It was late winter of 2020. I stood near the entrance of a residential building in Oran, Algeria’s second-largest city. I snapped a picture of a spray-painted message: Danger, crumbling building. The scene was not particularly remarkable; Oran is brimming with such “visual noise,”[1] graffiti displaying on external walls the housing dramas taking place behind closed doors.
Seconds later, a man stepped out of a taxicab. He asked me and my companions: Would you like to go inside? We entered the dangerously dilapidated building. The inhabitants ensured I recorded everything: official documents, a decaying roof, floor holes, black mold. Are we not Algerians too? they asked. I had been scripted into their performance of hogra (contempt, disdain, degradation, lowering)—a key Algerian genre of grievance. The state was its ultimate audience; I was merely an instrument for amplifying their case for public housing in the…
“…fight for a piece of the ‘patrimonial cake’ (le gateau patrimonial)[2] of which the state has claimed the lion’s share.”
I contextualize such struggles over urban space on page 99 of my dissertation—Streets of Grievance: Everyday Poetics and Postcolonial Politics in Urban Algeria. They are residues of 132 years of French settler colonialism and stunted postcolonial attempts to repair that past. After independence in 1962, this building was a bien vacant (“an abandoned good”)—property left behind by nearly one million French Algerian settlers (pieds noirs) who fled Algeria after a bloody eight-year war (1954-1962). Postcolonial urban politics have since revolved around the fight for postwar “spoils”—the patrimonial cake increasingly consumed by a few.
My dissertation outlines how ordinary Oranis navigate this political terrain through everyday urban poetics. City dwellers draw attention to everyday life’s forms—both linguistic (placenames, jokes, and strategic code-switches) and urban (the shape of public spaces, traffic lights, and monuments). The confluence of linguistic and urban materiality produces widely circulating sentiments carrying political potential. In the ruins of their beloved city, Oranis reanimate the colonial past in their fight for the patrimonial cake. For example:
A man holds a photocopy of a French identity card from the colonial era. He uses its mediality to prove his family had been in a decayed building for nearly a century—photo by author.
City authorities have razed historic neighborhoods. In the rubble, former inhabitants post makeshift signs claiming it as private property since the colonial-era—photo by author.
[1] Strassler, Karen. 2020. Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[2] Madani, Safar Zitoun. 2012. “Le logement en Algérie: programmes, enjeux et tensions.” Confluences Méditerranée 2: 133-152.
Shikhar Goel: Describe for us some intellectual motivations behind writing this book. What were some significant moments that led you to this book project?
Francis Cody: This book came out of a longstanding interest in news media circulation and publics that I had already developed while doing research in rural South India for my dissertation. But after a few articles that I wrote based on fieldwork done during that time, I still had a very vague understanding of where I wanted to go with the materials I was collecting until I realized that I was increasingly dissatisfied with how the literature on publics was so thoroughly grounded in liberal political theory. This was the case even among the most important critics of liberalism. And since I was approaching questions about democracy and the public sphere from postcolonial theory and the literature on populism, I saw an opportunity to intervene. The occasion for this was an article, later published as a book chapter in an edited volume, that I was asked to write on the theme of media and utopia by the wonderful media scholar, Arvind Rajagopal. By examining how crowds of angry supporters of political leaders attacked newspaper offices when their leader had been defamed in the press, and how newspaper editors published articles with the potential for such attacks to occur in mind, I was able to show the co-constitutive relationship that had developed between crowd violence and print capitalism, thereby undermining some of the key binaries underpinning liberal theories of publicity.
My interests had moved past liberalism or its postcolonial critics to hone in on political logics of event-making and spectacle. And from that starting point, I took my lead from the reporters I was becoming close to. I paid special attention to how limits were imposed to control what could be published as news, and how those limits were sometimes used as opportunities to amplify the importance of an event when newsmakers chose to breach them. For example, all the journalists I talked to complained of the government’s overzealous application of criminal defamation laws or the degree to which judges were likely to charge a journalist with contempt of court if they were unhappy with how they were being portrayed. And yet, I noticed that they would continue to publish news items that drew these charges, and some even appeared attract such charges on purpose for the sake of their own publicity. I saw this dynamic unfold across a range of contexts, echoing what I had learned about crowd violence against journalists, and I began to realize that this kind of amplification turning into a positive feedback loop was, in fact, becoming a focal topic of my research. Another significant moment that led to this project was a workshop on law and media technology organized by the Sarai project at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. It was there that I was able to begin to interpret what I saw happening around me in Chennai with the help of media scholars who had actually studied law and even among lawyers who were arguing before the Supreme Court of India to decriminalize things like defamation or to stop the government from attacking critics with sedition charges. I was motivated by these encounters, where the need for legal reform is quite clear, to try to put these questions in a wider sociological and historical frame.
Shikhar Goel: What would be some key contributions that you think this book makes to the existing literature in the field of media anthropology in South Asia and beyond?
Francis Cody: Beyond having reopened the question of political publicity from a new angle, I hope that the concept of the “news event” I develop over the course of the book will be useful to think through a range of topics. News media become event-makers in their own right, thereby blurring the distinction between events in the world being represented in the news and the event of news representation itself. And this ubiquitous phenomenon is at the center of our concerns about misinformation in the age of digitalization, for very good reasons. The fact of an event’s communicability – its capacity to circulate widely, thereby producing value and the production of circulation itself as an event – has eclipsed news media’s power to communicate something about the world outside of itself for many. But this should also remind us of some much older arguments, like Baudrillard’s claims about the “implosion of meaning in media,” or critical theory’s claims about the “culture industry” and how news is part of a much larger transformation in media circulation. These are long-standing concerns that have taken on new urgency in our times because of the obvious connections between transformations in technologies of circulation and the rise of populist attacks on traditional structures of representation, both in formal politics and in news media.
