Monthly Archives: February 2023

Valérie Robin Azevedo on her book, Los Silencios de la guerra

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https://lasiniestraensayos.com/libro/los-silencios-de-la-guerra-memorias-y-conflicto-armado-en-ayacucho-peru/

Interview (and translation) by Emily Fjaellen Thompson

English version below

Emily Fjaellen Thompson: Usted ha tenido un par de años muy prolíficos. En 2021, La Siniestra publicó la traducción al castellano (hecha por Alberto Gálvez Olaechea) de su libro Los silencios de la guerra: Memoria y conflicto armado en Ayacucho, Perú. Igualmente, en el mismo año, la Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) y el Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos (Lima) publicaron el libro Retorno de cuerpos, recorrido de almas: Exhumaciones y duelo colectivo en América Latina y España, proyecto colectivo que coordinó junto con Anne Marie Losonczy. Pensando tanto en el caso de Perú como de manera más amplia en otros países con experiencias de violencia políticas, ¿podría contarme más sobre las posibilidades de reflexionar o analizar el exceso discursivo de pasados traumáticos que menciona en sus libros?

Valérie Robin Azevedo: Esta investigación se basa en las voces de actoras y actores quechuas de las comunidades campesinas de Ocros y Huancapi (Ayacucho). Con Los silencios de la guerra busqué hurgar en las huellas del conflicto armado que enlutó al Perú a fines del siglo XX, y cuyos fantasmas siguen resurgiendo cada cierto tiempo. En este contexto de supuesto “posconflicto”, busqué entender cómo se construyen hoy las memorias de la guerra y también qué se silencia del pasado. Me interesé en lo que se muestra de la violencia, cómo y qué se escenifica en las conmemoraciones y celebraciones así como en las narraciones. También quise indagar sobre lo que a su vez ocultan estas lecturas forzosamente parciales del pasado. Este trabajo constituye por lo tanto también una etnografía de lo no dicho en la cual los secretos relacionados a la guerra con Sendero Luminoso, se trenzan entre disimulo y revelación, cual filigrana. Las dinámicas analizadas en este libro son a menudo apenas visibles en el espacio público nacional, pese a que esclarecen la pluralidad de los procesos de memoria vigentes en la sociedad peruana. Me interesé entonces en las formas inéditas, podríamos decir incluso inusuales para los sectores urbanos, mediante las cuales se rememora el periodo del conflicto armado, cuando el recuerdo se organiza recurriendo a elementos culturales locales, sea en base a fiestas patronales o carnavales, a la creación musical o los bailes, o incluso recurriendo a los sueños, visiones y apariciones de un santo milagroso y protector. Lo más importante que quizá podamos destacar finalmente de estas modalidades plurales del recordar, tanto en el accionar conmemorativo como en las narraciones y sus arreglos, es que son reveladoras de las encrucijadas en el intento de una convivencia pacífica luego de culminar la guerra. Y ofrecen vías alternativas al modelo de justicia transicional para proyectarse hacia el futuro contribuyendo a la elaboración de una verdadera mitología colectiva, ya no de fundación sino de refundación del grupo social. Esta mitología y estos rituales donde confluye la memoria no pueden reducirse a un tema de “creencias” o de “costumbres”, como algunos los ven, sino que participan más bien de la reconstrucción de lazos sociales dañados por la guerra fratricida que azotó al Perú durante la guerra y cuyas secuelas se siguen rastreando hasta el día de hoy. Por eso los procesos locales de micro-reconciliación posconflicto analizados aquí, como los trabajados a inicios de la década del 2000 por Jefrey Gamarra y Kimberly Theidon, son elementos claves a los que, tanto los actores estatales como los organismos de derechos humanos involucrados en la implementación de las políticas de reparaciones, deberían prestar más atención. Pues la significación de estas memorias, digamos alternativas y no literales, permiten pensar otras vías para la recuperación colectiva de sociedades de posguerra, paralelamente a un modelo uniformizado y globalizado de la justicia transicional que se impone de arriba para abajo (top down) […]

Emily Fjaellen Thompson: Usted identifica la época después del conflicto armado interno como una de “la efervescencia de la memoria” (47). En América Latina en general, esto también se ha denominado un “boom” de la memoria. En las casi dos décadas desde la presentación del informe final de la Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación, ¿cómo ha cambiado esta “efervescencia”? ¿Usted cree que ha pasado el boom de la memoria? Y si es así, ¿qué viene después?

Valérie Robin Azevedo: La otra cara de este boom de la memoria, fenómeno globalizado con auge en los años 2000, ha sido paradójicamente – o quizá no sea tan paradójico –, una “saturación” de la memoria, como lo analizó la filósofa Régine Robin sobre ciertos usos instrumentales de la memoria de la Shoah que pudieron acabar opacando el evento mismo y sus llagas. En el Perú, luego de la dictadura fujimorista que impuso una “memoria salvadora” (Degregori) asociada a la “lucha antiterrorista” militarista, hubo un período de apertura, de mirada crítica y constructiva, hacia el pasado, a raíz del trabajo de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR), entre 2001 y 2003. La CVR propició la expresión de historias disímiles con una visión mucho más compleja de lo ocurrido en los Andes donde un conflicto fratricidio se superpuso al conflicto político. Se logró que voces hasta entonces silenciadas pudieran expresar su versión del conflicto armado, con sus zonas grises así como las secuelas pendientes en cuanto a violaciones a los DDHH ; a menudo calladas o sencillamente olvidadas porque atañían a un sector de la población históricamente discriminado, de provincianos, campesinos e indígenas, o sea considerados ciudadanos de segunda categoría.

Pero la apertura hacia una mirada menos maniquea del pasado después del trabajo de la CVR fue cerrándose en los años siguientes y hoy en día, a casi dos décadas de la entrega del Informe final de la CVR, el retroceso es brutal. Podemos hablar de “un pasado que no pasa” (Rousso) en el sentido de que la memoria del conflicto armado interno no solo no está apaciguada sino que resurge de forma episódica y sobre todo está siendo instrumentalizada de manera insoportable y poco respetuosa del sufrimiento de los que padecieron el conflicto en carne propia. Vivimos en cierta medida una era de “postverdad”, alimentada por los medios de comunicación (concentrados a mano de un principal consorcio) y políticos de derecha y extrema derecha, lo que resulta preocupante respecto del proceso de democratización de la sociedad peruana posterior al final de la guerra. La alusión histerizada a este pasado de violencia sirve ante todo para desacreditar al contrincante en el escenario público actual, mediante la acusación infame de “terrorista”, o “terruco, en la jerga local, y que se ha venido calificando de “terruqueo” en el Perú […] El boom de la memoria de inicios de los 2000 se volvió dos décadas después en el auge de la memoria tergiversada que sirve en realidad para fortalecer una legislación antiterrorista cada vez más dura y cada vez menos basada en el accionar violento concreto sino en la represión de ideas, enmarcada en el delito de “afiliación al terrorismo”. Eso es preocupante no solo para la democracia peruana sino porque solo contribuye a legitimar la idea enarbolada por algunos de vivir una persecución política.

Emily Fjaellen Thompson: Me llamaron mucho la atención dos intervenciones que hace usted que empujan contra categorías rígidas. Primero, complica la idea del retrato normativo de una víctima “inocente” o “aceptable”. Este pensamiento es especialmente relevante con la jerga de las ONGs, las políticas de reparación y los discursos transnacionales de derechos humanos.

Valérie Robin Azevedo: El problema de estas categorías es su uso rígido y normativo que encierra a los individuos en un formato preestablecido y borra la complejidad de las experiencias vividas y de las identificaciones reduciendo la historia a binarismos simplistas. Pero recordemos que la CVR, para evitar ser tachada de “pro terrorista”, abogó por la categoría de “víctima inocente”; es decir, una víctima que se encontraba “entre dos fuegos”, lo cual ocurrió en ciertos casos aunque no siempre fue así. Este estereotipo indujo una despolitización de las afiliaciones ideológicas de las personas durante el conflicto armado y un uso estratégico de la figura de “víctima inocente” por los propios actores para no ser estigmatizados y poder recibir reparaciones. Es a raíz de la CVR que se fortalece la idea de una víctima que debe ser “pura” e “inocente” . La construcción de este prototipo de víctima emergió en un contexto de negociación política para poder implementar las reparaciones y tuvieron que sacrificarse temas claves de los DDHH; como el artículo 4 de la Ley de reparaciones que excluye a los miembros de las organizaciones subversivas y por lo tanto a sus deudos de poder contar con una reparación estatal. Eso rastrea como resultado que alguien ejecutado extrajudicialmente por agentes del Estado pero miembro de Sendero Luminoso o del MRTA no es legalmente una víctima. La imposición de la controvertida doctrina de “manos limpias” (Guillerot y Magarell) hizo que si una persona no podía demostrar su total inocencia no podía ser considerada víctima; lo que se opone al Derecho Humanitario Internacional, dicho sea de paso. Así la figura opuesta a la “víctima inocente” es precisamente el “terruco”. A más de dos décadas del fin oficial del conflicto, en el 2000, las disputas que rodean el uso y la instrumentalización de las categorías de ‘víctima’, ‘héroe’ o ‘perpetrador’ – el ‘terrorista’ o ‘terruco’ – aún ejercen un poder performativo fundamental sobre el destino de muchos ciudadanos.

En el libro enfatizo el hecho de que los senderistas son un producto de las contradicciones y desigualdades de la sociedad peruana y no personas oriundas de otro planeta, digamos. Sin duda estaban equivocados y su radicalismo es indudable, pero lo cierto es que muchos en Perú fueron inicialmente seducidos por su mensaje revolucionario; esto no significa negar las atrocidades cometidas en nombre de su ideología. Pero la performatividad del discurso sobre el “terrorismo” y el “terruqueo” genera la imposibilidad de pensar de manera distanciada y racional sobre la violencia propia y sobre la violencia de estado, como recalcó para otro contexto Talal Asad en su libro On suicide Bombing (2007). Llama también la atención que los miembros de la cúpula senderista estén en la cárcel, y que se los siga enjuiciando, pero que la mayoría de los militares responsables de atrocidades contra civiles sigan libres. Esto se extiende también a otros ámbitos como en la legislación “antiterrorista” cada vez más rígida y que se quiere aplicar a casos cada vez más numerosos; que puede llevar al encarcelamiento sin pruebas materiales y con penas de reclusión de hasta 25 años. Hay una doble moral porque solo se persigue un sector mientras el otro beneficia de la impunidad. […] Entiendo que el silencio de los organismos de defensa de los DDHH se justifica por querer seguir actuando y no ser terruqueados, no recibir amenazas o incluso ser enjuiciados. Pero al mismo tiempo es una derrota y un retroceso difícil de revertir. Piensan que evitando asumir la defensa de casos controvertidos los dejarán actuar, pero creo que es un error porque igual los van a seguir terruqueando. Me temo que esta autocensura haga que la lucha contra la impunidad se restrinja cada vez más en un contexto en el que las ideas antidemocráticas y la extrema derecha van ganando presencia y legitimidad en el espacio público peruano – ¡Bueno, como vemos que también está ocurriendo en Europa y EEUU! Con el terruqueo, no solamente se acaba deshumanizando al otro, al vencido, ex combatiente de Sendero Luminoso o el MRTA, sino a sus familiares, que acaban excluidos de la comunidad nacional, “des-ciudadanizados”, “desperuanizados” […] Hay que sacarse los anteojos limeños además. En Ayacucho hay una conciencia fuerte de cómo se está manipulando el cuco del terrorismo y el dolor de esa gente. Allí nadie olvida tampoco las tremendas masacres perpetradas no solo por Sendero Luminoso sino por las Fuerzas armadas.

