Members of the Sovereign Citizen conspiracy movement have been described as “paper terrorists” because of the way that they attempt to intimidate their enemies with mountains of nonsensical, legal-seeming paperwork. The documents they produce often feature bizarre elements such as atypical spelling and punctuation (names, for example, are often styled “FIRST-MIDDLE: LAST”) and mysterious arrays of postage stamps and thumbprints, with the latter sometimes made in the author’s own blood. For my PhD, I compared a corpus of documents filed by Sovereign Citizens in an American courthouse to a corpus of documents written and filed by actual attorneys. While I found thumbprints aplenty, page 99 has nothing to do with that; in many ways, in fact, its topic is just the opposite.
Page 99 contains two tables relating to the use of explicit negators (i.e. words like “not” and “no”) in the two corpora. I found that these words are used at statistically similar rates and in qualitatively similar manners in Sovereign Citizen texts and legitimate legal texts. While this may not be as attention-getting as the inclusion of actual human blood in some of the texts I examined, it is one of the more important findings of my thesis. Frequent negation is generally held to be one of the more distinctive features of legal English and Sovereign Citizens’ ability to accurately mimic this and related features in their own writings shows that they can’t simply be dismissed as being “bad” at writing legal texts. Instead, those who study the Sovereign Citizen movement should understand that they’re doing something purposefully distinct.
Whether consciously considered by the Sovereign Citizens or not, the animating principle behind their documents seems to be that there is power in the language used by lawyers, and that Sovereign Citizens can not only claim but enhance that power by taking the linguistic features of legitimate legal filings and making them, essentially, stranger. It is my hope that approaching Sovereign Citizens and members of other related conspiracy groups from this perspective will lead to more effective strategies for dealing with the harmful effects of contemporary conspiracy movements. Page 99 might not be the splashiest page in my thesis, but at least in this way, it gets to the heart of the matter (and for the thumbprints and postage stamps, see pages 200 to 211 instead).
Shinjung Nam: Your representation of everyday life in Tirana Modern felt surprisingly close to my current home, here in Seoul. Though vehemently “anti-Communist” rather than “pro,” South Korea’s military dictatorships (1950s–1980s) also built a country dependent on extractive urbanism, authoritarian hierarchy, corrupt nepotism, propaganda of all kinds, and ultimately, a normalization of capitalist desires. Continuing these traditions, South Korea’s electoral democracy has proven no better, especially for those without social, cultural, and educational capital.
Considering these similarities, your interlocutors’ outlook and way of life made me think back to my own interlocutors in Seoul. At the same time, I also thought about some of the differences characterizing their projects, especially their orientation towards the idea of a utopian community. Perhaps because Ataol and Arlind had such visceral experiences with (and under) the violence of a state-led utopian project, they have been less concerned with the problem of how to make an alternative community through their publishing activities. In contrast, many of my (now older) interlocutors in Seoul had been concerned with creating a new communal life—always dreaming of a true democratic society to come.
This comparison developed only when I began to truly appreciate your interlocutors’ self-positioning as “readers.” During my first reading, my immediate impression was, “I want to know more about their readers. Who are the readers that came to visit the bookstore and frequented it? Why did they come?” While I’m still curious to learn more about other readers, I now realize that I had lost track of your interlocutors’ identification as readers themselves. I had been identifying them by the place they occupied within the physical space of the bookstore, the way I had focused on the different positions making up the pedagogic relationship between the teacher-readers and the student-readers I worked with in Seoul. The lack of utopian trajectories in Ataol and Arlind’s reading and publishing only made sense to me when I began to focus on their love of reading and literature (as well as their clear understanding of its contradictory powers, including the ill it can serve), and not just the post-socialist conditions of Albania.
Perhaps this is all the more why I keep wondering about their imagination of “the social.” While categories of the social such as “the nation” and “the people” enter your interlocutors’ conversations on literature and writers, there is no conversation recorded in your ethnography on their explicit critique of these categories themselves. This leads me to ask how they view Albanian society in terms of the social, that is, of collective(s), how this shapes their understanding of “Albanian literature,” and how their reading practice in turn shapes their view of “Albanian society”? I note, for instance, that some of your interlocutors refer to the dialectical movement (or the tension) between “the universal” and “the particular,” with Elvis stating, “We have writers but not literature” (p. 67). Since according to the ethnography their imagination of the world and its map that both shapes and is shaped by their reading seems to be very much concerned with Europe, as well as the non-European frontiers (such as the Ottoman past), can you say more about how your interlocutors imagine “the public” and “Albanian readers”?
Matt Rosen: I’m happy to hear how reading Tirana Modern prompted you to reflect on your ethnographic experiences in Seoul. I also like to read ethnography that way. Not just to learn about social life in a specific time and place but to help me, as you said, think through matters that are closer to home. I only wish the common thread could be something other than corruption and violence!