What I would like to think I have contributed with the concept of the news event is a way to ask empirical questions about these very abstract theoretical claims – assertions that have often been made without much evidence. By taking seriously the politics that continue to unfold under the regime of what Jodi Dean terms “communicative capitalism,” my focus on the news event allows me actually track, through events that are as real as they are virtual, how positive feedback loops emerge, and why news makers pursue the politics of communicability at particular historical conjunctures. The stakes in understanding these phenomena are obviously high in South Asia, with the dominance of highly mediatized anti-democratic regimes in India or Bangladesh, as they are in many other places. The advantage that comes with having studied these problems in a place like Tamil Nadu, India, is that political actors have been remarkably reflexive about the mediatization of politics there, and have purposefully pursued power through the production of news media from the very beginning of the Dravidian movement that has dominated electoral politics for over half a century. But digitalization is playing a large role in the rapid transformations in Tamil politics as it is everywhere. I am developing the concept of the news event in a context everyone is highly conscious of the power and limits of news representation in creating a political climate. I am also aiming to provide a methodological model of how one might do this kind of media anthropology that is grounded in place, but which does not necessarily follow traditional models of ethnographic research and writing.
Shikhar Goel: Our readers might be curious to know more about your choice of working with “event as a method” in this book. How did you zero in on it, were there any competing alternatives you had experimented with during your research?
Francis Cody: My method of tracking events and logics of event-making to raise questions about the media politics of our time took a while to develop. And it draws inspiration from at least two very different traditions of thinking about the event. I really had no idea what I was looking for when beginning to do ethnographic research among news consumer and journalists, in addition to spending time in newspaper archives. But I was driven by a general sense that political sovereignty is mediated by news media and it is for this reason that political parties and other activists trying to change the world were so invested in how they are represented in the news and in trying to mold that image. I was working as a sort of second generation among media anthropologists, as a number of studies were being published at the time about particular news organizations or about particular media technologies. I realized that this study would have to be multi-sited in an institutional sense and multi modal in the sense of tracking news circulation across media such as newspapers, television, and the then emergent world of online publication and social media, especially WhatsApp. Books that immediately inspired me in terms of method were asking big questions beyond the study a particular media house, like Amahl Bishara’s critique of “objectivity” under conditions of war and occupation among Palestinian journalists, and Zeynep Devrim Gürsel’s study of how digitalization was transforming the way news photographs were circulating and representing the world.
Tracing the event started as a methodology to answer questions I had about how political power was mediated by news representation before it eventually became a concept to be theorized more abstractly. I draw on Veena Das’s concept of the “critical event” which she developed to understand how an anthropologist might engage with large questions about community, kinship, and the nation when these very categories were being thrown into question in the context of national crises. While many of the events discussed in the book are for less significant than those that fall under this category, the method of paying attention to the contours of contestation that are drawn when certain thresholds of social norms are crossed by news media or the politicians they report on was very powerful. The other concept that became important, much later when writing the book, was Bernard Stiegler’s idea of “event-ization” which he develops to capture the processes through which the distinction between a storyline and that which it is reporting on collapses as a result of media saturation. It appealed to my own sense that methodology must be ground in a processual approach to how events of representation become events of historical importance, and it captured that blurring of the distinction between the world represented in the news and the world of news representation that I saw happening all around me in the world of journalism in Tamil Nadu.
Shikhar Goel: This book pushes scholars across fields and disciplines to relook at some of their established assumptions and concepts by elegantly emplacing media as a fundamental constitutive building block for critical theory in the contemporary. At the same time, the term media itself has promiscuously and generatively become a placeholder for a galaxy of objects, concepts, and phenomena in the academy. What were some challenges that you faced as an anthropologist while working with a term like media that has come to engender such wide-ranging theoretical possibilities?
Francis Cody: You’ve put your finger on a very important problem, there is a sort of impasse that has arisen between media studies and anthropology. One the one hand, media as an explicit topic of study has receded into the background of much of anthropology compared to ten or fifteen years ago. I suspect that the question of alterity, which still drives so much of anthropological research in North America at least, is not as easy to ground in studies of technologies that are increasingly shared across the globe. This has happened at a time when ethnography is much more highly mediatized than ever before, where a great deal of anthropological research takes place online, for example. Media studies, on the other hand, has moved from seeing media, like television, digital media, and so on, as a kind of ecology within which culture grows to treating clouds, water, and so other elements of organic and inorganic matter as media in their own right. But too often, this kind of ecology-as-media approach grounds itself in a rereading of the European philosophical canon that treats the rest of world as having empirical interest but nothing much to offer in the way of theory. There is, furthermore, a sometimes anti-humanist ethos in some corners of media studies that is hostile to questions about the public sphere, or even to questions of meaning and interpretation, questions I have found to be of such central interest to my research.
So, there’s a fairly large disciplinary divide. At the same time, some of the hang-ups anthropologists have had about human agency and the problem of technological determinism have receded as well, opening the way for a greater appreciation for the scale-making qualities of media infrastructure and the technologically distributed quality of agency. So, in that sense, this is a fortuitous time to develop a media anthropology that is more tune with developments happening elsewhere in the world of critical theory. And doing so from the perspective of concerns arising out of recent transformations in India’s media ecology has the added advantage of avoiding many of the teleological assumptions about techno-social change that continue to undergird a media theory machine that remains incredibly Eurocentric. You see this in some of the literature on machine learning, for example. I’m interested in making general claims about media as a fundamental constitutive building block for critical theory in the contemporary, as you put it so elegantly, from an India-based point of view that doesn’t need to argue its importance by claiming that this the future of the global North, another Occidentalist teleology we continue to find in anthropology. This is precisely about the contemporary!
