of the book, you describe an episode from the BBC radio program, Mind Your Language, where there is a particular disconnect between the topics that researchers are typically interested in when studying multilingualism and the rich everyday linguistic experiences of a range of Heritage Language speakers whose interests are typically not represented in research. You also talk about how writing this book was a way for you to center the voices of people like you that is, highly educated second-generation South Asian Britons from a range of professional backgrounds whose experiences with multiculturalism and multilingualism are often not the focus of research. Could you tell us a little bit more about what kinds of audiences you’d imagined when preparing this book?
Sheena Kalayil: I am a minority in the UK, and I’ve married outside of my linguistic, ethnic and religious community, and I have what are termed dual heritage children. So, all of these things are very close to me and my participants. But at the same time, I am very much an outsider. I wasn’t born in the UK, and I didn’t go to school here, I didn’t have that kind of formative upbringing that many of my participants did. Research that I was reading focused on particular types of South Asian communities – living in close linguistic and religious communities, working-class – because they are rich sources for research into multilingualism and cultural identity. But by focusing on those rich sources, there were a lot of people in the UK who were flying under the radar of most researchers – as I noticed from my own milieu, from my friends and this comes back to your question about who my audience is. My first audience was really myself. As a researcher of color in this country, I felt like I had a responsibility to add to the corpus through my ethnographic perspective as an insider-outsider. I felt like this allowed me to develop a different perspective on multiculturalism and multilingualism from the well-trodden research routes within existing conversations. So, the second audience for the monograph was also the academic community. However, I also firmly believe that the way I write and present the data is accessible in ways that might be of broader interest to those interested in a wide range of related issues, even if not directly as students of linguistics.
Kim Fernandes: Right now, with COVID-19, a lot of interviews are increasingly being conducted over Zoom or Skype. I noticed, though, that even prior to this moment, you’d chosen to do a combination of in-person and Skype interviews for you book. What influenced the choice of interview location, and in turn, how did that shape the nature of the narratives shared with you?
Sheena Kalayil: That’s a really interesting question. I was worried that if I insisted on in-person interviews, I would narrow the scope of my participants for a number of reasons. I had to fit interviews into my daily life and couldn’t afford to pay a substantial amount of money for travel. I didn’t want to limit my research to the area I live in, Manchester, but I wanted a breadth of the South Asian experience, linguistically and geographically in the UK. So, while it would feel absolutely normal now to set up the Zoom interview, I realized when doing my research that the two kinds of interviews were different, but it wasn’t that one was better than the other. Meeting people online, in a way, allowed me to be a more considerate interviewer: I could fit in the Skype interviews around their daily routines. I felt like online interviews allowed me to touch on things that were sensitive to people of South Asian heritage, such as love marriages, arguments with parents over raising children, and so on, while also being respectful of my participant’s space.
I do think, as well, that what the online interviews did was focus the interview very closely on the participant and their language experiences, in ways that may not have been possible with in-person interviews, and this might be a consideration for research in the future. I hope this also means that we can move away from thinking about in-person ethnographic work as the only way in which to collect putatively authentic data.
Kim Fernandes: I noticed in the book that caste only come up a couple of times, with one participant. Elsewhere, you mention status and race, and their relationship to language, but there is almost no discussion of caste as a fairly significant oppressive, hierarchical system across South Asia and South Asian diasporic communities. Can you say more about how caste did – or didn’t – come up in your own conversations, analysis and writing, particularly with regard to how it influenced participants’ relationship with language?
Sheena Kalayil: That’s a really good question, and I think it’s interesting that I haven’t been asked that before. Caste hasn’t played a major role in my life, and it wasn’t at the top of my agenda. However, when I was gathering participants for this study, I could tell from their last names about their caste – and one participant, as you mentioned, brought up her own caste. It wasn’t a question that I asked, since I wasn’t planning on asking my participants about their caste or religion. But being South Asian, of course, meant that religion did come up at some point with the participants. Given the contested nature of caste in the homeland, I felt that in the UK, caste may not have been as prominent a feature, even though there were numerous hints relating to caste and religion throughout. In future research, this is definitely something I’d like to look into.
Ilana Gershon: At the heart of this book is the intellectually productive argument that intellectual property and piracy are so intertwined that not only do they mutually co-constitute each other under digital textuality, but the same people can support IP wholeheartedly in one moment and talk like pirates ten minutes later. On the ground, IP and piracy present as sides in a debate, but you argue that understanding this debate in terms of sides is misleading. Could you explain a bit what is misleading about viewing piracy and IP as opposing perspectives and the role digital textuality plays in creating this discursive field?
