Monthly Archives: December 2023

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins on her book, Waste Siege

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https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=27959

Hazal Corak: Waste Siege focuses on multiple forms of waste which accumulate and assume political status in Palestine. It introduces us to waste professionals who design landfills, ethical anxieties about unwanted bread, and Palestine’s flea (rabish) markets where objects that are discarded by their previous users in Israel are given second lives. Still, I am wondering what happens to the valuables that Palestinians discard. Take, for instance, the construction waste and objects such as metal scrap which retain economic value despite their discarded status. Given the sanctions and limitations towards the Palestinian Authority, are these re-introduced into global markets by Israeli companies and authorities? Who profits? What sort of economics and politics of waste-ownership are at stake in Palestine when it comes to such discarded valuables?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Shuqba village offers us a telling case. Palestinian hospitals from the Ramallah area send x-ray films to Shuqba to be burned down for their silver. We can assume that the x-ray films’ pathway goes something like this: Ramallah hospital, truck to Shuqba, arrangement with a Shuqba landowner who allows dumping on his land, burning to extract silver, silver sale to someone presumably outside Shuqba, possibly in Israel, melting of that silver (again) to turn it into something else, sale of that object, and so on. Data on how much cash is exchanged and where it ends up would offer a fuller sense of the political economy of waste in this settler colonial context. I heard stories of Israeli mafia connections to certain Palestinian discards like bottles. Other Palestinian discards may “leak” through into Israel or go farther afield. But other questions offer other, equally useful, insights. For example, some people, processes, or systems benefit indirectly from the revaluation of wastes. Understanding them is a way to understand how accumulations produce conditions of possibility for world-making. For example, Ramallah-area medical wastes supposedly disappearing into Shuqba allows the Palestinian Authority not to have to worry about increasing the management needs of those landfills, which means increased costs and scrutiny from Israeli actors, international donors, and local communities. It allows people in the villages around Jenin’s Zahrat al-Finjan landfill, whose land was taken by it, to feel slightly more secure that groundwater is not contaminated by hospital wastes and perhaps to tolerate the landfill despite its odors. It likely extends the landfill’s lifespan, and perhaps the lifespans of landfills in Palestine more broadly, which has its own implications. Smoke puffing out of a Palestinian village allows Israeli government officials to confirm that Israeli interventions on Palestinians’ waste management is necessary for the common good. A Palestinian truck driver who makes $40 to haul wastes from al-Hilal hospital near al-‘Amari refugee camp, like the Shuqba landowner who receives a similar sum to allow the dumping, does not exactly profit from that act even if a few paper bills make their way into his pocket. Settler colonialism and racism do profit, on the other hand, even if the flows of money to their primary supporting institutions (such as the military) are not so easily apparent. Comparing the “profiteers” and the processes and affects that gain their conditions of possibility makes visible that it is equally or even more important to follow paths less direct than the financial outcomes of circulations. Sometimes the interests of the people who profit are not served by that profiting in the long-term.

Hazal Corak: Rabish goods, namely the secondhand items that travel from Israel to Palestine, evoke contradictory emotions and senses of the self among buyers and sellers alike. As you report, they open up imaginaries about the contemporary life in the ancestral lands that are now out of reach to many. They create intimacy with and humanize the colonizer. Yet, using them also elicits senses of humility, lack, and embarrassment. The notion of shame has historically held a central place in the ethnographies of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. As Andrew Shryock remarks (2019), this notion is making a fresh return after almost three decades of abandonment. What sort of intersubjective relations of not only shame but also shaming are at work in your interlocutors’ engagement with rabish and waste? In what ways does the Waste Siege participate in such regional debates in the anthropology of the Middle East and the Mediterranean?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: I understand shame in the honor-shame dyad in structuralist framings of the Middle East and Mediterranean to describe a sense applying simultaneously to a group and an individual. In this it resonates with the kind of shame that some people felt in Jenin, for example, when they worried about it being known that they shopped in the rabish. The shame was my friend Dana’s when I mistakenly asked her too loudly on the street whether we were going the rabish that day. Her face went hot with fear that we had been overheard. It was also a classed shame, forging a connection to her working class status that her family was trying to escape. It was a national shame stemming from humiliation she and others experienced at the thought that Israel as a society was dumping its discards on Palestinians as a society. One difference is the fact that rabish shame was understood as a failing, yes, but less as a moral failing (which is pronounced in the honor-shame dyad) and more as a failing to have prevented the harm in which one lives. It is helpful to understand it as political shame, implying knowledge of an otherwise not accessed—whether that otherwise is found in histories of collective rebellion like that which occurred in the two intifadas or in a decision to resist wanting the goods Israelis discard across the Green Line. Even if other paths not taken (rebellion, nondesire) are implicitly superior to the one taken (buying colonial discards), honor is not the term that best characterizes their superiority. The honor-shame dyad has been used to offer what were understood to be cultural explanations for why people made some decisions and not others, why fathers killed their daughters and families feuded. The shame I witnessed, mixed as it was with desire, playfulness, ambivalence, historicity, and pragmatism, was neither pure as a structure of feeling nor cultural in the sense that it somehow existed before or outside of politics, for example in the form of occupation or history. It was an interpretation of one’s gendered, classed, and political location in the world and in relation to past and future.