Shikhar Goel: Law, both inside and outside the courtroom, emerges as your key ethnographic site in this book. The existing literature across disciplines of history, critical legal studies, and media studies among others in South Asia and elsewhere suggests that law and media share a constitutive relationship, where law emerges as an always already mediatized entity. What is then unique to this equation between law and media in the contemporary moment where digital technology with its robust circulation engines has come to dominate our mediascapes? How do you read the mutating relationship between law and media through time?
Francis Cody: As the scholarship from India and elsewhere shows, this co-constitutive relationship between law and media is old. It runs through cinematic representations of law and the legal regulation of cinema to our age of live reporting on legal procedure and legal attempts to shield the judiciary from the glare of instant publicity. Of course, courtroom events form a great deal of news content. But what I was struck by in my research is how often media are discussed in legal judgements and how much the judiciary is concerned with the influence of news media on the course of legal proceedings.
The problem of “trial by media” has become much more acute as the time lag between media reporting and the slow pace of legal procedure appears to stretch further and further. At the same time, police often play an important role in bypassing legal procedure by feeding evidence to television news channels, maybe because of the public pressures for the speedy delivery of some sort of justice (which is often profoundly unjust). One of the genres that I’m writing about at the moment is that of the mass forensic event where CCTV camera footage and postmortem reports are endlessly analyzed by news anchors and the news consuming publics. These kinds of evidence often ground very disturbing media trials where the criminality of certain types of people is decided upon ahead of time, and then seems to be corroborated by these kinds of indexical traces of violence, all before the courts are able to provide a procedural framework for weighing the value of evidence. At a more general level, if the legal system always played a large role in regulating what could appear on news media, it appears that news media are playing much stronger role now in determining the meanings, and even outcomes of trials. If we are already concerned with how political influence has hurt the independence of the judiciary, we should extremely worried about how the compulsions of communicative capitalism, coupled with corporate and political influence on news reporting, are driving the ways that the media environment conditions the life of law.
No matter the size of shows, and the actual count of the public, the Indian circus works hard to appear larger-than-life. The image of the circus, in other words, is in many ways larger than the show itself, the publicity that fuels it traveling ahead and enticing expectant crowds before a company’s arrival. The circus and its image bleed into each other, they exist symbiotically; when one is attacked, the other suffers with it.
In my dissertation, I track the ongoing disappearance of the circus in India as performances get associated with accusations that prove increasingly difficult to shrug off, including charges of animal mistreatment.
On P. 99, I locate one such shift in the public’s perception of the circus to a period from 1988 to 1998. Drawing from reports and opinion pieces appearing mainly in the Times of India, I track animal rights NGOs’ strategies as they shifted from earlier suits against individual street performers and animal tamers to large-scale reports and rescue operations targeting itinerant circus companies. Because the public did not tend to differentiate between one company and another, these strategies ultimately led to the entire profession being seen as complicit, at all levels, in the mistreatment of animals.
Caption (translated from Malayalam): This circus bear rides a motorcycle by himself
Source: Mathrubhumi weekly, January 1955.
P. 99 also notes the class disparities that mark the stark divide between the ideals of interspecies ethics that exist among circus practitioners and the more abstract notions of humane treatment and harm stipulated by members of animal rights organizations removed from the material conditions of work with animals.
Interestingly, both sides play upon the image of animals and humans working side by side in the circus foregrounded by circus publicity: one in the name of sociality, the other in the name of exploitation. Both also invoke the motif of the circus’s disappearance to their own end—one to harken back to the circus’s former glory and bestow upon it the mantle of an expiring art form, the other to look forward to a future in which its practices have been definitively relegated to the past.
Ironically, I claim, both sides, in insisting on the circus’s disappearance, have contributed in their way to sustain the ongoing presence of this performance, whose survival now seems predicated precisely on its being an object of dispute, always disappearing, yet never out of view.
Eléonore Rimbault. 2022. Disappearance in the Ring: The Perpetual Unmaking of India’s Big Top Circus. University of Chicago Phd.
Ilana Gershon In what sense do you see the focus of your book, a therapeutic intervention called motivational interviewing (MI), as a distinctively American approach?
Summerson Carr: I should begin by saying that many of my interlocutors in the world of MI will likely object to my characterization of the method as distinctively American. They would probably begin by pointing out MI’s significant international presence, with strongholds in the UK and Scandinavia as well as in the United States. They may then go on to remind me of the number of languages into which MI’s foundational textbook has been translated (28) and that approximately 40-45% of the membership of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT) do not reside in the United States. These things are true, though they have very little bearing on my argument. From the start, I take the “American” to be much more than a straightforward matter of national demographics; it is always also the ideological product of institutional and political history. By way of this history, many American products, including therapies and counseling methods, travel over lands and seas. That they do so with apparent ease—as if unaided by labor, capital, and other geopolitical inequities—has rightly interested many other contemporary anthropologists.
MI’s American founder and lead developer, Dr. William Miller, recounts MI’s origin story by way of his own international travels. According to him, through a series of serendipitous overseas encounters, he was gradually able to specify and articulate what he already knew deep inside: that is, a “spirit” of engagement that can be operationalized through a set of conversational techniques. It is this combination of spirit and technique that Miller, his colleagues, and his many acolytes developed as MI over the last forty years. Furthermore, MI proponents in the United States commonly frame MI spirit as transcendent and MI techniques as if they are features of a universal language, allowing the method to “speak” to people regardless of where it is practiced.