Alex Dent: When I was researching and writing my last book, on Brazilian country music, I noticed that musical genres were often only taken seriously by social scientists when they were judged to be the fundamental ground of some sort of identity claim. Were you a hard-core commercial country fan, or were you a member of the folkloric team? What I found, instead, was that the genres offered possible role-inhabitances; people crossed back and forth all the time, but that didn’t mean they didn’t fight about generic boundaries a lot. I feel similarly here, though in a somewhat different context. It is indeed true that there are IP maximalists out there who spend a lot of their time fighting for IP. Along those lines, I didn’t include, in Digital Pirates, the research I did about my study of the United States Trade Representative, where I discovered that the USTR plagiarizes huge amounts of text from industry groups while entirely ignoring the pleas of public interest groups to afford foreign nations the same legal protections citizens expect here in the US; the big pharma and film industry lawyers who showed up for those hearings did, indeed, seem like pro-IP warriors (and for the record, their suits appeared to be made of some non-stick, bulletproof material). Similarly, on the other side of things, copy-left advocates and hackers often seemed like they were categorically opposed to IP, arguing that “information wants to be free” (an anthropomorphizing if ever there was one). But the truth is that even these warriors for one or the other position step out of line from time to time.
Even more to your question, the vast majority of us live in that space between all the time. So it struck me that requiring there to be “positions” actually becomes a way to deliberately avoid the conversation that we need to have – which is about how arguments for and against IP get mobilized for political projects, with quite local approaches shaping that mobilization.
The insistence on positions seems particularly misleading in the digital realm, where inscriptive (which is to say, durable) forms of textuality become such a common part of our quotidian existence. One of your questions, below, asks me to talk more about cellularity and its relationship to contemporary capitalism – so I’ll hold off on that for a bit. But the point is simply that decisions about how you are going to govern your own productions now imbricate your every move. I write in chapter four that the novelty of contemporary digital textuality surrounds the reduction of response-time, the transcendence of space, the unification of communicative modalities in a single device, and the portability of that device. This means that durable and promulgating potentials are with you at every moment. And the decisions you make about how you are going to circulate yourself are shaped by both IP maximalism and piracy – shaped in real-time contexts, on the fly. So we are not “taking positions” on IP. We are, in a split second, deciding what kinds of circulatory legitimacy accompanies a photograph we just received, or a blog post – or how we might anticipate this video we are currently making about our dog playing in the snow finding itself in far-flung lands.
Ilana Gershon: What does policing look like from the perspective of Brazilian piracy?
Alex Dent: There has been lots of great stuff written on policing and its importance to contemporary capitalism. In that ambit, Jim Holston and Teresa Caldeira have done a great job writing about how, in what might seem a paradoxical move on the surface, the turn to democratization has actually led to drastically elevated levels of policing in Brazil; what we can derive from this is the necessity of policing to neoliberal theologies. With respect to IP, specifically, what I was anxious to do away with was the myth that policing of IP around the world is about bribes or salaries; there’s this idea among critics of IP that the only reason people would police IP in parts of the world where “licit” products are too expensive is because they are being paid. On the pro-IP side there is this equally misleading notion that local police “just want to be right with the law.” But the truth is a lot more complicated than either of these options. The truth is that there are local discourses that explain policing. In Brazil, discourses of cultural mixture are famous – in tourist brochures, of course, but even in Brazilian self-explanations of prowess in soccer, music, religion, and food (Lorand Matory and John Collins have written about this). But what you don’t hear about very much are Brazilian anxieties about cultural inter-mixture going too far. What you find, if you dig into the classic Brazilian book called “Rebellion in the Backcountry” (which is about a millennial movement that gets absolutely destroyed by the emerging Brazilian state in the late 1800s) is that there are localized appetites for “order” and keeping mixture under wraps. That is what is getting ignited by IP maximalism – not some bribe. So in some ways I’m revisiting that old chestnut about the relationship between the production of locality and the production of globality – with the notion that the dialogic relation between the two must be understood according to durable structures. It’s no coincidence that violations of IP get treated like “trash” in Brazil. I explain why in chapter two.
Ilana Gershon: What role does Paraguay play in Brazilians’ relationship to piracy?