Emily Fjaellen Thompson: En segundo lugar, identifica una dicotomía aún presente entre “el Perú profundo” (encarnado por los Andes) y el “Perú oficial” (encarnado por la capital costeña, Lima) (91).” Usted propone que gran parte de la antropología del siglo XX cae en esta categorización de “lo andino” como un monolito. También advierte contra el impulso opuesto, “desestimando cualquier cultura específica y descuidando las representaciones, los saberes y las prácticas sociales y religiosas características de esta región” (121). ¿Cómo podría el lente de la antropología complicar estos binarios? ¿Cómo ve su propio trabajo interviniendo en estas conversaciones?

Valérie Robin Azevedo: El conflicto armado interno fue, en efecto, un importante punto de inflexión epistemológica en cuanto a la manera de pensar y hacer la antropología en el Perú en el siglo XX; y eso tanto para la investigación universitaria nacional como internacional. Frente a este nuevo objeto de pesquisa –la guerra– que se impone en los años 1980, los paradigmas estructuralistas y culturalistas aplicados al estudio del “mundo andino” –centrados en lo religioso y más específicamente en la búsqueda de un milenarismo–, resultaron incapaces de analizar los acelerados y masivos cambios sociales que estaba viviendo el conjunto de la sociedad nacional y especialmente el campesinado desde los años 1960. Incapaces de analizar el conflicto armado interno, estos modelos teóricos fueron criticados hasta que, a inicios de los 90, surgió la crítica del “andinismo” en el marco del “deconstruccionismo” posmoderno estadunidense entonces en boga. Estallaron acalorados debates dentro de la comunidad académica de los antropólogos peruanistas. Recién a fines de los 90 y en los 2000, el retorno a los métodos eficaces de etnografía se hizo otra vez posible gracias al regreso al campo; implicó nuevos acercamientos y ofreció ricas perspectivas para renovar los temas y enfoques reflexivos de la antropología en los Andes. En el Perú, el “problema indígena” – preocupación de las reflexiones sobre la construcción de la identidad nacional desde el siglo XIX – resurgió en el contexto de la guerra, incluso cuando cierta mirada antropológica que oponía el “Occidente” y “los Andes” se hacía insostenible. El papel asignado a la antropología como disciplina que estudia las dimensiones “tradicionales” de la “cultura andina” finalmente cambió, luego de un largo proceso de conversión (Sandoval). Con la difusión de trabajos de campo de larga duración, la antropología andina en el nuevo milenio se renovó respecto de las ilusiones de un mundo andino” fantaseado, libre del esencialismo y también del posmodernismo […].

[…] Entonces, la idea es no caer en los extremos, ni la visión culturalista, utópica y que fantasea más que lee el mundo andino, ni la postura postmodernista deconstruccionista, aleccionadora desde su palestra, pero que no hace trabajo de campo o presta poca atención a lo que hacen y dicen los actores y resulta a fin de cuentas ciego a los procesos socioculturales internos que estructuran la vida social en concreto. En el ámbito del trabajo de la CVR, ciertas memorias de la guerra, demasiado alejadas del uso judicial y político que podía hacerse de ellas, fueron a menudo descuidadas por el personal enviado entonces a recoger testimonios. Las narraciones que reinterpretan el pasado en términos culturales, no pudieron acceder a la visibilidad ni obtener el mismo reconocimiento que los testimonios considerados más “verídicos” de los eventos pasados […] A partir de la segunda mitad de los años 2000 algunas de las memorias del conflicto, descabelladas desde la perspectiva judicial o de los defensores de los derechos humanos, empezaron a ser vistas como producciones valiosas que permitían comprender, de manera diferente, la forma en que las poblaciones andinas miran su pasado y logran reintegrarlo en una experiencia que tiene sentido para ellos. Y allí la antropología juega un papel clave. Por ejemplo, el bellísimo estudio de Arianna Cecconi sobre el papel de los sueños en el recordar el conflicto armado puso de relieve el uso de la experiencia onírica como modalidad cultural para la gestión del duelo, en el contexto andino donde los sueños y sus interpretaciones constituyen una actividad social importante y valorizada. Si algunos pobladores siguen sufriendo las secuelas de la guerra, el sueño donde “reciben la visita” de las almas de sus difuntos también constituye un soporte que permite apaciguarlos. Por mi parte, indagué sobre el sentido de los recuerdos de la guerra en base a relatos sobre las apariciones milagrosas y el papel heroico del santo patrón de Huancapi, presentado por sus devotos como el protector de los pueblerinos durante la guerra.

Entonces, hago mía la crítica sobre la interpretación culturalista del mundo andino y las posturas ultra-relativistas […] Sin embargo, la “deconstrucción” posmoderna plantea otros problemas. Si bien tuvo el mérito de seguir un enfoque reflexivo de la práctica de la antropología, corría el riesgo de tener efectos paralizantes para futuras investigaciones, ofreciendo pocas alternativas concretas.  Aun teniendo en cuenta las críticas postmodernas respecto de la “autoridad etnográfica”, ahora que las investigaciones etnográficas son de nuevo posibles, es clave volver a los estudios de campo. Por lo tanto, si bien es importante no adoptar un enfoque que otorgue un valor sobredimensionado a la “cultura andina” también debemos evitar caer en el extremo opuesto, desestimando cualquier especificidad cultural y descuidando las representaciones, los saberes y las prácticas sociales y religiosas características de esta región. Es precisamente lo que intenté hacer en mi trabajo sobre las memorias campesinas en Ayacucho.

English versión

Emily Fjaellen Thompson: You have had a very prolific couple of years. In 2021, La Siniestra published the Spanish translation (by Alberto Gálvez Olaechea) of your book Los silencios de la guerra: Memoria y conflicto armado en Ayacucho, Perú. In the same year, the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) and the French Institute of Andean Studies (Lima) published Retorno de cuerpos, recorrido de almas: Exhumaciones y duelo colectivo en América Latina y España, a collective project co-edited with Anne Marie Losonczy. Thinking about Peru and in terms of experiences of political violence more broadly, can you reflect a bit more on the discursive excess of traumatic pasts that you mention in your books?

Valérie Robin Azevedo: This research is based on the voices of Quechua actors from the peasant communities of Ocros and Huancapi in Ayacucho, Perú. With Los silencios de la guerra I explored the traces of the armed conflict that plunged Peru into mourning at the end of the 20th century, and whose ghosts continue to resurface. In this supposedly “post-conflict” context, I sought to understand both how memories of the war are constructed today and what gets silenced by the past. I was interested in the ways violence is shown through commemorations and celebrations as well as narratives. I also wanted to investigate what these necessarily partial readings of the past hide. This work therefore also constitutes an ethnography of the unsaid, where secrets related to the war are interwoven; both disguised and revealed. Despite the fact that they illuminate the plurality of valid memory processes in Peruvian society, the dynamics analyzed in this book are often barely visible in the national public sphere. I became interested in the unedited ways the armed conflict is recalled; when memory is arranged according to local cultural elements like patron saint festivities or carnivals, music, and dances. Here, this includes considering dreams, visions, and apparitions of a miraculous and protective saint. Perhaps the most important thing that we can ultimately highlight about these plural modalities of remembering, both in commemorative actions and in narratives, is that they reveal an impasse of a peaceful coexistence after the end of the war. And they offer alternatives other than the model of transitional justice by contributing to the elaboration of a truly collective mythology; not only the founding but also the “refounding” of social groups. This mythology and these rituals where memory converges cannot be reduced to a theme of “beliefs” or “customs”, as some see them. Rather, they participate in the reconstruction of social ties that were damaged by Peru’s fratricidal war and whose aftermath continues to this day. That is why local post-conflict micro-reconciliation processes (such as those from the early 2000s by Jefrey Gamarra and Kimberly Theidon) are key. Both state actors and human rights organizations who are involved in the implementation of reparations policies should pay more attention to them. The meanings of these memories, let’s say alternative and not literal, allow us to think of other methods of collective recovery in post-war societies, parallel to the standardized and globalized top-down model of transitional justice.

Emily Fjaellen Thompson: You identify the time after the internal armed conflict as an epoch of “la efervescencia de la memoria” (the effervescence of memory) (47). In Latin America in general, this has also been referred to as a memory “boom.” How has this “effervescence” changed in the nearly two decades since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report? Do you think the memory boom has passed? And if so, what comes next?

Valérie Robin Azevedo: The other side of this memory boom, a globalized phenomenon that peaked in the 2000s, has been paradoxically – or perhaps not so paradoxically – a “saturation” of memory. This has been analyzed by the philosopher Régine Robin in terms of certain instrumental uses of the memory of the Shoah that potentially overshadow the actual event and its resulting wounds. In Peru, after the Fujimori dictatorship imposed a “saving/salvage memory” (Degregori) associated with the militaristic “anti-terrorist fight”, there was a period of openness towards the past, both critical and constructive, as a result of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) between 2001 and 2003. The CVR encouraged the expression of disparate stories with a much more complex vision of what happened in the Andes, where a fratricidal conflict was superimposed on a political conflict. Voices that had been silenced until then were able to express their version of the armed conflict, with gray zones and the pending consequences of  human rights violations. These were often silenced or simply forgotten because they concerned a historically discriminated sector of the population, peasants and Indigenous people, that is, those considered second-class citizens.

But the opening of a less Manichean view of the past after the work of the CVR was already closing in the following years and today the setback is brutal. We can speak of “a past that does not pass” (Rousso) in the sense that the memory of the internal armed conflict is not pacified but resurfaces episodically. Above all, the suffering of those who endured the conflict in their own flesh is being exploited in an unbearable and disrespectful way. To a certain extent we live in a “post-truth” era fed by the media and right-wing and extreme right-wing politicians, which is worrying in terms of Peru’s democratization process after the war. The hysterical allusion to this violent past serves above all to discredit political opponents through the infamous accusation of “terrorist”, or “terruco”, in local jargon  […] Two decades later, the memory boom of the early 2000s has turned into a rise of distorted memory that serves to strengthen increasingly harsh anti-terrorist legislation. It is less and less based on concrete violent actions but rather on the repression of ideas, framed as the crime of “affiliation to terrorism”. […]

Emily Fjaellen Thompson: I was especially struck by two interventions you make that push against rigid boundaries. First, you complicate the idea of the normative portrait of an supposedly innocent or acceptable victim. This is especially relevant thinking with non-profit jargon, politics of reparations, and transnational human rights discourses.

Valérie Robin Azevedo: The problem with these categories is their rigid and normative use that encloses individuals in a pre-established format and erases the complexity of lived experiences and identifications, reducing history to simplistic binaries. But let us remember that to avoid being branded as “pro-terrorist”, the CVR advocated for the category of “innocent victim”; that is, a victim who was “between two fires”, which did occur in certain cases, but not always. This stereotype induced a depoliticization of people’s ideological affiliations during the armed conflict and actors themselves employed a strategic use of the “innocent victim” figure in order to not be stigmatized and be able to receive reparations. The idea of ​​a victim who must be “pure” and “innocent” is therefore strengthened as a result of the CVR. The construction of this victim prototype emerged in the context of political negotiations to implement reparations. Key human rights issues were sacrificed, such as article 4 of the Reparations Law, which excludes members of subversive organizations and therefore their relatives from being able to claim state reparations. As a result, someone extrajudicially executed by State agents but a member of Sendero Luminoso or the MRTA is not legally a victim. The imposition of the controversial “clean hands” doctrine (Guillerot and Magarell) meant that if a person could not prove their total innocence, they could not be considered a victim (which is in opposition to International Humanitarian Law, by the way). Thus, the opposite of the “innocent victim” is the “terruco”. More than two decades after the official end of the conflict in 2000, the disputes surrounding the use and instrumentalization of the categories of ‘victim’, ‘hero’ or ‘perpetrator’ – the ‘terrorist’ or ‘terruco’ – still exercise a fundamental performative power over the destiny of many citizens.