It is for all these reasons that I expect some significant pushback to my argument—developed over the course of the book—that MI draws on and manages historically-specific Anglo-American norms and values. This includes translating paradigmatically American tropes of democratic governance into therapeutic exchange (Chapter One); MI’s adoption of rhetorical forms and formula that were developed by white colonial settlers since the establishment of the republic (Chapter Two); MI’s implicit grounding in American Protestant ideals, including its spirit of capital accumulation (Chapter Three); total quality management in production of MI’s “evidence-base,” (Chapter Four); and MI’s vernacularization of American Pragmatism (Chapter Five). Less surprising is the way that MI, as a therapeutic intervention, draws on two school of American psychology—American behaviorism and the client-centered (or Rogerian) tradition—that had long been at philosophical odds and have organized the ways that psychotherapies have been trained and institutionalized in the United States. A throughline of the book is the remarkable way that MI seizes upon and defuses ideological differences, such as those that had so many U.S.-based psychologists at loggerheads for decades. Accordingly, I suggest that in MI we also find a classically American way of managing difference.
Ilana Gershon: I see your two books, Scripting Addiction and Working the Difference as very much in dialogue with each other. I am wondering if you could discuss how therapeutic practices shift when the therapist moves from viewing the client as in denial (as in Scripting Addiction) to being ambivalent.
Summerson Carr: As with your question above, it is hard to contain my response! I cannot overstate how profound MI’s shift to ambivalence is, given that denial has long been the organizing concept of U.S. addiction treatment. As I document in Scripting Addiction, the idea that addicts are the kind of people who cannot see and read their own inner states—aka, denial—means that traditional treatment entails engaging them in a clinically supervised regimen of inner reference. Practically speaking, this means that the typical clinical encounter is one in which the professional more-or-less explicitly relays that 1) they already see and know the “truth” that the addict denies and 2) that recovery will be measured by the client aligning their self-descriptions with the professional’s perspective. Not surprisingly, this state-of-affairs commonly leads to therapeutic stand-offs and is frustrating for both parties. It is also, arguably, violent, not just to the extent that it inherently grants the sovereign vision to the professional, but also because that professional is often the primary link to critical resources and services (housing, food, and so on).
Having documented these conundrums in my first book, and searching the field for alternatives as I was writing its conclusion, I became fascinated by MI, which began as a treatment for people labeled as problem drinkers (and has since spread to many other fields). You are right that MI replaces denial with “ambivalence,” which means both the client and the professional have more room to maneuver in searching ways to understand problem behavior. After all, the “could be” or “sometimes seems” of ambivalence is far more capacious than the “it is” of denial. Moreover, in MI, denial is understood as a difference between two people’s ways of looking at some problem—that is, the professional’s and the client’s—rather than a psychic attribute of the latter party. As an epistemological shift, this radically re-grounds the question of an individual’s suffering and the practical means of resolving it. More specifically, once interaction rather than interiority is taken as the grounds of therapeutic work, the professional becomes someone who can help conversationally rebuild what is taken to be real about a problem as well as a possible course of remedy. Mind you, this does not magically level the playing field, as I am careful to point out through the book. I do think it feels a bit better and more constructive to those involved, perhaps especially the helping professional.
Ilana Gershon: What does “paying it forward” mean for MINTIES, (what version of pay it forward do MINTIES adhere to), and how does it serve as a guide for behavior in contexts where people are often making calculations around boundaries?
Summerson Carr: Readers of Max Weber may remember that he identified Benjamin Franklin as personifying the ideological convergence of American Protestantism and American capitalism. Interestingly, some say that Franklin was the one who coined the term, “paying it forward,” when asking a friend to whom he made a loan to lend the amount to another in need rather than return it. The term paying it forward also has special resonance in Protestant communities in the United States, who define it as loving and giving to one’s proverbial neighbor, thereby mobilizing spirit. Note that in both these definitions, “paying it forward” means extending oneself out of already established relationships of reciprocity into less predictable future interactions with unknown parties. This means that the logic of investment is primarily oriented not toward accumulation and but rather continual expansion. This is very consistent with the work of MI proponents, particularly trainers, who devote themselves to disseminating MI and therefore, also, MI spirit for the good of others, whether proximate or still unknown. In this sense, for MINTies, paying it forward means not observing boundaries, even considering them to be a dangerous conceit. For them, to do otherwise would be to caricature an unknown audience, or think some are unworthy or unable to appreciate what they so value—that is, the spirit of MI. Of course, disseminating MI, whether to doctors in China or the State of California’s corrections system, is also profitable. But once that dissemination is understood as paying it forward, given the resonances of the term, any accumulation can be seen as a side effect of generosity and reinvestment.
Ilana Gershon: In one of your chapters, you start discussing what an evidence-based practice means in bureaucratic terms, the answer clearly surprised you. What was the surprise, and how do different MINTIES engage with this bureaucratic category?