Alex Dent: As a linguistic anthropologist, this was one of those spectacular fieldwork moments when you become aware of how language is a kind of flexible dialogue between historical conflicts and contemporary practices. It’s not a repository, mind you, because it’s constantly in flux. What happened was that my family started characterizing things that broke as “Paraguayan.” I remember the first time it happened – it was a cheap alarm clock I’d bought which inexplicably failed; and I’d just underscore that the cheapness and the inexplicability are intimately related to one another! In any case, this invocation of “Paraguayan” as a descriptor seemed, in that first moment, to carry all kinds of anxieties about bordering that I hadn’t though of. That’s when I started learning about Paraguay’s role as the place cheap goods come into Brazil, and also, about its stature in Brazilian popular culture as a place where grand promises are made that then are not delivered upon. There is some overlap with how the US-Mexico border translates in our context – though there are important differences. But with respect to Paraguay, the history is that Paraguay invaded Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1864, and after some stunning initial victories, they were absolutely routed. The war was just devastating for Paraguay, and in conventional histories, the war’s legacy was a long-lasting economic depression and cultural inferiority complex. (I’d like to note something obvious – that my Paraguayan friends inflect this story with considerably more complexity.) In any case, this phrase circulated periodically in Brazil when discussing a soccer team that started off in a promising way, but then crashed: the team was referred to as a “Paraguayan horse.”
I ended up spending quite a bit of time in the border towns between Brazil and Paraguay, studying the ways goods traveled from Paraguay into Brazil (although I should add that the real expert, here, is Rosana Pinheiro-Machado). And it struck me that the bordering work there – with incumbent anxieties about porosity, omnipresence, illegality, and necessity – also populated the way my interlocutors were characterizing the Internet in Brazil. All of which is to say that, when you are trying to understand just what this thing called the Internet might be, it makes sense to consider localized approaches to time, space, and boundary.
Ilana Gershon: You talk about how Brazilians have a different relationship to cellphones than Americans or Canadians do because they had a different historical engagement with landlines. Could you explain how these different historical trajectories made a difference in your fieldsites?
Alex Dent: When I first arrived in Brazil in 1998, I lived with a family — who subsequently became my caretakers, consultants, and very close friends – in the town of Campinas. My Brazilian “dad” was a telecommunications engineer who taught at the local university – UNICAMP. And in early discussions with him, I noticed that telephones were politicized in a different way fromm Canada, the US, or the UK – the three places I had lived. I detected a kind of media ideology about telephones where — in part based on consumption of North American public culture – there was this belief that Brazil had developed incorrectly. Phone landlines were incredibly expensive to get, and were not well disseminated among working class neighborhoods. Phones were not a forgone conclusion in Brazilian life – they were often thought of as a necessity that was paradoxically also a luxury. So when cell phones began to arrive, in concert with the neoliberal selling-off of the state phone companies, I heard a lot of people explain to me that Brazil had “skipped” a step; that, in some normative sense, it ought to have had cheap and widely available landlines first, and then people could have transitioned more smoothly to cell phones. I should point out that this popular argument also has a well developed academic Brazilian form in the shape of associated-dependency theory. But the point is that when Brazilians started to absorb cellular technology, their early use was often tinged with a dialogue between ravenous hunger, and a kind of shaming scold. I heard statements such as, “Brazilians have multiple cell phones, but they are too ill-educated to have anything to say on them,” which struck me as harsh until I decoded where they were coming from, historically.
Ilana Gershon: You argue that cellularity at the heart of contemporary capitalism – could you explain what you mean by this?
Alex Dent: I’m working this up into a broader theory of neoliberal theology now; as I type, I’m writing-up five years of data collected with Joshua Bell (of the Smithsonian) and Joel Kuipers (also at GW) on the productivity of ambivalence among teenage cell phone users in Washington DC. Part of the argument is that, contrary to the projections many adults place onto teenagers, teenagers are acutely aware of not only the joys, but also the potential harms of cellular phone use. The productivity of this ambivalence, as I note above, in chapter four, lies in “cellular publics”; I argue that contemporary digital textuality is characterized by reduction of response time, transcendence of space, condensation of communicative modalities, and portability. But what is significant is the trip to heaven and hell that this entails. (I should mention someone who has written brilliantly about this in Brazil is Leticia Cesarino.) Because just as cell phones can be celebrated for their rendering work more flexible, they can also be indicted for enslaving us. We are, in the same moment, in joyful anticipation of connection, and in horror at possible over-extension. I’m using “horror” carefully, here – intending to address myself to the brilliant theorist who was Mary Shelley. This is the sublime. And the argument I’m making is that contemporary (probably not “late”!) capitalism’s balance between tremendous wealth and utter ruin finds itself mediated – in ways I think David Harvey anticipated – by way of cellularity. To put it somewhat differently, it is no coincidence that “paying it forward” and “going viral” partake of the same vectors of accrual.
CaMP Anthropology 