In the book I emphasize the fact that Senderistas are a product of the contradictions and inequalities of Peruvian society, not people from another planet, so to speak. No doubt they were wrong and their radicalism was unquestionable, but the truth is that many people in Peru were initially seduced by their revolutionary message. This doesn’t mean to deny the atrocities committed in the name of their ideology. But the performativity of discourse on “terrorism” and “terruqueo” generates the impossibility of thinking in a distanced and rational way about one’s own violence and about state violence, as Talal Asad emphasized in another context in his book On Suicide Bombing ( 2007). It is also noteworthy that the leaders of the Shining Path are in jail and continue to be prosecuted while most of the soldiers responsible for atrocities against civilians remain free. This also extends to other areas such as increasingly rigid “anti-terrorist” legislation, which is applied to more and more cases and can lead to imprisonment without material evidence for up to 25 years. There is a double standard because only one sector is being persecuted while the other benefits from impunity.

 I understand that the silence of human rights organizations is justified by their desire to act without being terrorized, prosecuted, or threatened. But at the same time their silence is a defeat and a setback that is difficult to reverse. These organizations think that by not defending controversial cases they will be allowed to continue their work in peace, which I think is a mistake. They will be “terrorized” regardless, and I worry that this self-censorship will further restrict the fight against impunity in a context where anti-democratic ideas and the extreme right are only gaining presence and legitimacy in the Peruvian public sphere. We can see that this is also happening in Europe and the US! With terruqueo, not only do you end up dehumanizing the other, the defeated ex-combatant of Shining Path or MRTA, but also their relatives who end up excluded from the national community, “de-citizenized” or “de-Peruvianized.”

 One must also take off their Lima glasses. In Ayacucho there is a strong awareness of how people’s pain is being manipulated by the boogeyman of terrorism. Nobody there forgets the tremendous massacres perpetrated both by Sendero Luminoso and the Armed Forces.

Emily Fjaellen Thompson: Second, you identify a still-present dichotomy between “deep Peru”,  embodied by the Andes and “official Peru”, embodied by the coastal capital of Lima (91). You argue that much of 20th century anthropology falls into categorizing “lo andino” as a monolith but also caution against the opposite impulse to dismiss any cultural specificity and neglect the representations, knowledge, and social and religious practices that are characteristic of the region (121). How might the lens of anthropology complicate these binaries? How do you see your own work intervening in these conversations?

Valérie Robin Azevedo: The internal armed conflict was, in effect, an important epistemological turning point in ways of thinking and doing anthropology in Peru in the 20th century. Faced with this new research object –war– the structuralist and culturalist paradigms applied to the study of the “Andean world,” which had focused on religion and specifically the search for a millenarianism, were unable to analyze the accelerated massive social changes that the national society (especially the peasantry since the 1960s) was experiencing. Incapable of analyzing the internal armed conflict, these theoretical models were criticized until the early 1990s, when “Andeanism” emerged within the framework of postmodern American “deconstructionism” then in vogue, and heated debates erupted within the academic community of Peruvian anthropologists. In the late 1990s and 2000s effective ethnographic methods become possible again thanks to a return to the field. This involved new approaches and rich perspectives that renewed the themes and reflexive approaches of anthropology in the Andes. In Peru, the “Indigenous problem,” concerned with the construction of national identity since the nineteenth century, resurfaced in the context of the war even when a certain anthropological view that opposed the “West” and “the Andes” rendered it unsustainable. After a long process of conversion, the role assigned to anthropology as a discipline that studies the “traditional” dimensions of “Andean culture” finally changed (Sandoval). With the spread of long-term fieldwork, Andean anthropology in the new millennium was renewed in terms of illusions of a fantasized Andean world, free from essentialism and also from postmodernism.

The idea then is to not fall into extremes; neither the culturalist, utopian vision that fantasizes more than it reads the Andean world, nor the deconstructionist postmodernist position, whose point of view is instructive but does not carry out fieldwork, provides little attention to what actors do and say, and is ultimately blind to the internal socio-cultural processes that structure social life in concrete terms. In the context of the CVR’s work, certain memories of the war that were too far removed from any judicial and political use were often neglected by the personnel sent to collect testimonies. Narratives that reinterpreted the past in cultural terms could not obtain the same recognition as “truer” testimonies

 As of the second half of the 2000s, some of the memories of the conflict – preposterous from the judicial perspective or from human rights defenders – began to be valued and enabled us to understand, in a different way, how Andean populations look at their past and manage to reintegrate it into an experience that makes sense to them. And this is where anthropology plays a key role. For example, the beautiful study by Arianna Cecconi on the role of dreams in remembering the armed conflict highlighted the use of the dreams as a cultural modality for the management of grief in the Andean context where dreams and their interpretations constitute an important and valued social activity. Some residents continue to suffer after the war and “receive a visit” from the souls of their deceased in dreams as a kind of soothing support. For my part, I inquired about the meaning of memories of the war based on stories about miraculous apparitions and the heroic role of the patron saint of Huancapi, considered by his devotees as their protector during the war.

I make my own criticism of this culturalist interpretation of the Andean world and ultra-relativist positions. However, postmodern “deconstruction” poses other problems. While it has the merit of following a thoughtful approach to anthropological practice, it risks having chilling effects on future research, offering few concrete alternatives. Even given the postmodern critique of “ethnographic authority,” a return to field studies is key now that fieldwork is possible again. Therefore, although it is important not to adopt an approach that gives excessive value to the “Andean culture”, we must also avoid falling to the opposite extreme, dismissing any cultural specificity and neglecting the characteristic social and religious representations, knowledge, and practices of the region. And this is precisely what I tried to do in my work on peasant memories in Ayacucho.

Tom Mould on his book, Overthrowing the Queen: Telling Stories of Welfare in America.

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Interview by Fionnán Mac Gabhann

iupress.org/overthrowing-the-queen

Fionnán Mac Gabhann: Overthrowing the Queen represents one of several objectives devised as part of a collaborative project you initiated for the purpose of addressing stereotypes and perceptions of public assistance in the United States. Could you describe the origins of this project and the collaborative efforts that lead to this book’s publication?

Tom Mould: As you know, the book is an attempt to look at all the different stories that are told about public assistance and people who receive public assistance. And so it includes the spurious legends about welfare queens but also spends equal time, if not more, on stories told by aid recipients. I do come at this topic as a folklorist, which means I pay attention to genre, narrative, performance, and context. But I’m also drawing links to a lot of other disciplines like psychology and sociology, anthropology, political science, communication, and so on. This is a question that spans more than one discipline, so I really felt that it required an interdisciplinary approach, and collaboration. There was no way this project was going to work if I wasn’t collaborating with people who spend their lives, day in and day out, working as aid providers or struggling to make ends meet as aid recipients. And then, of course, I collaborated with people who are telling these stories, doing the kind of good, strong ethnographic field work that folklorists and anthropologists are known for.

So I’ll give you the origin story. It was 2011, and I’m at a dinner party, a big organizational kind of thing with hundreds of people in attendance from across the spectrum in terms of class, race, position, and so on. I found myself talking with a woman—a fairly wealthy local community member—about the Affordable Care Act, which was being discussed and debated in the public domain at this time. The conversation was a little heated. We didn’t agree on almost anything in terms of the merit of the Affordable Care Act. I was more in favour of it, the person I was talking to was quite against it. Finally, we found one point of agreement which was that we both agreed that using the emergency room as your primary care provider was terrible for financial-economic reasons, for health reasons, for the pressure it places on institutions such as hospitals, and so on. So we could all agree on that. And I thought, “Great, I’m going to leave while we finally have something we can agree on.” And she said, “but,” and I’m thinking, “Oh no.” She continued, “You’ll never convince me that those people aren’t just going to take advantage of the system anyway.” I sceptically responded, “What people?” She proceeded to tell a story positioned in ways that I’ve heard this story told since I was a kid. The story was the classic welfare queen legend of the woman in the grocery store. And this woman told the story as something that she had seen herself and been present for in the not too distant past. She said, “I was in the grocery store the other day; I was checking out; there was a woman in front of me. She had nice clothes, jewellery, nice hair, and she had all of this food, steaks, and so on. She was buying dog food, and the woman behind the register said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, you can’t buy dog food with food stamps.” And she said, “Well, this is ridiculous.” And she kept pushing it and finally she said, “Fine,” and she marched back to the meat counter, grabbed a couple of steaks, brought them back and said, “All right, I’ll just feed my dog the steaks instead.” The narrator in this case did not say that the woman at the grocery store climbed into a Cadillac but that would be a common conclusion to the story.

I’ve heard this story so many times, but I thought it had risen to prominence during the Reagan presidency and declined in Reagan’s aftermath. I thought these stories were waning. They aren’t, they weren’t, and this project makes it quite clear that these stories are very much still being shared among friends, family, co-workers, colleagues, and so on.

So I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t get this story out of my head, I couldn’t believe it was still being told; and I was looking for a new project. I’m always interested in narrative. I had come off of a couple of other projects that were very focused on sacred narrative, but I’m also interested in how narrative is used in political spheres.

Long story short, I went and followed up with some colleagues on the Board of the Women’s Resource Center and folks I knew in the Department of Social Services. We convened a group of about nine of us who were working both in government and non-profit organizations, and said, “Hey, I heard this story. I want to do more about it. What do you think?” And people responded with, “Oh my gosh, we hear that story every time we present publicly.” So we sat around and for the next couple of months, threw out ideas for what we might do, what specific problems we wanted to address, how I could be helpful—because I’m not an economist, I’m not a policymaker, I’m a folklorist. So how can I bring my skill set to the table? After about a year of conversations and collaboration we had 10 goals or outcomes that we wanted to reach, we had an advisory board and group of people, and we had students who were signed up for a class to do some of this work.

Fionnán Mac Gabhann: In the book you describe your struggle with the question of how to write about stories of public assistance in the United States without reinforcing the very stereotypes that have caused so much damage and which you are attempting to undermine. One solution you offer is to take a performance-centered approach to analysis of stories of public assistance. How did this study benefit from folkloristic and linguistic anthropological insights on performance?

Tom Mould: Firstly, I’ll say that folklorists in general, because we pay attention to genre and process, are particularly well positioned to consider rhetorical strategies. I don’t want to critique the whole field of anthropology, but I think that sometimes the discipline has spent less time thinking about epistemology and the construction of knowledge, focusing more so on what it is rather than how it is produced. Of course, this situation has changed over time. But I think that folklorists do a really good job of thinking about how knowledge is produced, and that’s what a performance-centered approach does. It asks: who’s in the room, what are their rhetorical goals, what are their histories, what do the participants bring to the table? And with this kind of information we can understand why a particular story is being told and how we should be understanding it. A performer-centered approach also encourages us go beyond the immediate situational context, to work even further back, and to look at how a person is positioned, whether in terms of a particular role—a recipient or provider of public assistance for instance— or in terms of their own personal biographies and lived experience. Both of these moves help to bring context to the table so that we can unpack these kinds of stories.