Summerson Carr: Perhaps one should not be at all surprised that “evidence-based” is at least as much of a bureaucratic as a scientific qualification of a practice method. My student, Hannah Obertino Norwood, and I have also recently written about this in Social Science & Medicine—expanding select sections of Chapter Four’s discussion of MI science. Hannah and I detail how the production of evidence-based practices centrally involves a wide range of extra-scientific actors—charitable foundations, public and private insurers, state and federal agencies, health and human service organizations—who work in tandem to register and legitimate certain programs and practices as “evidence-based.” Once officially attached to a method like MI, the designation of “evidence-based” acts like a kind of passport; it green-lights the adoption of that method not just by various service agencies, but also by entire states in large part because it renders that method reimbursable. The real surprise for me was how little “evidence” the designation of “evidence-based” requires. As William Miller himself shared with me, a method can be registered as evidence-based based on a single study as long as that study is conducted in what officials consider the most epistemically virtuous way—that is, by way of a randomized controlled trial (RCT). What is more, that single study need not show that a method is effective in the sense of producing positive behavioral outcomes. Rather, the method must simply be shown to have an “observed effect” by way of an RCT, even if that effect is a negative one. Notably, while keenly aware of how important MI’s status as an evidence-based practice is to its spread, Miller was very forthcoming about this all in my conversations with him, saying that the main federal EBP registry for behavioral interventions at the time of his applications had “a very low bar.” At the same time, he emphasized that this did nothing to diminish the spirited labor of MI researchers, who have produced almost 2,000 RCTs of MI over the last 30 years. As for the MINTies who disseminate MI, there is a wide range of perspectives on the scientization of counseling methods, from true believers to those who think the whole EBP movement is a “whole bunch of crap” (to quote one of my interlocutors). However, surely all US-based MINTies are aware that for MI (spirit) to successfully circulate, MI must also be recognized as scientific. This is in part because, for decades, “evidence-based” has been practically synonymous with “reimbursable”—whether by private or public sources. In this sense, and as I argue in the book, the EBP movement is as neo-Keynesian as it is neoliberal.
Ilana Gershon: You talk about many of the paradoxes that practitioners eagerly say “Yes, and . . .” to in this book, but in reading this book, I was struck by yet another paradox which I wondered if you could address. MI is a both a fairly standardized set of rules for conversational interaction that is closely monitored by auditors, at the same time that the training itself stresses a strong commitment and attention to the context, and presumes that the therapist is a perpetual apprentice, always learning and transforming. I wonder if you could say a little about how standardization and localization/constant change interweave in MI practices.
Summerson Carr: Hmm…this is an interesting question. First, I think we need to unravel what an “attention to context” means in the world of MI, which is quite different than how an anthropologist or sociologist might think of it. Indeed, one is reminded of the shade many linguistic anthropologists have long thrown at conversation analysts. Put simply, the MI-trained professional is supposed to be rigorously attuned to the context of each interview they conduct. So, yes, there are a set of standards for how one conversationally engages, but if standard MI skills are not calibrated and applied relative to what a particular client says and does, the interview fails. Or, to put it in my interlocutors’ terms, the professional practices MI skills without MI spirit. As a conversational style, MI is a way of listening as well as speaking, which itself suggests a commitment to localization.
But easier said than done! It is also a deceptively difficult method of rhetorical engagement and analysis, requiring a kind of pragmatic sensibility that I describe at length in Chapter Five. This is one reason that hundreds of US MINT members—including Miller—see themselves as perpetual apprentices. Of course, lifelong apprentices are also especially reliable disseminators! Furthermore, because the method is considered subject to decay without regular practice, there are many auditing tools that are focused on monitoring whether a practitioner’s MI skills and spirit are up to snuff. But the question of managing the competing demands of standardization and localization is also a question about balancing research and practice. No doubt, standardization is especially important to MI as a contemporary scientific enterprise. Recall here the bureaucracy that MI proponents must navigate in order for the method to be officially registered and recognized evidence-based, which begins with the RCT. Now consider how critical it is that the professionals enrolled in RCTs as research subjects who say they are doing MI are in fact doing MI whilst under study. And while MINTies further removed from MI research sometimes grow weary of the latest updates to MI’s fidelity instruments, as they are regularly unveiled at annual conferences and professional get-togethers, I think most appreciate the utility of the various audits and quality controls in the work of spreading motivational interviewing. For MI to spread, after all, it must work the difference between research and practice as well as science and spirit. And, as you point out, this entails ironing out any felt disjuncture between standards and the pragmatics of local application.
Ilana Gershon: How did this book come about and what are some of the ways you hope this book will travel into other people’s reading practices?
Susan Gal: We hope this book conveys the power of Michael’s amazing intellectual leadership to the widest possible audience. When Michael was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in the Summer of 2019, there were two things he told his close friends he wanted to do: teach one last round of his signature course, “Language in Culture,” which he did in the Fall. And finish preparing for publication the set of lectures based on the version of the course he taught at the Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America in 2017. Cambridge University Press had already accepted his set of richly illustrated lecture-notes for publication. But he knew that, like any set of notes developed over many years, they needed polishing and editing, so that the connections among the lectures would be highlighted and explained. The three of us set about doing this with the help of a marvelous group of Michael’s colleagues and friends with whom – in a series of workshops – Michael discussed each chapter in turn, as we took notes, asked questions and listened to him further develop the ideas, suggesting elaborations and refinements. The book stands as a distillation of Michael’s lifelong intellectual project, which was also, from the first Language in Culture lectures in 1970, a pedagogical project. As he told us repeatedly, legibility and accessibility were top priorities for him in this book. He wanted to reach out to readers. Working as editors, we relied primarily on his lecture notes and the workshop elaborations, but also on his previous publications. Most importantly, we were determined to render Michael’s inimitably entertaining real-life voice, not as in his writings, but the one so many generations of students had heard and been captivated by in lectures and informal discussions. It is gratifying that many people who knew Michael well have commented that the book “sounds like him.” The book includes his playful side, his delight in irony and puns, his many jokes, quips and sometimes wickedly funny comments on his contemporaries, as well as his warm appreciations of others’ work.