Hazal Corak: I would like to go back to the very beginning of the book in order to touch upon some theoretical implications of how waste siege works and what it does. In the introduction, you distinguish between experiential and structural forms of violence. Can you tell us some more about how you see the distinction between the two and in what ways the waste siege is specifically facilitating an experiential form of violence rather than a structural one?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Living in Palestine made me curious about the discrepancy between what people sensed about waste and how they understood accountability and politics in relation to waste. I was puzzled that, on the one hand, waste was so pervasive in the spaces that Palestinians traversed daily that it seemed impossible not to sense it through one’s body. People did sense it in that they closed taxi windows as they passed sewage-saturated valleys. Shopkeepers swept incessantly in front of shops. People cursed the cheaply made objects like toasters that broke during use and made connections between their miscarriages and the dumps smoldering around their villages. Yet somehow this inundation by waste often obscured what I would describe as the structural violence that was its condition of possibility. Waste was irritating, confounding, worrying, generating of endless attempts to manage it. But something about it created a kind of noise in the signal that makes clear to Palestinians that settler colonialism, for example, is to blame for other experiences like a house demolition. Each time I traced the origins and flows of waste I found connections to the Palestinian Authority’s vision of a capitalist Palestinian future state, or to Israeli efforts to settle the West Bank, for example. But these connections were not as visible to the person whose lungs were clenching from trash fire smoke or to the person smelling sewage and who was stuck—and this is the crucial point—in Palestine. Accountability was shrugged off as opaque, if often still related to the general situation, meaning occupation (al-wadi’). Or it was attributed to poor management (on the part of the PA) or irresponsibility (on the part of a neighbor). Political analysis brought into so many other conversations about life in Palestine did not often extend to what I call waste siege. One of the goals of the book was to try to name this thing that was not named as a siege, to gather many disparate experiences together and give them a name. Another goal was to suggest that there are sieges that can be felt and cause suffering while differing in significant ways from the sieges that provoke mass mobilization, which this siege has thus far not done.

Hazal Corak In the book you mention your stay at an Israeli-owned AirBnB in Palestine. Your next project is on AirBnB rentals in Palestine and Greece. Can you tell us a little bit about how your research on waste infrastructures in Palestine led to this second project? What sort of similar themes attract your attention and in what ways is this one a completely novel endeavor for you?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: My next book explores the effects on property, family, and forms of attachment that have resulted from the saturation of Athens (Greece) with Airbnbs under austerity. My work overall seeks to answer two main questions: 1) How do destructive conditions—be they ecological, political, or economic—remake socialities and relations? 2) And how do people harness the material and semiotic properties of infrastructures to make their everyday lives livable under conditions of duress? In each of my projects I locate large-scale phenomena such as settler colonialism and austerity in the intimate details that emerge from slow ethnographic listening. Paying attention to quotidian details allows us to see how destructive conditions become braided into people’s senses of ethics, self, and possibilities for alternative futures. Palestine and post-2009 Greece have more in common than meets the eye. Both are places of foreign occupation. The forms of violence vary. But foreign states and agencies are the main determinants of the destructive conditions in which the people in both places live.