As you know, one of the incredibly grim things that I discovered early in my fieldwork was that aid recipients replicated welfare queen legends very frequently. In fact almost every aid recipient had at least one kind of a welfare queen legend that they told. Rhetorically this makes all the sense in the world when you consider the larger social context. Aid recipients are aware that if they don’t acknowledge the welfare queen narrative and disassociate themselves from it they won’t be taken seriously because their interlocutors are already bringing that prejudicial narrative to the table.

And I’ll just add, finally, that a performance-centred approach encourages us to pay more attention to the audience and how people are responding to stories. For example, there was a wonderful moment captured by one of the students I worked with, Jessica Elizondo, who spoke with a group of conservative, white, upper middle class, older businessmen over coffee. These men were very bold in their views and stories, but you could see them sussing each other out in terms of what their positions were on welfare. Once agreement started getting shaped and formed more and more stereotypical stories were shared with that comfort that was being built. This kind of context is crucial for understanding why even self-professed liberals will sometimes share these welfare queen stories.

Fionnán Mac Gabhann: One of your major contributions to narrative scholarship in this book is your proposed reorientation of approaches to the study of legend. As you illustrate, most previous definitions of legend foreground the negotiation of truth as the essential characteristic of the genre. Contrastingly, you argue that legend is distinguished by the doubt it engenders and you advocate for a “doubt-centred approach” to the study of legend. Why have you adopted this approach, and what do you suggest are the benefits of such a reorientation?

Tom Mould: When I started this project I did an exhaustive literature review of legend and ended up with something like 84 different definitions that scholars have articulated over the years. So we haven’t settled the debate, and that’s okay. I mean, we all need an operational definition to move forward with, otherwise we’re sort of crippled intellectually. But that work really helped me realize that what makes a legend distinctive is not effort to convince someone of their truth but rather people’s expression of doubt.

I need to be really clear here because I’ve published some articles on this subject before this book came out and it’s really easy for folks to misinterpret what I’m arguing. Many people have said, “I can’t believe you are suggesting that we should be doubting all the people we talk to,” and I said, “No, no, no, the doubt is not our own.” The goal with a doubt-centered approach to legend is to look to see where audiences and participants are doubting, not to bring our own doubt to the table—my gosh, I can’t think of anything worse, and yet we do it all the time. I mean, when you actually think about what folklorists study as legend, it’s things we doubt, it’s things we think aren’t true. So, actually, maybe paradoxically, ironically, a doubt-centered approach actually helps us get away from that bias. And so, if somebody is making an argument for something that’s true and nobody doubts it, then it is just news or then it is just fact. We don’t call that legend, it’s not part of the legend process of debate, discussion, and belief. But the minute somebody starts to doubt it, then it becomes legend.

I’ll give you an example. When various folks on the right were claiming that Barack Obama couldn’t be President because he wasn’t a US citizen you had the birther movement—people who question the validity of Obama’s birth certificate—claiming that the story that Obama was born in Hawaii was a story to be doubted. The story that he is secretly a Muslim born in Kenya was the story to be believed, from this group’s perspective. So for them, the first was legend, the second fact. Then you had others—the mainstream media and investigative journalists, for example—for whom the reverse was true, where the story of not being a citizen or a Christian was the legend. So paying attention to where people are doubting is a crucial move here.

And doubt is not just the other side of truth. One of the things I found in this work was that people would often accept as true, let’s say, that an event had happened at a particular point in time but they doubted the degree to which these kinds of instances were common or generalizable. If you took a truth-centered approach to the same exact stories you wouldn’t necessarily recognize that people were actively trying to convince you the story was generalizable. The same goes for an interpretation. Many people think “Oh, the story speaks for itself.” Well, a lot of our research shows that it doesn’t. There is great open-endedness to narrative; stories require interpretation.

The doubt-centered approach I took highlighted a whole series of rhetorical strategies that would not have been identified with other varieties of analysis focused on how people are establishing credibility. So, that’s part of the argument. There are other benefits to a doubt-centered approach, however. One of the biggest ones being that it is emic; it encourages us to consider how people within the community are interpreting the narrative. It also brings more focus on audience interpretation and audience reception, which I think folklorist have not done as great of a job at as we could, in terms of analysis.

Fionnán Mac Gabhann: You published three monographs prior to Overthrowing the Queen, all of which revolve around oral narrative: Choctaw Prophecy: A Legacy for the Future (2003), Choctaw Tales (2004), and Still, the Small Voice: Revelation, Personal Narrative, and the Mormon Folk Tradition (2011). How does Overthrowing the Queen compare and contrast with these previous works?

Tom Mould: With Choctaw Tales I was following very much in traditional folklore footsteps by setting out to record the local traditions and stories. This was a book that community members wanted. In fact they sort of said, “You can write your Choctaw prophecy book but you have got to give us Choctaw Tales.” Part of the reason why they wanted Choctaw Tales was that they are still incredibly stigmatized and discriminated against in their home state of Mississippi. People still don’t understand who they are, what their traditions are, what their stories are, the depth, and richness, and beauty of their culture. So this is kind of a classic Boasian moment: go in, identify that, write about it, and let the work speak for itself. I think that was an implicit move behind both Choctaw Tales and Choctaw Prophecy.

When I first started working with Latter-day Saints people kept saying, “Are you coming to expose us? Are you coming to pile on?” When the book was published people were pleasantly surprised. Having a non-member write emically was ground-breaking for so many of them because they were not used to that. That wasn’t an explicit mission of mine, but in all of my work I certainly aim to present an honest, accurate, fair, and also empathetic view. If we really take cultural relativism at its face value then there is something to value here and the question becomes, what is it?

To get to your question. I had been focused on sacred narratives. I had been focused on stories that were grounded within a particular community and which bound folks together. I can’t say that welfare legends bind people together, certainly not the non-recipients. Even among aid recipients, there’s some recognition of shared plight in this narrative tradition, but it’s not the kind of community building or cohesive kind of tradition that folklorists often study.

So when I came to the welfare project I was interested in exploring more explicitly the possibility of putting my social conscience into my work. Every folklorist is going to be different and no folklorist should be obligated to do anything of this sort. But I felt compelled to do this, especially after studying the narrative traditions of a church whose leaders took political stances against things like same-sex marriage that ran counter to my own views. So when the story of “the welfare queen” was told to me at this dinner party, it landed in my lap at a time when I was thinking, as a folklorist, what if I brought my study of narrative and applied it to what I was doing in my off time, in terms of social justice and in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion work? Could that be a happy marriage? I would argue that it has been, and I also appreciate that there are going to be folklorists who don’t see it fitting within the parameters that they’ve often operated under. I just think it’s a missed opportunity if we don’t explore this also. I think our tent is big enough for both.

References:

Mould, Tom. 2018. “A Doubt-Centred Approach to Contemporary Legend and Fake News.” Journal of American Folklore 131(522): 413-420.

Stevie Suan on his book, Anime’s Identity

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Interview by Wendy Goldberg

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/animes-identity

Wendy Goldberg: How fixed is Japan’s perceived cultural dominance for anime? How could cultural dominance spring back along the node of transnationalism? I’m thinking, for example, of how American culture has been a dominant node of popular culture globally by absorbing other cultural materials. Your discussion here shows how anime remains supposedly Japanese in American and other country’s consumption of anime and manga (whereas before, especially in the US, Japanese origins had been suppressed. Now, its Japanese-ness became a selling point to consumers). This works well within your discussion of local/global. In other words, do you see how another culture (nation-state) could begin to dominate among these transnational networks?

Stevie Suan: These dynamics, are, as you’ve pointed out, very complex. I think part of the difficulty is that a lot of cultural analysis starts from the national context and endeavors to break free of it by exposing the transnational. But, in the book I try to foreground the transnational as the point of departure—that anime is always already transnational.

However, this transnationality is usually shunted into a national framework. So, for anime, although this is probably an unpopular position, I see the broader nation branding of anime as effectively claiming anime as Japanese culture despite anime’s decades long global visibility and transnational production. Yes, the idea that anime is Japanese predates the nation-branding campaigns, and yes, the campaigns are horrendously ineffective in making any actual improvements to the abusive work conditions of workers in the industry. But there has been a shift in the past few decades towards accepting anime as part of what counts “officially” as “Japanese culture,” a rise that directly coincides with the inclusion of anime in nation branding, both domestically and externally.

This is the “soft power” at work, making anime a symbol for Japan both inside and outside of Japan, which creates the image that anime, even outside of Japan, is always already Japanese. These campaigns, which in my view are often most effective in partly-privately, partly-publicly funded industry showcase events like the aptly named “AnimeJapan,” that tend to tie anime to Japan (in this case directly in the name). The result is a defining of anime in relation to Japan, where, as the event’s tagline states, “everything anime is here.”

Because of this consistent tying of anime to Japan, the transnationality of anime becomes a point of contention. Works that are openly transnational (for instance, with productions that advertise as partially done in China, or by a Chinese studio) get scrutinized as “not really anime,” or “not anime enough.” This is despite the fact that most anime, unbeknownst to most viewers, are actually transnationally produced.

What might best evince the effectiveness of this branding is how something similar does not happen with, say, Dreamworks animations. I doubt many would question the authenticity of a Dreamworks film because part of the production occurred in India, for example. But for anime, websites in both Japanese and English stress how they define anime as “animation produced in Japan.” The perceived importance of Japan for anime is so prominent that companies from China go through great lengths to either found studios in Tokyo or make sure the anime is dubbed into Japanese to “authenticate” these works as “real anime” because “everything anime is here (Japan).”

So, with the rise in fans across Asia of anime, and the fact that there are already skilled animators there who work on anime anyway, it should be no surprise that there are increasing numbers of anime that are produced almost entirely outside of Japan. These are also transnationally produced, with some so-called “Chinese anime” actually having parts of the production done in Japan and Korea. This is also not uncommon for games like Genshin Impact, produced mainly in China but with animation sequences done in Japan, featuring anime voice actors (who speak in Japanese), and advertising itself as an “anime-style” game.

The question remains if anime will go on to be equated with a broader “East Asian” aesthetic, if Japanese nation branding will continue to claim anime effectively, or if anime could be seen as something more global and transcultural. So, the aim of the book was to develop ways to assess the transnational operations at play in anime, to trace the different forms of globality and how to address them.

These appear in tandem as distinctive types of globality for anime: 1) the tensions of the internal-external (domestic-foreign) dichotomy of anime as a (local) Japanese media with a global presence; 2) a centralized transnationality with Tokyo as the privileged point in a transnational network of cultural production; 3) a decentralized transnationality, where anime is produced by referential reiteration of conventionalized components in various locales, which enables a more heterarchical network of connection across borders and has a transcultural potentiality that may be radically divorced from nationality. Each affords a very different notion of spatiality, of conceptualizing and ordering space, and our relation to that space.

Anime seen from this perspective, as performatively constituted through citations of reiterated components, would produce a very different geography when tracing the paths of its enactment. “Chinese anime” would then be part of a broader transcultural media-form that is anime, linking it with so-called “anime proper.” I think there is far more potential there, where media-form is radically distanced from the national. Alternative organizations of space, regionality, and conceptions of cultural production would then come into view, which I try to outline in the book.

For me, this is a more promising avenue of pursuit than to categorically allocate out nationalized notions of aesthetics. The latter approach risks restaging national literatures and cinemas debates, except this time every country needs an animation style. I’d rather challenge those notions and experiment with what a transnational, transcultural view of culture might conjure up—I wanted to explore how to chart or sketch how a regularly occurring transnational context and geography might look like, and how to read for it.