I think there are many ways to use the book in teaching. Different parts of the book could work for different courses. It could be background reading for the instructor. I have found it useful to unfold the more complex theoretical points by reading passages with students; discussing them in class. The many detailed ethnographic and sociolinguistic examples are compelling on their own. Reading Michael’s precise and colorful dissection of them is an eye-opener and intellectual fun. He even gives instructions at one point on how to do the kinds of analysis he advocates.
Ilana Gershon: What makes a concept cultural and where do these cultural concepts come from?
Constantine V. Nakassis: One thing that really came out in working on this book – both in the book workshops Sue mentioned, and after – was how Michael was weighing into, indeed striking directly at the heart of, a much bigger Enlightenment philosophical discussion of the nature of thought (conceptualization) and, further, how he did so by thinking through the history of linguistic thought (and his relationship to it). In these lectures Michael chides a certain philosophical tradition (from Locke to so-called analytic philosophy to modern cognitive science) for its linguistic naivete, assuming that the world of concepts and the world of things can be transparently accessed in some way or other rather than seeing how language and culture – and language in culture, and culture in language – mediate the entire problem space of categoriality, and thus conceptualization and thought. Michael starts from the Boasian view of language and culture as classifications of experience (viz. concepts); but what kind of a thing is a concept and what kinds of concepts are there? Here, Michael distinguishes between grammatical categories – and the concepts they embody (precipitated as Saussurean values or intensions that are system motivated, with scope over extensions, or instances of the category) – and what he calls, at some point in the lectures, “Bakhtinian concepts” or, more often in the book, “cultural concepts.” The call out to Bakhtin here is particularly interesting, since it suggests that cultural concepts are discursively mediated notby principles of grammar (langue) alone but, rather, through the dialogism of semiosis, through – as Sue will note in her answer to the next question – voicing structures in/across interaction as they come to serve as the (political, ideological) field within which communicable categorizations of experience are indexed, entextualized, circulated, enregistered, institutionalized, and so on. Such processes are sociocentric, historically contingent, perspectival, and their normativity is dynamic (indeed, dialectically mediated by the events in which they are instantiated and abstracted from). They are, in a word, cultural.
In saying this, Michael is laying claim to the anthropological concept of culture (a term abandoned by many in our field but taken up by others outside of it), deconstructing it by inserting himself into a longer conversation while re-signifying the term. Because if concepts are cultural, it’s not because culture is some static “system”; rather, it’s because concepts are creatures of discourse, subject to its vagaries. Concepts are achieved, tenuous phases or states of a sociohistoric and evenemential flux.
It’s important to see, though, that Michael was not dismissing the importance of grammatical concepts. Quite the opposite; he was developing a more sophisticated apparatus to relate grammatical and cultural concepts. This is his recuperation of Whorf. Going against a naive “Whorfianism,” grammatical concepts are not determinative in any way of cultural concepts. But how, then, are they related? As Michael shows in the last part of the book, grammatical concepts can serve as a certain kind of germ for cultural concepts (though the latter have roots which are not reducible to the former), but only insofar as langue is enunciated – that is, entextualized and contextualized – in/across events of discourse and insofar as discourse is itself reflexively/ideologically reanalyzed. And in passing from the virtual plane of grammar to actual embodied (and ideologically mediated) communication, concepts slip beyond any reductive grammatical mediation. One of Michael’s fabulous examples of this is color terms, where he shows that while there are cross-linguistic structuralist patterns across languages as regards to how the denotational domain of color is linguistically categorized (lexically), such an analysis can only take one so far since, while it will predict certain contours of color terminologies, it can’t tell us what those terms’ pragmatic meanings consist in (for example, in terms of indexical significations; metapragmatic stereotypy, and so on), for this is the domain of the cultural, which has a semiotics distinct from that of structuralist analysis.
Ilana Gershon: What would Silverstein most want people to understand about voicing identity?
Susan Gal: I vividly recall that “identity” was not a central term for Michael when it first became ubiquitous in the social sciences over the course of the 1990s. His focus, as Costas elaborates below, was on “event” and what kinds of social facts precipitate out of presupposed and created indexicality in events. But later, in a characteristic move, Michael reinterpreted identity in his own terms. It now serves as an important category, in a changed form that incorporates insights from Goffman and Bakhtin, along with his own innovations. I’d say it has two key aspects.
First, deliberately opposing much of sociolinguistics, Michael rejects the idea that identity consists in the demographic categories that a person might fit into, it is not even the intersection of several such, like “middle-class woman.” It is not some person’s performance. No. It is not even something individual. It is the changing relationship among participants that emerges in the course of interaction as speakers position themselves with respect to each other in a kind of ballet, choosing among small bits of language in order to formulate verbally, in response to each other, the places, times, institutions and people that they talk about. With the words they select, speakers align with or distance themselves from each other, and with/from those times and places they talk about. This is not identity as a “thing,” but what he calls identity-effects, identity work. As Michael says: “there is no announcement of identities in culture,” no one proclaims himself as, for example, intolerant or arrogant, a “twit,” or “nice” and compassionate. These are inferences participants make; they are cumulative effects of the multiple little culture-invoking verbal partials that people use in interaction.
But how do those little “verbal partials” – the selection of one name for a place, rather than another, for instance – become “culture invoking”? That’s the second key aspect. Michael notes that we all, universally, have culture-specific intuitions about the kinds of talk that belong in different kinds of situations; we have folk models of registers (in speech and in other forms of expression) that shape our expectations; violations of those expectations change the situation and often the social selves of participants. Well established and institutionalizedregisters become stereotypes: “emblems of identity.” People deploy pieces of those emblems (characteristic sounds, lexical shibboleths) in self-fashioning. But speakers do not enact stereotypical identities. It’s more complicated. Michael builds on Bakhtin’s notion of “voice.” We speakers “voice” ourselves in relation to such stereotypes – aligning with them or against them and with/against our interlocutors – in given situations. As he writes: “It is as though we are thinking/saying: This is how a social category or group member communicates.” We can (partially) inhabit various such social “figures” or stereotypes, but always via events with their interactional organization and contextualized in specific ways that deviate from or build on those stereotypes. Registers are cultural phenomena. Their existence and use depend on circulation across situations; they emanate from many different institutional nodes such as schools (from which standard language emanates), or from government (bureaucratese), fashion industry, social media and so on.