An empirical question that had come up during my work on Waste Siege was about less visible strategies people in the broader geographies of Israel/Palestine were using to mitigate besieging circumstances. One answer I found was that many Israelis and Palestinians are investing in Athens real estate. This led me to spend time in Greece with Israelis who traveled back and forth between Athens and Israel facilitating investments in Athens properties and it sent me back to Israel/Palestine for a new bout of fieldwork starting in 2020.

Middle class Israelis and Palestinians will look to secure their futures against potential war and economic crisis, and to boost chances of upward mobility through expensive European educations for their children,  and so are investing outside their political borders. There is a sense that there is less and less land available to build upon, which is a condition of waste siege, and this has been an important driver of investment abroad. Palestinians’ experiences of discriminatory landownership further contribute to overcrowding in Palestinian towns like Reineh in northern Israel, where I spent time with a family of Palestinian investors in 2020. One of the attractions of Athenian apartments for foreign investors is that they can easily be turned into Airbnbs with high annual returns. Between 2010, when Airbnb had first arrived in Greece, and 2019, the number of listings jumped from a few dozen to over 91,000.

For Greek as well as foreign owners, Airbnb is an improvisation for mitigating destructive conditions. I call the relationship calibration to which Airbnb has contributed “controlled alienation.” That is the process of, on the one hand, letting go of aspects of existing relationships, ways of being and thinking that are made in relation to homes. And, on the other hand, maintaining some ability to determine the fate or workings of things. These two processes are conditions of one another. For example: a family of property owners I call the Petridous were able to maintain legal ownership of the apartment by giving up use of it (to Airbnb managers) for themselves. I think of controlled alienation as a way of managing the violence of austerity as siege. By offering stays as short as one night and flexible booking and cancelation, Airbnb allows owners to feel that they can return to their space at will. But this preserving does not achieve continuity. Nor does it cleanly replace one body (the now deregulated state) with another (a multibillion dollar company). In the process of engaging with the platform, people lose some things and gain others. My book tries to capture the sensibility that emerges in that dual loss and gain.

Side note: I have only stayed in Airbnbs within Palestinian cities run by Palestinians or jointly run by Palestinians and their expat spouses.

Hazal Corak: Finally, I want to ask about the issue of multi-sitedness in relation to the Waste Siege and your research on the AirBnB rentals. In the book we see you present at the Palestinian households, flea markets, bureaucrats’ offices, and landfills as well as the meetings with NGOs and environmentalists in Israel. Do you see the Waste Siege as a multi-sited ethnography? How do you compare the structures of multi-sitedness in your two different projects? Multi-sited research is seen crucial due to the polycentric workings of the global economy and the planetary proceedings of the ecological crisis. At times, it is also criticized for being too ambitious as an ethnographic endeavor. What would you like to share with other ethnographers regarding methods, techniques, and terms of getting related to multiple settings which constitute the different ends of one single phenomenon?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: A project on almost anything must be mobile. The idea of the single-sited project implies a site that is somehow ontologically bounded. As anthropologists we create the sites we claim to study by naming and reifying them in our work. The relative boundedness of any site is contested both by those in it and by those who (also) produce knowledge about it. Major elisions result from imagining a site as supposedly purely itself. Take Psari, the village in which my grandfather was born. Home to about 385 registered people (not including myself, my parents, or my nuclear family, though we have a family house there), the village of Psari is located two hours west of Athens. I would miss a lot if I were to assume that I could physically stay within the boundaries of Psari, nestled in the mountains, to understand how people experience life there. I would miss that most of the women marry in from regions as far away as Epirus. I would miss the uncounted Roma communities who pass through, the Bengali workers who sleep outside on the hills but who work the land as cheap labor, I would miss the hundreds of children, elders, and deceased self-identified members of Psari’s community disbursed in Australia and Chicago. I would miss the global swirl of private housing and anti-Communism campaigns that historian Nancy Kwak has documented and that sent American funds for homes to be rebuilt after German soldiers burned Psari down during World War II. I might miss the fact that Konstantinos Tsamados, a fourteen-year-old from a modest family, is a Youtube sensation for his incredible voice. I might miss the fact that the waters in Psari’s rocky underground—waters Psari needs to support its one economic engine, agriculture—are being pumped by private companies, with government permission, bottled and shipped to Saudi Arabia. Whether you want to study gender, class, environmental politics, or media in Psari, you would have to use some sort of multi-sitedness to do it. We have been multi-sited all along.