With that in mind, one of the aims of the book was to radically get away from notions of origin, to focus on what sustains something instead of focusing on origination; to move away from two completely divided segments that come into contact and instead focus on the tensions of hybridity, even in areas where it is not often recognized like anime, in order to trouble the claiming of something through the national. Instead, I wanted bring into view potential formations of transcultural commonality.

Wendy Goldberg: Could you argue that this model of citation is also a model already at work and in force in other popular cultural forms? That is, in how we consume, cite, and reconfigure pop culture properties? Is anime an especially fungible set of texts?  Does the speed of production (made possible through these putatively invisible transnational productions) make anime a special case of citation?

Stevie Suan I definitely think that citational practices can operate similarly in all sorts of cultural forms. Manga operates very similarly, and part of its appeal, as has been noted by a number of scholars, is the consistency of its media-form. This allows for readers to gain literacy and for artists to gain fluency very quickly. Because manga does not require as much financial investment and number of laborers to produce, this may be partly why many of its stylistic elements have spread throughout the world in the past few decades.

Genre media is another good example where citations are so important. You want the shadowy lighting and the down-on-their-luck detectives to be a film noir. There is a lot of sophistication in these operations, as it’s not easy to reproduce effectively. And the specific combinations of citations can link in distinct directions, make unexpected connections, or sustain common assemblages.

With that in mind, I think that anime is a particularly rich site for that because it wears its citationality so openly. There is a staggering amount of anime produced each year and so much of it very blatantly resembles prior iterations. Fans (casual and more dedicated) actively search out anime precisely because it looks, sounds, and has many similar narratives—they want more of the same.

Another important aspect is that operations of citation tend to link across iterations. Because of the way anime’s production has developed historically from cel animation practices where individual layers are produced by different people in disparate places, these citations are employed on multiple layers in multiple places.

It also allows for a coordination across the complexity of this production network as everyone is “sharing” a certain degree of understanding of citations. In turn, this helps with the rapid speed of production across the transnational locations of the various studios that produce anime. In this way, anime’s citations constitute a multilayered transnational image that is composited into a single frame, making the very images themselves transnational cultural products.

 Wendy Goldberg: As you have noted, visual and narrative citation dominates what we call anime but citation also comes through performance, in the seemingly moving figures these images and stories create. Can you talk more about the modes of performance (embodied and figurative) you describe and how that helped you think about anime’s differentiation?

Stevie Suan: When I encountered Donald Crafton’s typology of embodied and figurative acting in animation, I was elated because I finally found terminology to articulate the distinction in different types of performance I was sensing. For Crafton, “embodied acting” places the emphasis on the uniqueness of movement as an externalization of an interior. In my view, the actor thus presents an individualized character, one where outside and inside are cleanly divided. This is roughly analogous to method acting and what is famous on screen in Hollywood films. It makes its way to animation via Walt Disney, who invokes this mode of animated character acting which, to this day, is often seen as “the gold standard” for quality performance in animation globally.

But figurative acting involves preexisting movements that the actor must follow. These codified expressions are then employed in combination to express a character. And different actors and different characters can perform the same expression, usually in different situations, but sometimes even right next to one another. There is an overt engagement with repetition, with referencing prior iterations, citing them to reenact them with as little deviation as possible.

So, there is an emphasis here on the externality of the expression, of it performed on the character from prior iterations on other bodies, rather than something sourced from within. Figurative acting is found across the world (from Ballet to Kathakali) and in various types of animation (from Betty Boop to the Simpsons), and employed frequently in anime.

But one aspect that Crafton does not expand on is the implications for the type of characters produced by these two modes of acting. I started to wonder if perhaps each mode of acting affords a very different way of conceptualizing the self more broadly. Embodied acting only comes into prominence in modernity, and certainly emphasizes a very specific notion of individualism and strictly dividing inside and outside. Disney—which is still so invested in embodied acting—is a massive globally influential media, evincing how important embodied acting still is to our global conception of self.

But then, what type of selfhood does figurative acting afford? Anime may be one of the few types of media, especially in animation, that can claim a similar degree of global influence to Disney. And working through repetition, or rather, citation and combination, each anime character is somehow pre-individual (built from codes that exist prior to the character) and trans-individual (each code is cited across bodies). In this sense, anime’s characters are not individual-characters but particular-characters, where the distinction is produced through the specific combinations, and can involve a radical interconnectedness and lack of closure.

But as Crafton notes, and as I try to further develop, in truth neither mode of acting is entirely separable from the other. Figurative acting is, like all attempts to repeat, only possible through difference; and embodied acting’s gestures are usually involving some codified element to be legible (even unique smiles resemble other smiles).

With the expansion of neoliberalism, these two modes come into connection in contemporary lifestyle performance. Here, the interiority of the self is supposedly made externally visible through the purchase and wearing/using of various fashions and commodities, thus making one into an individualist neoliberal subject—aligning with the individualism invoked by embodied acting.

But in its operations, the individual is only made legible through mass-produced, external objects. In this sense, the combination of those external objects becomes inseparable from the performance of self, aligning with the operations of figurative acting. With lifestyle a globally prominent expression of self, in some ways, it makes sense that Disney (which tends towards embodied acting) and anime (which tends towards figurative acting) are two of the most dominant types of animation globally in this historical moment.

Wendy Goldberg: Can you talk more about the final paragraph in Chapter 6 about hyperindividualism as “isolating” and how “figurative acting may appear to be a potential alternative to the dominant individualism of embodied acting” (pp. 236-7). I’m also struck by your statement that figurative performance can be “as exclusionary as it is participatory, and figurative modes of expression are still bound by the processes of citation and the power dynamics at play within them” (p. 237). There seemed to be a lot to unpack here in terms of power (both participation and access) so was there more you wanted to explore here?

Stevie Suan: Yes, there was so much more I wanted to write! I wanted to underscored how hyperindividualism can be isolating because the individual, with its strict divisions between the internal and external, has become the de facto unit of the social under neoliberalism. This becomes apparent in embodied acting, when the movements and gestures emphasize distinction and uniqueness. In the extreme, the resultant character’s self can appear totally disassociated from anything external. It becomes isolated because it is purposefully unrecognizable or illegible, appearing unrelated to anything, slipping into modes of isolating hyperindividualism.

But on the other side of the spectrum, figurative acting operates as repeating codes with a minimization of distinction between iterations. Here citations are openly shared across bodies, so inside and outside don’t work in the same way as in embodied acting.

In regards to figurative acting’s participatory elements, viewers and performers must share, and acknowledge that sharing, of the codes even if not explicitly—otherwise the performance is not as effective. But this also means that there will be those who do not understand, who are not trained in performing or learning the codes. Furthermore, there may develop systems of authorities on who is and isn’t allowed to perform (and perhaps even read) those codes.

For anime, this is seen as Japan/Japanese culture: the figurative acting codes are authenticated by their relation to Japan/Japanese culture, and those who perform it outside of Japan are seen as inauthentic or “merely imitating” (despite the fact that that’s how figurative acting even in Japan operates). And those who view/read those codes outside of Japan are simply accessing, not engaging in an exchange with Japanese culture. So, there are exclusionary tendencies that can occur.

This includes the politics of citation, as who and what is cited by whom can have important effects. Because figurative acting depends on prior iterations, if a code is not regularly cited, it loses visibility and becomes illegible. Thus, those who are authenticated to perform or engage have a lot of power to acknowledge or disavow certain codes through their own citational practices (or lack thereof). In the context of transnational production, if an anime largely animated in China innovates on an expression, due to the current understanding of anime as Japanese, if it is not cited within an anime that is perceived as Japanese, it may become a derided deviation, rather than an addition to the repertoire.

The other issue is the conservativism in expression. Because the figurative acting codes operate through citation, they tend towards minimizing difference. This can become stale and rigid very quickly. But more importantly, it is also about subjugating oneself to the pre-existing codes. You must contort and conform oneself to the prescribed pattern. It is very difficult for an individual, even those with authoritative status, to make any substantial changes because they are so decentralized. It has to be a massive movement of repeating (or ceasing) to affect any substantial shifts, for better or for worse.

And while I have focused on the potential pitfalls here, it is also important to acknowledge the constructive potentials. Figurative acting could also be very inclusive. Technically, anyone from anywhere can perform the codes. Indeed, the rigidity towards maintaining the code and the decentralized network of citations that sustains figurative acting is here a double-edged sword: as long as the codified element is reiterated within the limits of its preexisting range of expression, it is technically a felicitous performance; furthermore, it is hard to pin-down and control or own definitively.

This could facilitate a radical openness to accepting a diversity of performers, and indeed, as I show throughout the book, anime’s figurative acting codes are performed regularly by people outside of Japan. Additionally, there is also the capacity to expand beyond the current repertoire and include more and more codes. As long as it gets repeated regularly, almost anything could become a figurative acting code.

I think there is a lot of potential to be explored in figurative acting as an alternative to individualism for performing the self, but it is also important to acknowledge its own limitations, and to think across and through the two modes of acting, to expose how they function in the world, and the far-ranging implications of their operations.

Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler on their book, The American Stamp

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Interview by Pauline Turner Strong

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-american-stamp/9780231208246

Pauline Strong: Congratulations on the publication of your book! I very much enjoyed reading it and I look forward to sharing it with students. To begin our conversation, I’d like to hear what drew each of you to the topic of the cultural history and iconography of US postage stamps.

Richard Handler:  Like many children of my era (b. 1950), I collected stamps as a child, and like some of those people, I returned to stamps in my 40s, working on my collection more or less seriously since then.  It’s easy to immerse oneself in various obsessions of collecting that do not require a lot of creative analysis. I certainly did that (it’s a hobby, after all!), but also, as an anthropologist who studies nationalism, I thought some over the years about the iconographic content of US stamps. (I also collect French and French colonial stamps, but that’s another story.)

There is a particularly striking US stamp, featuring the Sicangu (Brulé) Lakota chief, Hollow Horn Bear and issued in 1923, that has always held my attention.

That stamp gave me ideas for a more extended analysis of Native Americans on US stamps, but I felt I didn’t have the necessary expertise in American studies or Indigenous studies to carry out such a project on my own.

As we explain in the acknowledgments section of our book, Laura and I met when she was finishing her dissertation (in the English department) on Manifest Destiny, conquest narratives, and the closing of the American putative frontier. As we got to know one another (talking about how her work intersected with mine, on nationalism), I got to talking with her about my idea for a paper about Hollow Horn Bear and Indians more generally on US postage stamps.

Laura Goldblatt: I found this topic very interesting for the reasons Richard mentions, but also because I continue to be drawn to questions of state messaging or propaganda. In this regard, postage stamps seemed so ripe for exploration: tiny pictorial messages, designed to travel broadly in their delivery of other messages, that end up in the intimate spaces of the home. And, while senders can control what they send and to some degree what stamps they choose, receivers don’t get to reject delivery because they don’t like the image on their parcel. And neither has any control of what happens as their missives move through the mail. It made me think about government messaging in new ways, as far more multifaceted than the term propaganda implies, but also as completely banal and woven into the fabric of the quotidian.

With that in mind, I also became interested in collectors because I wanted to know how people interacted with stamps, what they did with them, and how these instrumentalized objects could be used for non-instrumental purposes. Stamp collecting is more Richard’s ken, but I nonetheless became intrigued by how different collecting communities—Confederate collectors, Third Reich collectors, and so—described their interests, how they responded to changing political climates, and how they understood stamps’ meanings. Though the casual stamp user is different from these specialist groups, they, too, express opinions about stamps’ designs, have stamp preferences, see the images on their letters, and so on. In fact, the COVID pandemic really underscored how crucial the USPS–and home delivery in particular–remains to the US body politic.