Ilana Gershon: What drew Silverstein to so many analyses of Mr. A and Mr. B and Ms. C?
E. Summerson Carr: To be sure, these dialogues are neat encapsulations of some of the most central lessons of Michael’s program for the study of language in culture. That said, I think Michael was enchanted with these interactions for their political implications as much as their semiotic ones.
To back up a bit, readers may recall that Mr. A, Mr. B, and Ms. C were professional graduate students at the University of Chicago in the mid 1970s. They were also participants in a research study led by Michael’s colleague, University of Chicago Professor of Psychology, Starkey Duncan. As Duncan’s original study was designed, A, B and C – along with several dozen other graduate students – were paired off to engage in brief “Getting to Know You” conversations, with very little in the way of topical guidance given beforehand. Whereas Duncan and his coauthor, Donald Fiske, were primarily interested in turn transitions in talk (and their resulting book is filled with charts that account for sundry statistical (ir)regularities of face-to-face interaction: gaze rate, nod intervals, smile number and so on), Michael focused on semiotically loaded social distinctions: the interscalar differences between what it typically meant (and still means) to be a student at the University of Chicago Law School as opposed to a student in the School of Social Service Administration.
These intriguing coordinates naturally piqued Michael’s interest, suggesting as they did an institutional order (with which he was quite familiar, after all, as a longtime professor and deeply invested student of the University of Chicago). Indeed, if Duncan and Fiske overlooked salience of their research participants’ campus affiliations, Michael seized upon them in his subsequent analyses, not only by acknowledging the class positionalities and possibilities of lawyers and social workers, but also by showing how class hierarchy would be ritually enacted and reproduced in the students’ brief but densely diagrammatic conversation. As he puts it in the book, within the first minute of conversation, Mr. A and Mr. B “managed conversationally to double their intra-Chicago status asymmetry,” at least until Mr. A is unexpectedly knocked off his perch. For rather than simply showing how social class – as institution – is predictably rebuilt in interaction, Michael uncovered in the soon-to-be-social worker’s turns attalk – and turns of phrase – the political potentialities of linguistic virtuosity. More particularly, Mr. B and Ms. C – trained as they are in the therapeutic registers – manage to “clientize” Mr. A in their respective conversations with him, thereby gaining the upper hand. It seems quite clear, given his repeated return to these dialogues over the years, that Michael not only appreciated the play in these dialogues, but delighted in the disruption they entailed.
It is in this book, including – tellingly – its closing pages that, Michael provides his clearest parsing of the dialogues between A, B, and C to make three points central to his larger program of the study of language in culture:
1. Interactants cannot simply rely upon institutions to affirm their identities, confer role and status, and establish stable posts. Rather institutions are reforged through the dynamics of entextualization and contextualization.
2. Face-to-face interaction is ritual interaction, and the dynamic figuration of denotational material – the how of what people say – is highly consequential for participants and institutional products, and
3. Interaction diagrams how institutions order and taxonomize, if not always predictably or by participants’ plans.
So, in the end, through his reanalysis of these dialogues, Michael suggests that institutions are creatures of interaction, which means that they might – and often do – reorder people and build paradigms in predictable ways. Yet it might be otherwise, in part because interactants can draw on various genres and do so with virtuosity, yielding surprising identities and relations.
Ilana Gershon: What might Silverstein want analysts to focus upon when studying moments the analyst themself would label miscommunication or more precisely discoordination? What could be the first steps for tackling such a moment?
Susan Gal: That’s a great question about Michael’s actual analytical methods, which emerged in the workshops as something he wanted very much to emphasize. The book in fact starts with an example of what you might call miscommunication! But he was more interested in the participants’ assessment of “miscommunication” or “discoordination,” than the analysts’. How people react to each other is the revealing thing. When there is something that seems like discoordination to analysts, he would advise that we attend to what participants make of it; what are the uptakes, the alternate interpretations, are there attempts at repair? What future possibilities emerge for relationships, identities, institutions? As we worked through the lectures, it was clear that on the one hand, he emphasized that we can sketch out how social process works, at many scales. But on the other hand, there are no guarantees. Indeterminacy is everywhere (as his discussions of Mr. A and Mr. B reveal). Rituals sometimes fail, people often fail to convey or attain or even know their interactional goals. Intention is a poor guide to outcome, and outcomes are contingent. That was why he was strongly drawn to analyses of courtroom trials and political speech. Even firmly institutionalized practices like those must be reproduced, recreated in interaction, and subject to change. In Peircean fashion, Michael showed there is always a next moment of interpretation. So, I’d say his first step – as in the examples in the book – is to see how the participants react. The moments when participants are seen by themselves or others as violating expectations are the richest ones for understanding culture as a continuous chain of indexical and therefore interpretive process, and vice versa!
Ilana Gershon: What is the sign’s eye view?