In studying Airbnbs, I did something similar to what I did in studying waste in Palestine. I paid attention to flows of materials, ideas, and people. Those of us who followed the network have learned that the network is endless and rhizomatic. There are only so many threads one can follow in a finite amount of time, with one body and a desire to do more than prove that things exist in networks. I think they do, and I think that many people have made the case compellingly. Within the finitude of our lives we can dig deeper into particular relations. In studying Airbnb in Athens, I learned about investors buying Airbnbs who were based in several countries including China, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, and Israel/Palestine. I followed the thread that led me back to Israel/Palestine because I knew that I was better able to say something about the worlds out of which those investors were coming, about the conditions of possibility and structures of feeling that supported the investments, and about what the investments did for investors from Israel/Palestine in return. My choice does not suggest that there is something more interesting about this investment pathway than about the pathway that leads Russians or Turks to invest in Athens; rather, it suggests that I can be more interesting in relation to this pathway than I can in relation to others. My advice would be to pursue the relations that are most obscured from public view.

Hannah Foster takes the page 99 test

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Page 99 is found in my second chapter where I discuss how English becomes iconized (Irvine and Gal 2000) as an elite index through practices of learning English at private educational centers in Astana, Kazakhstan. Page 99 includes an ethnographic example of what I characterize as an ostentatious display of English—the head of a small company, a woman I call Raushan, contacted the educational center that served as my primary field site to ask about private English lessons. Raushan’s request was considered ostentatious because she wanted private (and therefore more expensive) English tutoring that would take place at her office during her lunch break. To demonstrate its ostentatiousness, I recount the educational center director, Zhibek’s, response which was to laugh at how ridiculous it was that “even the heads of tiny companies think they’re so important that everyone should accommodate their schedule and needs.” This page describes one experience of learning English at private educational centers that I try to capture in my dissertation—that of the elite, upper middle class. The remaining content chapters explore other experiences connected to English such as entrepreneurial self-development and aspirations for class mobility.

My dissertation proposes that learning English in private educational centers offers students an opportunity to take up different subjectivities, not just opportunities for finding employment or accessing higher education. I show ethnographically how learning English is one practice among many that enables students to take up elite or entrepreneurial ways of being in the world. I also argue that students’ experiences in the English language classroom reflect broader cultural and ideological shifts that are reshaping contemporary Kazakhstan. Though my interlocutors’ experiences are not unfamiliar to English students living in other areas of the globe, what makes learning English in Astana (and its many frustrations) unique are the private educational centers in which most students encounter English. My dissertation focuses on these centers and the students who frequent them in order to present an ethnographic portrait of those in the middle class in Astana. Page 99 is then one piece of that portrait and reflects a partial but relevant portion of that overall goal.

References:

Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, edited by Paul V. Kroskrity, 35–83. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Nishaant Choksi on his book, Graphic Politics in Eastern India

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https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/graphic-politics-in-eastern-india-9781350159587/

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:    Your fascinating book argues that script serves as a “critical semiotic modality through which Santali speakers assert temporal and spatial autonomy from hegemonic historical narratives, administrative territories, and dominant class and caste based social orders” (26). The concept of autonomy is very central to the book. Can you speak about how a graphic politics of autonomy is distinct from identity or state-based politics of recognition that have, perhaps, been more frequently been addressed in linguistic anthropological work? 

Nishaant Choksi: First of all, thank you so much for the interview, and giving me a chance to discuss my work with you and the CAMP audience. Yes, you are right, I have deliberately tried to avoid using the words ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’ in the book and instead tried to outline the concept of autonomy. It is not like the struggle that the proponents of Santali language and Ol-Chiki undertook was not about identity or recognition, it certainly was. However, these notions in terms of political vocabulary are relatively recent in India, and they also, as many anthropologists have discussed, come with analytical limitations. Instead, I draw on a longer discourse of autonomy among the communities I worked with which was tied to the struggle for Jharkhand, which was a long-running struggle among indigenous communities in eastern India to have a federal region with an indigenous majority that would have a specifically indigenous political and cultural character. The struggle was both spatial in that it focused on territory, and temporal, in that it sought to emancipate the Adivasi (original inhabitants) from a temporal discourse of backwardness and primitiveness. The area of West Bengal state in eastern India where I did my fieldwork was left out of the eventual Jharkhand state but the assertion for script in this area, I found, had many continuities with the struggle for Jharkhand. While interfacing with the state for resources and institutions for Santali language and script, the discourse might revolve around identity or recognition, the everyday graphic politics practiced in the rural areas where I did fieldwork revolved more around the conceptual fulcrum of autonomy.      