These interests eventually superseded the reservations we both felt about diving into a topic with very little existing academic scholarship on it.

Richard Handler: So we took the plunge, starting with some shorter pieces and then committing ourselves to the book about five years ago.

Polly Strong: One of the main themes of The American Stamp is how the creation, circulation, and collecting of postage stamps contributed to the construction of citizenship during the second half of the 19th century and the entire 20th century. This is a very long timespan to consider! Would you each give an example of a notable change in the social use of stamps over this century and a half?  

Laura Goldblatt: For me, I think the most notable change is from the idea of postage stamps as representing the nation, to postage stamps being indicative of various consumer preferences. For instance, prior to 1893, when you wanted to mail a parcel, you had very limited options of imagery. You either selected the stamp with the exact postage for the item you wanted to send, or some combination of stamps to equal the correct postage—though again, you didn’t have multiple choices for one-cent, two-cent, half-cent stamps: there was just one of those varieties.

But then, in 1893, the Post Office released a set of stamps alongside the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The stamps were sold at the fair itself, where you could also have them postmarked and then keep them as souvenirs. These stamps depicted a variety of images from the narratives of Columbus’s voyages to the Americas.

These were the first commemorative stamps: stamps produced to mark a particular occasion or person and available only for limited time. With the Columbian series, the Post Office realized there was money to be made from such commemorative issues, and more and more were produced over time.

People don’t mail letters as much as they once did, but when they do, they have a wide variety of stamps to choose from, all in the same denomination. The last time I went to the post office, I was able to buy stamps commemorating the 50th anniversary of Title IX, two sheets of stamps from the Black Heritage series—Edmonia Lewis and August Wilson

—and a sheet of stamps dedicated to Shel Silverstein. That is to say, I was able to choose which stamps best represented my values and priorities, rather than solely national values or priorities. I think that’s a really big change in how we understand citizenship and the government’s relationship to citizens. 

Richard: Piggybacking on what Laura said, before the Columbian commemorative stamps, most US stamps feature what we called “dead heads”: the great men (and they were men) of American history. These supposedly definitive stamps were, unlike commemoratives, meant to stay in circulation for many years. For example, most people mailing a letter in the 1940s would have used the three-cent Thomas Jefferson stamp from the Presidential definitive series of 1938.

This type of stamp remained dominant until the post-WW-II period, when commemorative stamps really took off, with more and more new stamps being released, placed on sale, and then withdrawn every year. 

As Laura said, commemorative stamps became a vehicle of consumer choice. But something else was happening: as various kinds of multiculturalism became politically more salient in the last third of the 20th century, the post office found it ever more difficult to produce sets of dead-head stamps that represented the nation in all its diversity. A consequence of this, we argue, is that a different iconography came to the fore for the representation of the nation in definitive stamp series. Instead of featuring representative persons, these stamps featured iconic objects like flags, scenic views, and nostalgic items of material culture. It’s as if on the eve of the 21st century, the post office stalled out on the iconographic recognition of a truly diverse America.

Polly Strong: This brings us to another major theme of the book: collecting. Richard, how was your research on stamp collecting influenced by your previous research on collecting and display at Colonial Williamsburg? Laura, could you comment more on how consumer demand and economic imperatives have shaped postal iconography? What do you make of the marketing of stamps for national, religious, and secular holidays?

Richard Handler: Your question suggests another chapter to be written, comparing genres of collecting. We focused on two aspects of stamp collecting: the creation (over time) of a system that defines collectible objects and assigns values to them; and the ways in which individual collectors interact with that system. One of the striking things about stamp collecting that is not true of all genres of collecting is the high degree to which the average collector, with very little financial investment, can interact with the larger system to create collectible objects—for example, by sending letters to oneself, stamped with interesting stamps, which will be returned, postmarked. I’m not sure what the analogue to this would be in the art or museum worlds. That’s the next paper to write!

Laura Goldblatt: Richard mentioned the post-WW II explosion of commemorative stamps. Looking at the pattern of new commemorative issues since then, it seems clear that the post office has responded to the increasing number of requests for stamps coming from various demographic and interest groups not by articulating a new or revised model of ideal citizenship but simply by producing stamps for each group. I mentioned the Black Heritage Series, which is a response to those who want Black culture celebrated on US stamps. But what are we to make of the 1995 Civil War commemorative series, which honors both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Frederick Douglass and “Stonewall” Jackson?

Rather than make a political decision about how to commemorate the Civil War—a decision that might lead to the depiction of only Union actors, and thereby offend Lost Cause warriors—the post office treated both Confederate and Union figures as equals. Similarly, the advent of special stamps for Christmas in 1962 was not hindered by critics who worried about the separation of church and state, but led instead, over time, to stamps for Hanukkah (1996), Kwanzaa (1997), and Eid (2001).

This is the kind of consumer logic we see at the grocery store: do you like one brand of milk or another? But the fact is that Confederates are not the same as Union soldiers, nor is honoring various religious holidays the same as refusing in principle to honor any. In sum, the US stamps program has come to instantiate a consumer logic: letting the market decide instead of deciding that some political positions ought not to be celebrated by the state.

Polly Strong: I really appreciate hearing about the new directions your research could take now that the book is published. I’d like to close by asking each of you about the collaboration that gave rise to this book. Richard, in addition to your single-authored books and edited volumes, you have co-authored an unusual number of publications for an anthropologist, including The Fiction of Culture (with Daniel Segal); Schneider on Schneider (with David Schneider); The New History in an Old Museum (with Eric Gable); and now The American Stamp. Why has collaborative work been so compelling to you? Laura, in addition to The American Stamp you have been working on a single-authored monograph, After Destiny: Propaganda, Settler Colonialism, and Community, and you have published both single authored and co-authored articles. What do you see as the rewards and risks of collaborative work as an early career scholar?    

Richard Handler: The simplest and in some sense truest answer I can give is that writing with a co-author is more fun than writing alone! Perhaps fun isn’t quite the right word; to put it slightly differently, co-authoring is a social experience in a way that solo writing (which is also, of course, a social experience) is not. Co-authoring means you have someone to talk to about the work that is important to you; and co-authoring only works well if you enjoy talking to your co-author about your shared project.

Beyond fun, I am a person who is conscious of my scholarly limitations: what I’m good at and not so good at, what I know and what I don’t know. Co-authoring is a sensible response to one’s limitations; it allows writers to share in each other’s expertise. It also allows for quick and engaged feedback, as when you call up your co-author and say, “I can’t figure this out, can you help me,” or “I can’t make this paragraph come out right; will you see what you can do with it.”

A final thought: egalitarian co-authoring requires both a strong ego (you have to be willing to write your fair share) and a lack of ego, in the sense of allowing the other person’s ideas and writing to change yours. 

Laura Goldblatt: I’d echo Richard in the list of rewards. I often think of all writing and thought as collaborative. Even my single-authored publications and research grew out of a series of rich conversations with others, and aid that included reading and commenting on drafts. Co-authorship makes those collaborations visible. I also just really like co-writing. I largely decided to go to graduate school because of how thrilling—really!—I found class discussions about rich and complicated ideas as an undergraduate. Co-writing takes that process beyond the classroom.

In terms of risks, co-authorship often isn’t legible to others as legitimate scholarly work, which is a problem as an early-career academic. It can also make it difficult for peers and search committees to glean what my expertise is separate from that of my co-authors. But still, the benefits for me far outweigh those risks. I’ve learned as much about scholarly and professional praxis from Richard as I have about stamps, which is a kind of mentorship I think we could all gain from.

Laura Goldblatt is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where Richard Handler is Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies.

List of Illustrations

  1. Cover, The American Stamp, 2023, https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-american-stamp/9780231208246
  2. Hollow Horn Bear, 1923, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/the-american-indian-in-postage-stamps-profiles-in-leadership-the-paths-of-great-sioux-2
  3. Columbian Exposition issue: Landing of Columbus, 1893, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/object/npm_1980.2493.1609
  4. Black Heritage series: August Wilson, 2021, https://uspsblog.com/celebrating-black-heritage/
  5. Presidential series: Thomas Jefferson, 1938, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/about-us-stamps-bureau-period-1894-1939-definitive-issues/presidential-series-1938
  6. Civil War commemorative series, 1995, https://www.amazon.com/Civil-Sheet-Twenty-Different-Stamps/dp/B008G3G2RI

Jay Ke-Schutte on his book, Angloscene

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https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520389816/angloscene

Interview with Andrew Carruthers

Andrew Carruthers: First, please allow me to offer you a hearty congratulations on the publication of your monograph! Ethnographic richness and theoretical acumen are highlights of Angloscene, a book whose eponymous object of concern is an ideological space-time linking whiteness, English, and cosmopolitan mobilities in Afro-Chinese Beijing and beyond. Across a detailed series of Afro-Chinese encounters, the problem of translation looms large, figuring not only as part of African and Chinese subjects’ everyday equipment for living, but also as a rarefied object of critical inquiry among anthropologists and other scholars in the humanities and social sciences. I wonder if you might begin by situating the approach taken to translation in Angloscene. What is the relation between translation and personhood in the space-time configuration that you call the Angloscene? I’m particularly interested in hearing more about how your approach to translation contrasts with approaches developed in, say, so-called posthuman anthropology and media theory, a point you pursue in Chapter 4.

Jay Ke-Schutte: It has been such an enjoyable task engaging with these generous questions, especially from someone I not only regard as a colleague, but as a friend. In light of my relatively remote writing chronotope at around 3000m on the Tibetan plateau, I will do my best to do them justice. The analytic of translation, as you point out, is fairly crucial throughout the book and in many ways will be at stake in almost all the questions in our exchange. As a starting point – though I will continue to return to this theme – Angloscene was an attempt to work beyond two problematic translational a priori in Western anthropology: The first, and likely more familiar, remains a faux-romantic translational nihilism, which posits the impossibility of translation, while never accounting for how or why so many ethnographic informants undertake significant discursive labor in translating at various abstractive scales of materials for their ethnographers. The fact that translational denialists benefit from an astounding degree of translational extraction was just one of those things – as a bilingual – I had to brainwash myself into not seeing just to get through my early anthropological and ethnomusicological education in South Africa.

The second translational a priori is a more recent, peculiarly metaphysical, assertion of translation as a posthuman, non-representational, often synchronically-amorphous becoming. The contradiction of posthuman translation emerges in its reception. The retreat of its all-too-human register into a highly-mediated (and frequently classed) poetic nativism is often mistaken by posthumanists themselves as promising greater vital and ethnographic immediacy. A simple test for this genre of ethnographic writing is its translatability into languages that lie beyond the intimate affects of English or French literary genres and their shared European art worlds. As it turns out, translating the immediacy of posthuman prose, and its borrowed vitalist lexicon into another language, will often require a fairly truncated mining of the existent aesthetic literary possibilities that are available within the the target language. Thus, as with the nihilist position, posthuman translation will again entail a great deal of hidden (alienated?) translational labor.

Both of these translational ideologies undermine an engagement with language and communication as intersubjectively-mediated and indispensable social infrastructures (particularly in non-Western, multilingual settings). Such nihilist and posthumanist positions additionally presume upon fundamentally Eurocentric and monolingual assumptions regarding language and its relationship to entailed metaphors like translation and communication in mediating public life. If these terms don’t even hang together the same way in the developed, modernist societies of Asia where translational labor vis-a-the Anglosphere is a fundamental social infrastructure mediating virtually every public concern, why would we assume a one-to-one relationship between language-communication-translation and their analogues in societies where educational development, mass-literacy, and their contested meanings are still being negotiated? Here, translational nihilism and posthumanist approaches to translation play a strangely enabling role in bypassing multilingual personhood particularly in developing settings where publics are frequently being told by foreign advisors to commit to the monolingual state for their own good – despite the developed world benefiting explicitly from predominantly mother-tongue education. It is precisely these kinds of communicative chauvinisms that language activists like Neville Alexander spent their lives arguing against.