Constantine V. Nakassis: This is one of the major innovations in Michael’s work, and the book, and like so many of Michael’s innovations reveals his sense of intellectual lineage. In particular, it always struck me how Michael saw his own work in relationship to Roman Jakobson, whom he always referred to as his teacher. In fact, I recall him once downplaying some of his own contributions to linguistics and linguistic anthropology by saying that he saw himself as just unpacking the implications of what Jakobson (and his other teachers) wrote! There is something to that, but I think Michael was also being overly modest. The “sign’s eye” is an example of that. In Lecture 1, Michael introduces this idea by way of his reading of Jakobson’s model of the speech event. Like the Saussurean speech circuit, in that model – visually, at least – we are not in the diagram per se but hover outside of it, indeed, over it, from the “bird’s eye” (or God’s eye, or the positivist linguist’s eye). From this perch, the speech event model is a kind of objective, etic grid. It’s static. Michael described this vision of communication as like a ball (the “message”, famously diagrammed qua Signifer/Signified in the Course in a ball-like shape) being lobbed back and forth from “sender” and “receiver.” Part of the problem with this view, among other things, is that it takes for granted what a “message” (or a “text”) is, and in doing so also takes for granted what a “context” is; or, as Hymes also pointed out, that the speech-event “factors” are straightforwardly, always already, “there” in an interaction and that our job as linguists/anthropologists is simply (simplistically!) to figure out how the factors are “filled in” in any particular instance or how they correlate with each other.
Michael turned this whole model inside out by instead reading the speech event model as a field of possible indexicables. That is, he read it from the point of view of the sign itself, asking what are all the things a sign, a message (or text), might ‘point to’ (index) as context for its construal? Speaker? Code? Channel? (Or, what must a sign be such that each such “factor” could be a relevant context for its construal?) To take the sign’s eye, then, is not to assume that there is a pregiven, static context for any particular sign. Rather it suggests that context is that which is projected by a sign, that is, that which a sign invokes as a relevant principle for its intelligibility, meaning, force. Since such an invocation takes, as its semiotic ground, a relationship of ‘pointing to’ (or making contiguous, co-present, existentially related); that is, it is indexical. The sign’s eye, then, repositions our analysis to ask how text and context are made through indexical sign activity, and in so doing puts us “inside” the speech event rather than just observers standing outside of or above it. And this move also thus takes us from speech event to indexicality, and from there to the dialectic of entextualization and contextualization, circulation, enregisterment, emanation, and so on and so forth. So this one move opens up a whole space for rethinking semiosis, discourse, language.
It’s a brilliant move, and typically Michael; he simultaneously sutures his own theoretical apparatus within the history of linguistics (in this case, Saussure to Jakobson to …) while inserting his own unique spin on it (here, by leveraging Peirce, but also a particularly anthropological sensibility which positions analysis within the phenomenon under study). In so doing, he works within a tradition but leaves the point of departure completely transformed, figuring his own contribution (a next-sign in a genealogical chain) as its fuller realization.
When I reflect on Ford Madox Ford’s statement, I immediately think of branching trees and river bends. Each branch is self-similar to its predecessor, demonstrating both infinite relationship and fragmentation. While I could comment on the self-similarity of page 99 to my dissertation as a whole, I think it more apt to focus on what it tells us about the iterative or branching nature of writing. In my dissertation that touches on various local, state, and extra-state actors’ definitions and applications of communist-era history in Albania, page 99 represents a moment of transition between the project that I had initially imagined to the one I came to know during the fieldwork and writing process, from a statement on collective memory production to one on transitional justice.
“As interviews with project staff and media responses to their projects make clear, both the communist past and the future of Albanian youth (and Albanians more broadly) as they stand are infused with a quality of uncertainty that stems from Albania’s narrative of democratic consolidation, one of permanent transition (see Introduction). The past as an uncertain subject appears to have no truth…” (Rocker 2022, 99).
On page 99, I introduce two of my key nongovernmental organization (NGO) collaborators – whose work inspired me to begin this project on the afterlives of 20th century history. Since the 2010s, both organizations have found a place in Albanian civil society promoting the discussion of topics such as cultural heritage, history, and democracy and both have identified young adults born in the 1990s and later as important targets of that work. I had initially viewed their efforts as a response to decades of State Socialist control over history and its interpretation (Kodra-Hysa 2013) and a drive by international donors in the region for democratization. Gradually, I realized that NGO workers’ efforts were also responses to earlier attempts to address past wrongdoing following the end of single-party rule (transitional justice) in the 1990s within a present that was not living up to the potential that had been promised at the start of the country’s political transition (Nadkarni 2020).
The Page 99 test ultimately encouraged me to think about the iterative and branching nature of research and writing. While I had set out to study collective memory efforts, I learned even more about transitional justice, and its ongoing translation by various actors, especially NGOs and young adults. While many Albanians, scholars and media included, have characterized Albania as stuck in “permanent transition” (Pandolfi 2010), my interlocutors pushed against this idea through their projects aimed at the past. Instead of mourning for the loss of futures promised in the 1990s, they focused on the work they could do in the present to engender new futures for themselves tomorrow.
References
Kodra-Hysa, Armanda. 2013. “Albanian Ethnography at the Margins of History 1947-1991: Documenting the Nation in Historical Materialist Terms.” The Anthropological Field on the Margins of Europe, 1945-1991. Edited by Aleksander Boskovic and Chris Hann. UK: Global Book Marketing, 129-152.
Nadkarni, Maya. 2020. Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Pandolfi, Mariella. 2010. “From Paradox to Paradigm: The Permanent State of Emergency in the Balkans.” Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Intervention. Edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi. New York: Zone Books, 104-117.
Rocker, Kailey. 2022. Translational Justice: Facing the Past to Take on the Present in Albania. University of North Carolina, Phd. https://doi.org/10.17615/5414-9q81
CaMP Anthropology 