On the differences in outlook you noted, it’s true that Arlind and Ataol rarely expressed much hope for the future. From what I could gather, they had no illusions about the structural problems in their social world. I think a lot of this goes to the critical stance they’ve developed through their reading and discussion practices. But it also seems to me a kind of defense mechanism. They might see it differently, but I think their way of always tempering expectations about their work was a way to protect themselves. By the time I met them, when they were in their early thirties, I think the harsh realities of living in Tirana had taken a toll on whatever youthful optimism first pushed them toward literature and philosophy as a way of life. Still, they saw that reading and social change could go together, and I think their work in publishing was a way to keep that vision alive.
I also appreciate how you came to see Arlind and Ataol not just as publishers but as readers. When I started the project, I felt something similar to what you described in reading the account. But when I expressed this, for example, by asking questions about how their readers responded to a particular book, they would either say, “You’d have to ask them yourself,” or they’d remind me that speaking of “our readers” was a very broad generalization and not something they were comfortable doing. I did of course ask other readers I met in Tirana for direct input, but more importantly, I took Arlind and Ataol’s refusal to generalize seriously. So although I managed to pick up some good anecdotes from many different readers, I chose to focus the ethnography on Arlind and Ataol because they were the ones I got to know best. And even though I did get to know them well, and we talked a lot of social theory, precisely because their views were so nuanced and carefully considered, I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting into my own words how they see categories of the social such as the nation, the people, or the public. Let me just say that though they were very aware of the hazards of generalization, they had clear ideas about these concepts. After all, as publishers working in a very small literary field, these were not just academic concerns. For them, talking about the future of the Albanian reading public was something they worried about in very practical terms.
Shinjung Nam: The meaning of the word “imagination,” as in “technologies of imagination,” gains new traction when considered in light of Arlind and Ataol’s narratives on the present and their avoidance of any explicit collectivist utopian prescriptions for the future. The work of imagination they seem to be dedicated to and wish for other readers to engage in is less about producing “images” (new images of the social in any specific, as in species-wise, terms) but more about opening. Some books or texts are considered “foundational” (p.71) to this opening/opening up (of oneself). Why is this so? What would the anatomy of a reader (or his/her/their soul) be like according to Arlind and Ataol’s reading of (a) certain texts and their intertextuality, and (b) the practice of reading?
Matt Rosen: I’m glad you brought this up. I also see the work of imagination here as being about opening up new spaces of possibility. In the introduction (p. 11), I related this idea to the work of cultivating “good readers” in the Borgesian sense. By this I meant that the books in Pika pa sipërfaqe’s catalogue were places where Albanian readers could now go to encounter new ideas, which in turn could be the starting point of further translations and even new social arrangements. Considering your question now, having recently reread The Aesthetic Dimension (1977), I think something very close to my understanding of Arlind and Ataol’s view of what they were doing in publishing comes through in Marcuse’s notion of the permanence of art as measured by its nearness to the simple but elusive criteria of showing the reader a truer truth or a realer real than what we tend to get caught up in due to the stresses and demands of everyday life. Calling a book “foundational” in this context is both a shorthand and a result of multiple translations. I chose the word foundational for the English rather than other potential fits, including “fundamental,” “essential,” or “most important.” But thinking about it now, I might just as well have said “good books” or “must reads” as these were also words Arlind and Ataol used when I tried to press them on the question of why they chose to translate and publish this or that title.
Shinjung Nam: Tell us about what it was like to create an ethnography that is in a way a product of collective reading and reading nearby (you mention how your interlocutors have had a chance to read your drafts and respond to them, to the point where some of the details were omitted, making a reader like me thirsty for them precisely).
Matt Rosen: It was in many ways a very enjoyable way to spend time. I really like talking with Arlind and Ataol and listening to what they say about the books they’re reading and working on. I think most of my best reading experiences since 2015 have come out of—and returned to—conversations with Arlind and Ataol “in the field.” Being conscious of my desire to represent the richness of these conversations in writing did cause me some internal tension though. I would sometimes jot or scrawl a few words in a notebook while we were together, but for the most part, I tried to be present and attentive and relied on writing fieldnotes at the earliest opportunity, often in the company of my partner (Smoki) or daughter (Simone) in the Mulliri vjetër coffeeshop near Arlind and Ataol’s office. On the practice of dialogic editing you mentioned, I can’t stress how grateful I am that Arlind and Ataol read drafts of the work in progress and helped me improve the account. With reference to the spicy details I decided to omit from the eviction narrative in chapter 5, I have to say, this was really on me. It wasn’t because they asked me to remove any specific material or because I wanted to make things mysterious. It was more to do with my own anxieties about fixing those details in print.