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:  While many scholars treat writing as a secondary reflection of speech, your book focuses specifically on the graphic politics afforded by the invention and circulation of the Ol-Chiki script. What does your attention to script and multiscriptality reveal beyond what a study attending primarily to language and multilingualism might find?   

Too often the study of writing systems has been conflated with that of language, drawing from, as you rightly point out, the idea that writing is a secondary reflection of speech. In this book, I try to intervene by analytically separating script from language (by language I mean ‘code’ or ‘oral variety’). In doing so, I see how script carries different semiotic significations from a linguistic variety, which is important when analyzing languages written in multiple scripts. Starting from this vantage point also allows us to see under what conditions a script becomes ideologically tied to code, and what the significance of the script is for readers and speakers of a language beyond the fact that it represents a particular language. For instance, the Eastern Brahmi script is ideologically tied to the Bengali language in West Bengal, although it is also used to write Santali, which places Santali written in the Eastern Brahmi script in an inferior position to Bengali. This is one of the arguments used for the argument that an independent script such as Ol-Chiki is needed for the Santali language. Yet, Eastern Brahmi is also the most accessible script for Santali speakers and readers, and therefore it is highly visible in the linguistic landscape and in certain types of Santali-language media, where it carries different significations, such as that of local territorial affiliations and literary culture for Santali-speaking communities residing in West Bengal. Understanding the layered and complex signification of script and its multiple relationships with a particular linguistic code was not possible within prevailing analytical frameworks that focused on multilingualism alone. 

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:  In Chapter 2, you describe a moment in which, noticing a diagram chalked at the entrance of a Santali household, you were told that the marks were writing (ol) but not symbol (chiki). This moment is suggestive of Santali semiotic ideologies about the potential properties, functions, and social indexicalities of writing that differ significantly from understandings of the nature and purposes of writing held by missionaries, state administrators, and other institutional figures Santali speakers encounter. Can you speak a bit about how variously positioned Santali writers understood and deployed Ol-Chiki? 

Yes, as I argued in Chapter 2, the originator of Ol-Chiki script, Pandit Raghunath Murmu, had incorporated ritual elements into the graphic construction and rationale for the script that drew a much older practice of writing/drawing or what in Santali is called ol.  The same went for other Santali intellectuals and writers who created their own distinct scripts, for instance the famous Santali poet Sadhu Ramchand Murmu also based his script, Monj Dander Ank, on ritual writing and “divine sound” (ishrong). These scripts were both modern in that they represented spoken language, but also departed from the notion that writing was an arbitrary representation of speech that informs modern regimes of literacy. Scriptmaking, I suggest, emerged in the Santali-speaking area at a time when many of the leading intellectuals of the community were experimenting with ways of how to usher the community into modern regimes of literacy and education while also preserving community values and histories. Ol-Chiki was the most successful of these new scripts to emerge during this period but despite its success, was not immediately accepted by all. Many writers still value the Roman script, while other senior writers preferred writing in regional scripts like Eastern Brahmi so their writing could be made more accessible to the widest possible audience. However, as technology changed and the politics of autonomy became more identified with the graphic domain, most writers under 50 in my field area have more fully embraced Ol-Chiki as the most appropriate script for writing Santali literature.  

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: In Chapter 5, while focusing on the role of print media, you introduce what you call the “Jharkhand imagination,” which challenges both Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities and theories of Indian nationalism. Could you elaborate on the concept and how it intervenes in these frameworks? 