The Intervention Angloscene attempts here is to firstly draw attention to the under-explored pragmatic dimensions of translation – linguistic, cultural, and otherwise – as indispensable social process unfolding regardless of its imagined impossibility through the often alienated discursive labor of diverse subjects mutually committing to translation without the expectation of some revelatory, Adamic endpoint of semiotic sublimation. To be sure, this insight has long been latent in linguistic anthropology but often obscured by an American-centric register and narrow institutional politics that remains alienating outside of the subdiscipline. As such, Angloscene attempts both to explicate this pragmatic insight through a more accessible ethnographic language; while at the same time demonstrating that any adequate exploration of translation should place persons and personhood; their representational and reflexive communicative infrastructures; as well as as the contingencies of their historical and spatiotemporal emplacement within the frame of analysis.

Andrew Carruthers: From invocations of third-world solidarity (disanshijie datuanjie) at banquets, to the embrace of Seth Godin’s (2009) “Purple Cow” register among aspiring African elites in Beijing, to tense dinner table debates over freedom, you take the encounters in Afro-Chinese encounters ethnographically seriously. Would you please say a bit more about your formulation of the Afro-Chinese encounter, and how your manner of approach to encounters such as these informs Angloscene’s addressee design?

Jay Ke-Schutte: Drawing inspiration from the observations of two unconventionally-confluential thinkers, Frantz Fanon ([1952] 2008) and Erving Goffman (1983), I had previously suggested how interactions between contrasting subjects are among the most radical points of social friction and breakdown from which social insights can be drawn (Ke-Schutte 2019). Interactions, taken as dialectical in their relationship to the aspirational histories of their participants, represent a case example for the pragmatics of translation out of which the micro-interactional shifts of history (in the Foucaultian sense) might unfold. In Angloscene, I go considerably further in excavating how multilingual social encounters and non-settler colonial interactions in particular, serve as precisely the kinds of sites within which the pragmatic translational propensities discussed above become ethnographically-explicit. Such encounters also serve to reveal how what initially might seem to be emancipatory public-makings beyond a West-and-its-Others participation framework, ultimately rely on encompassing, hegemonic translational ideologies without which personhoods and their aspirational histories would otherwise be unintelligible. In this sense, the book’s various ethnographer-in-training addressees (in my view our primary and most important audience) are invited to ask where they are situated in the making of worlds and the chronotopic circumscriptions of the persons that populate them, and whether doing so is necessarily consistent with internalizing the Anglo-linguistic weaponry of genre-appropriate Western anthropological writing.

Andrew Carruthers: In your concluding chapter on liberal racisms and the Angloscene’s white space-time, you identify whiteness as a “horizon of aspiration,” one that can “operate efficiently without a Caucasian in sight” (p. 161). How do these observations on liberal subjecthood’s “invisible order” build upon and extend the book’s (and anthropology’s) recurring interest in questions of aspiration, horizons, and (un)markedness?

Jay Ke-Schutte: This is very nicely put, in that the book explicitly foregrounds English and whiteness as raciolinguistically-entailed units of commensuration for internationally-aspirational, cosmopolitan subjects who are attempting to articulate forms of emancipatory personhood in the absence of co-present White bodies. However, there is a fundamental contradiction at play in appropriating signs of English and whiteness in such scenarios – what Lauren Berlant might have called a cruel optimism (2011). The contradiction lies in how these subjects must rely on the raciolinguistic capital of English and whiteness to engender forms of unmarkedness that can be experienced without them feeling like whiteness, even while this reliance comes to ultimately compromise them and sustain the Angloscene’s ideological gravity. Here, Chinese and African students’ commitments to an ‘unmarked’ horizon of aspiration are undertaken in sharp contrast with a more dystopian icon of personhood: the raciolinguistically-marked terminal migrant. Turning the lens back toward contemporary anthropology’s own compromised disciplinary politics around intersectionality and Anglo-racialization (for the debate is truly too American-centric to be about decolonization for all), Angloscene asks whether whiteness is perhaps the cryptotype behind unmarkedness’ frequent and peculiar unattainability for non-White subjects in the presence of White bodies; or its permanent unattainability for the ‘left behind’ White subject feeling like a waste of a white skin. Working from a decidedly non-Anglo-settler-colonial interactional context, I suggest that ‘whiteness’ of a kind can be seen to engage in its own form of body-snatching. If whiteness does not in fact need white bodies, then the absurd pantomime of corrective essentialization that has taken hold as a kind of mass-panic in the American academy would seem, at best, like an astounding neo-perochial digression riding on Anglo-monolingual assumptions about the relationship between language and race; and at worst, like American academic neocolonialism through an insidious form of identity imperialism. In both cases, the insightful and rigorously examined ideas of many of the critical race and decolonial thinkers whom are frequently hashtag-cited in support of arguments they would have never made, become completely sabotaged through misappropriation in the service of a hegemony they themselves would have resisted. Thus, the concluding chapter in question reflects on the context of reception within which the initial insights of Angloscene were formulated and contested. In writing it, I attempted to capture how the early salvos of current cultural wars within the American academy were coming to engender the very assymetries and forms of power being contested.

Andrew Carruthers: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1990) writes that “[T]he production of theory is in fact a very important practice that is worlding the world in a certain way” (1990, p. 7). Spivak is but one of several postcolonial thinkers who serve as theoretical interlocutors throughout your book. In Angloscene you write about your own encounters with postcolonial and critical race theory’s perceived markedness in “the evaluatory regime of the American academy” (p. 150), a regime that renders certain bodies of critical literature “dead,” “out of date,” or otherwise out of touch with “‘more complex’ realities” (p. 159). In so doing, you offer a reflexive metacommentary on the Anglosphere’s unmarked and regnant modes of theorization. I’d like to invite you to say a little bit more about this critically attuned aspect of the book, and to speculate (if you’d care to) as to the horizons of anthropology in the space-time of the Angloscene.

Jay Ke-Schutte: I am really relieved that these critical racial and postcolonial stakes of the book came through and also grateful for your concise and elegant articulation of them. Unfortunately, they still seem less easily discerned in mainstream anthropological journals – the sites where the bulk of lively disciplinary debates are meant to unfold. Consider this delightful remark from an anonymous, mainstream American anthropological journal reviewer on one of the chapters I had previously considered for submission: “This paper will fit a publication addressing the fading contingent of postcolonial theory enthusiasts; but in the main journal of sociocultural anthropology it will be a waste of space.” This fairly run-of-the-mill treatment of work citing both critical race and postcolonial theory is relatively clear evidence of outright hostility toward these theoretical genealogies, frequently gaslighting many anthropologists writing from the global South into jettisoning decolonial and postcolonial arguments as well as the contexts they understand intimately and intuitively better than many of their Euro-American readers and colleagues. Their work is frequently denigrated on the basis of their supposedly over theoretical or out-of-date content. Meanwhile, ethnographic literatures that borrow from the supposedly right kinds of theory, adopting the frustratingly generic register of the soto-voiced white liberal English native speaker are valorised as somehow clear, jargon-free, and innovative despite their absolutely formulaic presentational style – reflexively curated through adherence to quaint, trendy style-guides on how to get your paper published in X journal, absolutely dripping with patronizing pedagogical prose for the country bumpkin international researcher. International conversations on anthropology should be precisely that: international. This means that reviewers and institutional gate-keepers cannot simply brand submitted work as overly-theoretical because they are unfamiliar with the frameworks being used or decolonial readings of texts they were taught in imperialist spaces. In many ways, these particular issues of representational economy and context of reception in contemporary Anthropology stem from the antiquated genre-expectations of the discipline – what Michel-Rolph Trouillot once reffered to as anthropology’s one site, one ethnographer, one space-time problem (2003). In the genrefication of anthropology within its presumed Angloscene, any critical awareness of encompassing, competing, or hegemonic translational ideologies quickly evaporate into the predictable, all-too-Anglocentric relativisms of Euro-American Anthropological writing and its frequently reductive evaluational matrixes. From this standpoint, the horizons of anthropology seem somewhat grim until a genuine, non-Eurocentric communicative reflexivity around the translational politics of the discipline become central to its debates and institutional management.

Bibliography

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove.

Godin, Seth. 2009. Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. New York: Portfolio.

Goffman, Erving. 1983. “The Interaction Order: American Sociological Association, 1982 Presidential Address.” American Sociological Review 48 (1): 1–17.

Ke-Schutte, Jay. 2019. “Aspirational Histories of Third World Cosmopolitanism: Dialectical Interactions in Afro-Chinese Beijing.” Signs and Society 7 (3). https://doi.org/10.1086/704011.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York, NY: Routledge.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jonathan Sterne on his book, Diminished Faculties

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Interview by Toni Nieminen

https://www.dukeupress.edu/diminished-faculties

Toni Nieminen: First, congratulations on Diminished Faculties, what a wonderful read it was! I find your form of writing very interesting. The mixing of different voices and genre-specific stances, that you flag through linguistic and stylistic means, is such a creative way to engage with the reflexivity of one’s positionality as a researcher. Two examples stand out: in chapter three you provide counterexamples to the historically and ideologically constructed, yet compulsorily imagined connection between voice and the mouth, by constructing an imaginary art exhibition (where the reader is being seduced by textually expressed sensorial nuances) and then you end the book by providing an impairment handbook to the reader rather than a conventional conclusory discussion. Both passages are brilliant. Could you elaborate on where you came up with the idea to style your book in this way, where are you drawing inspiration from? What possibilities for and limits to academic writing does such a form gesture at?

Jonathan Sterne: Thank you for reading, thank you for the kind words, and thank you for these great prompts to think more about this work. A couple general thoughts on style. Someone told me that this is in some ways very much a “full professor” book. I don’t think I could have written Diminished Faculties in my early 30s, when I wrote Audible Past; maybe someone else could have, but not me. Disability Studies has also changed a lot over the last decade and a half. There is much more work on technology and media, and some of the theoretical discussions have really taken major steps forward.

Both chapters that you mention actually began from stylistic impasses. With the help of research assistants and friends, I had collected a large body of artwork and art-adjacent representation of the voice that was in a sense beyond the mouth for Chapter 3. It was meant as part of the same project as Chapter 2, since that’s all about the dork-o-phone displacing the point of emanation for the voice. I have a few close art historian colleagues and the original plan was to write something about it all in the visual culture studies tradition. But I couldn’t come up with a good thesis. At the same time, I was really looking for a way to extend my critique of the ideology of vocal ability. So I tried a show-and-tell approach.  At first the art exhibit was a conceit, but it got more and more serious. After the first round of review, Zoe de Luca, who designed the layout, suggested I take it really seriously. A writing discipline like that always works really well for me. So, we borrowed the layout from another museum and designed the exhibit which she drew, and Darsha Hewitt re-drew. Darsha is an artist who does a lot with sound technology, but also has a drawing practice. Then I rewrote the chapter in the second person, like an exhibition guide. It was also an interesting exercise in representing accessibility in image description and the like.