Nishaant Choksi: Anderson’s concept of imagined communities is useful in that it provides a way that we can incorporate “imagination” into our social scientific analysis, seeing how collectives can exist beyond the present status-quo, both temporally and spatially, and allows us a way to examine how media, specifically, facilitates that imagination. It is limiting in that, as many linguistic anthropologists have argued, its notion of imagination is flat and homogenous, based on a presumption of a monolingual reality. In the study of South Asia, the concept has come under criticism, famously by Partha Chatterjee, who argued that the Indian elite had a simultaneously spiritual domain of what constituted the nation, based on writings in Bengali, and material domain oriented toward the British imperial power, based on the English language. This division between English and what is viewed as the vernacular has been constant in the linguistic understanding of South Asian nationalisms and sub-nationalisms. 

Such formulations do not adequately explain the multiscriptal, multilingual milieu of eastern India where I did my fieldwork. Print media was very important for Santali-language activists and writers, but the articulations of community were highly varied depending on what genre of media, and what combinations of script and language they used. Magazines and newspapers had different aims, for example, and they used different linguistic and graphic resources to fulfill these aims. “Jharkhand” as it was imagined in the regional media, especially the multilingual and multriscriptal newspapers which I discuss in the chapter, as a space not identified with any language or script, but with the idea of a convivial and co-eval multilingualism and multiscriptality. Hence the project challenged the idea of linguistic uniformity as a basis of shared community as well as the concept of a hierarchically ordered bilingualism that informs studies of Indian nationalism. 

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:     You note in the book that digital media use has proliferated among Santali speakers since your research began in 2010. You offer an analysis of the role Ol-Chiki had begun to play on digital media during the period covered in the book, but I wonder if you can speak to any changes following this period in how digital media has been drawn into the scalar work through which Santali and other Adivasi groups create autonomous spaces that extend beyond state lines? 

Exactly, so much has changed since 2010-2011 which is when I conducted my long-term fieldwork on which this book is based. At that time hardly anyone (including myself) had a smart phone. Carrying my laptop and a USB dongle, I was one of the few people who even had an internet connection. My research assistant had never even heard of email, much less social media. In the years I have been back, mobile smart phones have revolutionized the communicative situation, and now so many people, both young and old, have access to the internet and are communicating with each other through messages and social media. Filming which used to take place with cameras and VCDs has now become extended to anyone with a phone. Choices of script, which before had to be written by hand, or if typed, given to a specialist who knew typing, can now be accessed and changed at one’s fingertips. Ol-Chiki is even available as a Google font. YouTube channels also abound with Ol-Chiki script displayed prominently in the videos. I suggest the digital transformation hasn’t reduced the importance of script, and print media is still important though it is supplemented and complemented with digital media now. Moreover, digital media provides new platforms where the script can be used to different ends. I have written a little about this in the book, and more substantially in a separate journal article and a book chapter, but there is so much more to explore on the subject. I think for the study of indigenous languages in South Asia and elsewhere, this will be the most important area of research in the coming years.   

Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway:  Who are you most hoping to address in this book and what do you most want readers to take away from it?  

Nishaant Choksi: Originally when I wrote the book, I had in mind primarily the research and student community in anthropology, linguistics, South Asian Studies, and indigenous studies. I wanted to place the study of script and writing front and center in the study of South Asian languages, an area still underexplored given the vast diversity of writing systems. In addition, I had hoped to contribute to the development of the study of the graphic from a linguistic anthropological standpoint, a field that has really picked up in recent years, much more than when I started my graduate studies. Thirdly, India’s Adivasi (indigenous) communities are primarily identified with oral culture and oral tradition, and this is one of the few scholarly books discussing the Adivasi communities in terms of their writing practices and encounter with literacy. For both Adivasi scholars and those working on Adivasi communities, I am happy to see that it has had some impact. 

Finally, it is nice to see sometimes when you write a book it goes beyond your intended audience. For instance, I had no idea that the graphic design community would find this book useful, but recently a font designer who has worked on developing culturally sensitive Indian language fonts read my book and interviewed me for a documentary, for which he also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand in Santali villages. I have also received an invitation to speak about the book to a design group focusing on indigenous design.  It is a positive development that our work as anthropologists can also have influence in other kinds of fields, and because of the book and the conversations I have had around it, I was also able to expand my own intellectual and creative horizons.   

Adeline Masquelier on her book, Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger

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https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo37805918.html

Rahul Advani: In your book Fada, you attend to the ways in which young men in urban Niger facing economic uncertainty sign up as members of fadas where they experiment with social norms and rehearse aspirational modes of adulthood. Could you tell us more about this dynamic and the tensions it produces? 

Adeline Masquelier: Waiting has become something of an endemic condition for young male urbanites unable to secure stable jobs in Niger. The fada or “tea-circle” is where they wait. Together. In the book I describe the fada as a socio-spatial formation that is symptomatic of the destitution experienced by many Nigerien young men facing limited prospects of employment. Modelled after the chief’s court, the fada is essentially a masculine space where young men fulfill their need for sociality and self-affirmation. Male youths speak of their fadas as places where they can escape the crushing weight of social expectations and just be themselves while they engage in a variety of pastimes and projects aimed at making life livable not just in the present but also in the future. What interests me is precisely how the fada constitutes a staging ground affording both sanctuary and prospect. Centered as it is on on male activities and aspirations, the fada is well suited to nurture the dreams of the good life young men may harbor. I propose that we see the fada as a social laboratory where fadantchés (fada members) experiment with who they want to be without fearing criticism. At a time when traditional avenues of self-realization are blocked, young men imagine a future for themselves, whether that means becoming a rapper or a prime minister, or simply a self-sufficient household head. Paradoxically, some fadantchés defer adulthood rather than embrace it, using dress to fashion themselves as youth, for instance. The fada, I have argued, provides a forum for playing with the boundaries of youth and testing how life might be lived.

Rahul Advani: The young men in your book – much like the young men in north India who engage in “timepass” that Craig Jeffrey has written about – make life purposeful through killing time in the face of diminishing returns on their schooling and college degrees. What is it about time and waiting that offers a useful framework for understanding contemporary experiences of liberalization? 

Adeline Masquelier: Temporality is a central concern of the book. On the one hand, young men confronted with the lack of job prospects are worried about their futures. Trapped in the imposed presentism of daily survival, they feel robbed of the futurity previous generations took for granted, as is the case in India as well. On the other hand, they often have too much time on their hands. I show how the fada attends to both these temporalities. It is a place where young men marginalized by the workings of capital seek solace and wait and hope. They share their anguish at being unable to follow expected life courses. They also learn skills and how to prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood. Now, waiting may be experienced as a suspension of time but it is not, I argue, a suspension of activity. At the fada, idleness is transformed into a rewarding experience thanks to the way that the practice of tea-drinking–a central dimension of fada life which I call teatime–shapes the texture of waiting and resituates young men in the tempo of daily life. Young men are often accused by elders of doing nothing but sip tea, but we must see the fada (and teatime) as a by-product of structural inequality. Part routine, part ritual, teatime creates ideal conditions for actualizing aspirations and cobbling together new practices of self-making. The condition of jobless youth in the global south has been described as waithood–a wait for adulthood. I find the concept inadequate to capture the micropolitics of waiting. I was interested in exploring how time is lived at the fada through its simultaneities, its tensions, its trajectories. Anthropologists have long dismissed waiting as a form of inactivity, but I am, in fact, claiming the opposite. We must attend to the work that waiting requires and to the complex ways in which people customize time when they wait, whether they wait for jobs, for the end of the month, or for the tea to brew.

Rahul Advani: The book makes an important insight into how people come together to create what you term an “infrastructure of solidarity.” Could you describe the role of conversation – from the forms of speech adopted to the activities such as tea-drinking that punctuate and facilitate conversation – in how young men at the fada navigate precarity together and make sense of the world? 

Adeline Masquelier: The term “infrastructure of solidarity” was inspired by AbdouMaliq Simone’s concept of human infrastructure, by which he means the use of people’s bodies in combination with objects, spaces, and practices to create nodal points between individuals and make cities work more effectively. In urban Niger, one cannot but notice groups of young men, huddled together, that take over the street at night. They fill the space with their tea-making, their conversation, actualizing their togetherness through the clusters their assembled bodies make; once they return home, however, there is no trace of their presence, save for the name of the fada written on the wall against which they sit. The fada then has no permanent structure. As a place of and for conversation, it offers the kind of support needed after a romantic setback, a failed job search, a quarrel with one’s parents, or simply to unburden oneself of the daily humiliations inflicted by a life of precarity. Such conversation is best accomplished while waiting for the tea to brew. Tea is said to untie tongues: it enmeshes people in comforting intimacy while energizing them. Significantly, there are rules regulating fada life, including teatime. I have tried to highlight that, far from constituting “anti-societies,” most fadas have a moral code–an ethos centered on solidarity and loyalty, that, in the absence of conventional modes of generating value, lays an alternative path to masculine dignity.