The conclusion presented other interesting challenges. The original version of the book ended with Ya-Ya vomiting on me and the haiku at the end of Chapter 5. That’s how I wanted it to end, but all the reviewers wanted a conclusion. I asked friends and my social media feeds: what are the best conclusions to academic books you’ve ever read?  It was crickets! At least in my constellation of fields, conclusions aren’t a high art form. I had recently read Jenn Lena’s Entitled: Discriminatory Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts, which has a fantastic conclusion in part because it doesn’t really have an expansive introduction. I realize I was in the same situation. But while I wanted a didactic conclusion, I didn’t want it to look like a mirror function of an introduction. In my other work, I am often reading technical writing and documents, and of course there is also a tradition of workshops, workbooks, and such in gender and sexuality studies. So, I don’t know exactly how I came to the user’s guide idea, but once I did, I decided to follow it as meticulously as possible, just like in the imaginary exhibition chapter. It is in some ways the perfect didactic form for this project. I asked Darsha to illustrate because she’s skilled in technical drawing, and I liked the illustrations in the Madrona Labs software instrument manuals, which are in turn derived from the manual for the Buchla Music Easel, an early portable synthesizer. But it wound up going a whole other direction: the illustrations are all Darsha and not really modelled on either manual. I might someday have a book on obsolescence in me as I have been fascinated with the phenomenon of user manuals for new products that include instructions for disposal, so that also had to be in there.

Toni Nieminen: In the book, you argue that illness, impairment, disability, and debility are all conditioned by a divergence from medical or social norms as well as by an ideology that always prefers ability. You gesture at how this preference might be political but is more precisely orientational – that is, felt, lived, and negotiated – an argument I find convincing. However, you choose to center impairment and decenter disability in your analysis. Can you elaborate on this choice; how does it reflect your own positionality and what do you expect to either add to or play down within the social model of disability, and by extension Crip studies, by focusing on impairment?

Jonathan Sterne: I think the benefit is a) a wider net to capture aspects of debility and disability that aren’t always at the foreground elsewhere in the field and b) a more vigorously constructivist and realist account of the material and experiential dimensions of both categories like disability, debility, and impairment. I am hardly the first person to note the constructedness of impairment as a category, and yet, one still finds a lot of writing in the field that holds on to a nonconstructed basis for disability. Concepts like Tobin Siebers’ complex embodiment and Alison Kafer’s political/relational model try and synthesize the fact that things like pain are real, and that disability is ultimately tied up with cultural classification, histories of institutionalization and stigma, and politics. I am convinced by that perspective, but what often happens in practice is that ideas that used to be mapped onto disability, like “the inability to do something” are simply displaced onto impairment.

All that said, I wrote the book to sit on the shelf next to lots of books about disability. I wouldn’t want to privilege impairment or decenter disability beyond my text or as some kind of general theoretical principal or political commitment. It’s part of a massive mosaic.

To answer the me part of your question, Diminished Faculties necessarily bears the marks of my own positionality. When I began the book, I wasn’t even sure of my own place in the various orbits of impairment and disability; that status changed during writing as I went on my cancer meds, and I am now as clear as one can be about my own identifications. That’s one of the reasons why it’s written as it is: it is not a book about my trauma, my grief, my therapy (apart from speech therapy) or my own marginalization. Textually, I feel like that is space better occupied by others. As my blog shows, I’m not a terribly private person, but there’s a difference when I’m writing for a scholarly conversation. My contribution is more circumspect, intentionally. It is deliberately intellectualizing some dimensions of experience. But it also reflects my own intellectual and political biases. It took a lot to get me to the point of writing about myself for others. I was dragged back into phenomenology while shuttling in and out of consciousness in both the personal and political senses of the term. It sort of happened to me. Friends really had to encourage me to write the first part of the book; I was reluctant. And at first, I also resisted phenomenology—someone actually had to tell me to accept that this is what I was doing.

That also put me in a very good position to recursively apply the theory of disability to the theory of disability: so much writing in disability studies is resolutely affirmative regarding disability experience, and implicitly operates as if that experience is immediately available to the person having it, even as the same scholarship mounts a vigorous critique of the ideology of ability. Almost all of the great disability studies mounts a critique of the self-sufficient subject, but in the field, we still often suspect that critique when discussing categories of experience. Along with everything else, we need a place from which to interrogate the category of experience, which is one of the through-lines of Diminished Faculties. Because I’m privileged enough that (at least in this text) my experience doesn’t require an additional demand for validation, I was in a good position to experiment with that and consider the problem. That’s my job in this book. It is definitely a moment of looking inward, rather than outward. Other writers have other agendas: I don’t think it would be fair to place that particular interrogatory burden on top of Sami Schalk’s Black Disability Politics, Aimi Hamraie’s Building Access, or Michele Friedner’s Sensory Futures.  

Toni Nieminen: You argue that phenomenologists are better off thinking of experience as something conditioned by contextuality and situationality rather than universality. However, and this might sound like a conventional counterargument to such a statement, to state something about anything requires some universally-ish mediated and shared categories of experience in order for communication and interaction to take place. What is your take on this dualism, and how can impairment phenomenology be modelled and geared to support a political struggle for Disability justice (if this is even the point), which as a political movement – despite being a cluster of multiple, spatially and temporally located ones – has historically drawn upon collectively and publicly shared notions of experience?

Jonathan Sterne: I don’t think you need a universal category or agreement for communication to happen. You need some kind of alignment among positions in order for agreement about reality to happen, that someone reading me will think I mean what I think I mean. But that’s not universality. Differences in positionality also produce communication, though it may be a form of productive understanding or conflict. Disability studies is particularly fertile ground for phenomenology and for communication theory because the experiences of disability are so radically different. For instance, I have lots of shared political affinities with autistic people, but I’m pretty damn allistic, so phenomenologically, we are pretty far apart. I absolutely love Remi Yergeau’s Authoring Autism but the first time I read it I Did Not Get It. I had to work at it. Similarly, I find the writings in Deaf Studies very illuminating for my work on sound, but I have a very different experience of and relationship to my own hearing.

I’m no social movement scholar, but as far as I can tell, the Disability justice movement is more about shared political goals and affiliations. I think those probably come more out of shared classification, and in some cases voluntary identification. People claim disability for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they may want to; other times they may have to as a form of self-advocacy; other times they may have no choice. Still others never claim the term at all, as Alison Kafer reminds us.

I’ve moved in both worlds, and sometimes the intellectual necessities are fundamentally different. Sometimes the alignments aren’t clear until after the fact. Sometimes scholarship and activism can work in concert. In this way, disability studies is like other fields that have emerged as a response to political projects: there isn’t one ideal alignment between scholarship and activism. I wouldn’t want “immediate usefulness to activists” as a litmus test for scholarship, just as I wouldn’t want “theoretical correctness” as a litmus test for activism.

As an activist, one needs a theory of the situations in which they are operating, a theory of change, a theory of communication, and a theory of practice. These all change depending on context, positionality, prior experience, and so on. That kind of theoretical work emerges more from practice and mentorship in the first instance and can be enhanced with reading.

Sometimes scholarship can speak directly to those needs, as in action-research, or collaborative work. Sometimes the connections are orthogonal and surprising, which is also good and important. But scholarship also affords the opportunity from a retreat from some of the pressures and immediacies in which activists find themselves. At the same time, it is often more caught up with the politics of knowledge. This has been my experience touring Diminished Faculties. Because of my prior work, I’ve found myself with audiences who know almost nothing about disability or disability studies. I also find that talking about disability to disabled audiences is also an important moment for political work within the academy: it’s about transforming spaces that have historically been structured around ableism.

Toni Nieminen: Your book can be posited as an auto-ethnographic account in that your own experiences of living with cancer have shaped and enabled you to think about experience in a fragmented way, whereby change and contingency become the point of departure in experience and perception. Considering some criticisms of auto-ethnographic writing (who gets to say what, when and why), do you reserve impairment phenomenology for those living with impairments, or is it accessible also to the non-impaired? If so, how does the project change in the process? Further, and this is something you gesture towards in the concluding handbook, do you think that impairment phenomenology can be used as a research tool across disciplines?

Jonathan Sterne: This is a fantastic question! I think about this a lot. Who can and should write about impairment and disability? Anybody can. More people should. All are welcome. But as the saying goes, “nothing about us without us.” Writing about disability starts with reading work in disability studies. There is an awful lot of sanctioned ignorance among ableds, which is how you get neo-eugenic access policies and disability simulations, as well as scholarship that uses or engages with disability from an ableist frameworks. So, the first step is struggling to overcome that sanctioned ignorance.

I don’t think there should be a passport for writing about anyone, but there is a responsibility to the group you are studying, and a moral requirement of social solidarity if you are in a privileged position with respect to them. In the humanities this is often personalized around the charisma and ethos of the intellectual—as in, to be wrong is to be morally deficient. I hate that, but I also understand it. For disabled people, the emotional stakes can be amplified because the personal and political are commingled, and we are so often represented by others against our will, especially in institutional contexts. Our challenge as scholars is to resist this impulse to completely personalize position-taking, while being attentive to the fact that universities and the field of academic writing are very ableist spheres, which often crowd out and systemically exclude disabled people. Right now in universities, we have a situation where most of the claims to putative expertise on disability come from nondisabled people. We have to ask how such a fucked-up result came to pass and what it will take to transform that situation. We need to deal with this in concert with other challenges our institutions are facing around their ongoing racist, colonialist, cis-sexist, and heterosexist histories. It is perennially unfinished work.

As I mention above, I don’t use the label auto-ethnographic for Diminished Faculties, though I’m also a believer in Barthes’ “author is dead” thesis, and others will categorize me as they like and I’m fine with that. My resistance to the term is that I think all ethnography involves the position of the ethnographer (so ethnography without a reflexive turn on the ethnographer is bad ethnography). There’s also a systematicity and intentionality to ethnographic research that’s absent in Diminished Faculties. It’s a very fragmented text both in terms of subject matter and method.

Toni Nieminen: I like how you describe fatigueness not as a medical outcome but as a relational phenomenon and an act of refusal. Can this reading of fatigueness be aligned with other impairments and what does this tell us about the reality of refusal more broadly? Here, I would be particularly interested in hearing your thoughts about disabilities and impairments other than those you discuss in your book, that is, fatigueness, hearing or speaking – for example, how about neurodivergence?

Jonathan Sterne: On one level, I think there is a specificity to all disabilities (and all theory) that can’t be ignored. My training in cultural studies kicks in and I’m always tempted to say, “this is not meant as a universal theory; it’s a set of ideas that can be transported and transformed, or abandoned as needed.” Impairment theory is at best inspirational literature. Neurodivergence and fatigue are pretty different, and both fall both inside and outside the parameters of disability, depending on what we’re talking about.

At the same time, fatigue phenomenology also highlights the weight of the world that brings people to a political position of refusal more broadly. In that sense, it might help elucidate a dimension of the politics of refusal that has been generally downplayed, because of the affirmative politics of self-assertion in most texts that perform refusal. I understand the necessity and even urgency of that work. As with my comments on impairment above, my hope is that this would sit next to other texts on refusal, not supplant them.

From the disability studies side, many impairments and disabilities might also have their own possibilities for a politics of “already having refused”; or a politics that is somehow complementary to that framing. Autistic writing often comments on the absurdity of neurotypical social life; one could read refusal into that without too much effort. Depression and ADHD also have elements of refusal built into their modalities of interacting with the world. Though these are also great examples of the limits of universalizing my theory: to take an example from ADHD—and I’m writing as a neurotypical here—my sense from talking with people and reading is that a phenomenological state like hyperfocus requires its own theorization. It could be read as a kind of refusal, but maybe it’s better understood as some kind of hypercommitment?  I don’t know. I definitely hope to explore these questions in more depth.

Thanks also to Meesh Fradkin for comments on a draft of my responses.