Rahul Advani: In your chapter on the naming of fadas, you discuss the overseas locations and global popular culture that fada names draw inspiration from. As you note, these inscriptions reflect how young men in urban Niger project their imagined fantasies and at the same time, in spite of their social immobility, engage in their own politics of exclusion. In what ways do names materialize young men’s claims for inclusion in the city and the world beyond while also excluding other men?

Adeline Masquelier: Once a fada is founded, fadantchés typically give it a name that reveals something of their  ideals, ambitions, or pastimes. Finding a name that fits the fada is critical. Names have  intrinsic potency. They fix the identity of thing they are attributed to, endowing it with  substance while also “activating” it. In documenting how marginalized young men affirm their presence in the city, I came to see the fada as a locus of self-narration. Fadantchés often draw inspiration from figures of heroic masculinity or they select names that conjure distant elsewheres. Names like Delta Boys, Cowboys, Dragon Show, Young Money, Texas, or Territoire des Milliardaires (Territory of Billionaires). I was particularly interested in the connection between image, topography, and language. By branding the neighborhood with the name of their fada and decorating the walls with symbols (hearts, dollar signs, and so on) and images (a rapper, a cobra, and so on) fadantchés strive for visibility: they want members of other fadas to notice them. It’s about inserting themselves in a famescape. The practice also provides a vehicle of self-realization, by putting the accent on young men’s accomplishments or future projects–chimeric as they may be. In this regard, the martial art hero and the black US rapper embody audacity and virility, signaling that fadas are microcosms of social aspirations. While they procure stability in the face of the volatility of everyday life, they also serve as experimental grounds where samari can test out a range of possibilities while nurturing aspirations of the good life. Let me stress that not all fadas are forward-looking projects. Some I’ve visited bear names like L’Internationale des Chômeurs, that put the accent on the marginalization of youth, but they are in the minority.

Rahul Advani: Anthropology has, until fairly recently, only occasionally examined men as men – that is, as engendered and engendering subjects. While your initial research intended to focus on women’s lives, upon visiting fadas, you “switched course and embarked fully on a study of the lifeworlds of young men on the streets of Dogondoutchi.” How did the fada as a fieldsite inform your method and approach, and how did your decision to focus on men and masculinities determine the kinds of research questions you asked?

Adeline Masquelier: When I started this project, I saw the fada as the mere setting for young men’s conversations around a pot of tea. Eventually, I realized that far from being a container of activities, the fada was at the very heart of young men’s preoccupations and projects. It was a world unto itself that needed to be problematized from a variety of angles. Given all that goes on at the fada, the fada turned out to be the right forum for exploring dimensions of urban life in Africa — in particular, ethical, aesthetic, and existential dimensions — that are frequently eclipsed by concerns with crisis. From the beginning, young men stressed the sense of homeliness the fada provided. I therefore tried to orient my questions towards the practices of solidarity and belonging young men fashioned. That meant focusing on the experience of teatime (which I had previously ignored as unimportant) and exploring the (spoken and unspoken) moral codes regulating fada life, something fadantchés were keen to impress upon me in the face of elders’ constant criticisms. In observing fadantchés’ diverse forms of engagements, I also came to rethink the experience of waiting. Now, questions about temporality are rarely straightforward. I turned my attention to the emergent and the unresolved, which meant considering less obvious “empirical” findings. There were lots of small but revealing moments. Often, it was the fadantchés themselves who oriented the conversation and shaped it with their concerns and questions. In the end, I did a lot of waiting and listening! In the process, I became interested in the intersecting and overlapping modalities of engagement that waiting entails, that ranged from longings for ever-receding horizons of possibilities to efforts to keep life projects alive to more ordinary struggles to navigate uncertainties, all the while stitching together discordant temporal regimes.