Shinjung Nam: One of the reasons I loved reading your ethnography is that it rekindled in me the sense of reading ethnographies as an anthropology major back in college who was less concerned with the reproduction and promotion of anthropological theory and more engrossed in the stories of the people I have yet to encounter and their making/unmaking of realities. Theoretical concepts enter your ethnography as frames and lenses. And then your ethnographic narratives on your interlocutors’ work and life—and their words—re-turn your reader (me, in this case) back to these concepts so as to re-read them in yet another fashion (my second question is proof of that). Tell us (your readers) about your choices in foregrounding ethnographic narratives (over theoretical advances) in your text.
Matt Rosen: Thank you, it’s very nice to hear this! I think I just follow the writerly advice of trying to make the kind of work I would want to read. Some of this also has to do with what feels comfortable for me. Let me put it this way. Though I can appreciate a snappy dresser when I see one, I’m not the kind of person who can “pull off” a very fashionable look. Similarly, while I like to read and absorb challenging theory and philosophy, I don’t think of myself as the one who should write it.
Shinjung Nam: Your biblio-ethnography walks and makes a renewed path in today’s literary and media anthropology. It also re-appreciates classic texts in the field that may be considered by many as outdated, creating an intertextuality unforeseen in contemporary anthropology. Having said this, can you walk your reader (back) through the current “trends” in literary and media anthropology, if any, and elaborate on some of the challenges and promises that such trends might be bringing to the proliferation of more works in line with your imagination of biblio-ethnography?
Matt Rosen: Yes, though it’s difficult to put the answer in brief. In the process of researching and writing Tirana Modern, I tried to stay as close as I could to studying “what people actually do” with books, and what books in turn do with people. At bottom, the idea I developed of biblio-ethnography is grounded in my reading of practice theory as packaged for anthropology by people like Pierre Bourdieu and Sherry Ortner. In that regard the 2010 collection Theorising Media and Practice edited by Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill was a touchstone for me. And though this is not necessarily one of the usual references for literary and media ethnography, I found Bruno Latour’s brand of actor-network theory to be an extremely helpful and readily applicable way to get at what he called “the event of the social” in relation to the event of reading and the medium of text. Although there is not room here to go into more detail, I tried to be as clear as I could about the theories and methods I brought together in the account, and I sincerely hope other readers will pick up and give their own twist to this thing I call “writing the relationship between books and people.”
Hyemin Lee: Readers might be curious about your intellectual trajectory as well as the motivation behind the years-long research and writing this book. What were the starting points that led you to explore this issue? How are your previous books and research in dialogue with Scripting Death?
Mara Buchbinder: I came to my research on assisted death via a study that I did in 2012 investigating how abortion providers in North Carolina were adapting to a new restrictive abortion law that introduced a 24-hour waiting period and counseling with state-mandated content. That study made me curious about other sites in which law and medicine collide. The end of life piqued my interest because it is one of the areas of medicine that is most heavily regulated by law. A palliative care physician suggested that assisted dying would be ripe for the sort of inquiry that I was interested in. When I learned that Vermont was the U.S. state that had most recently legalized medical aid in dying, I was hooked—I had spent a lot of time in Vermont and knew I could successfully carry out a long-term project there, despite the distance. Studying the implementation of assisted dying in Vermont, similar to studying the implementation of a new abortion law, also picked up a thread from my previous work on newborn screening, through which I became interested in how new health policies are implemented, navigated, and contested by patients, families, and clinicians. Each of these projects are also animated by concerns about sociality and care in matters of health and illness.
The concept of scripting came into play relatively late in my work on the project. After completing my fieldwork, I became fascinated with the ways in which the concept of scripting could serve as a useful frame for thinking about human agency over death. My use of scripting built on my previous work on abortion counseling scripts (Buchbinder 2016), in which I considered the multiple meanings of scripts and scripting. My use of “scripting” in Scripting Death highlights the theatrical dimensions of planning for and controlling one’s death, yet it offers the added value of several additional analytic dimensions, including the bureaucratic and regulatory aspects of the process, and the provision of a prescription (i.e., a “script” for death-hastening medication). Because it invites consideration of the performative dimensions of clinical speech, scripting is also a useful analytic for bridging medical and linguistic anthropology, which is a cross-cutting theme in my work. In sum, Scripting Death brought together several different strands of my previous projects in a way that I found intellectually exciting.
Hyemin Lee: One of the central arguments of this book is how the legalization of aid in dying represents the cultural imaginaries surrounding “aspirational death,” where the expectations for “choice” and “control” impact how people imagine the experience of dying. Could you tell us more about how the cases of aid in dying described in the book offer broader and more instructive pictures of assisted death in America more generally?
Mara Buchbinder: Doing this research in Vermont was an amazing opportunity to return to a state that I loved, where I had spent large chunks of my childhood. But it was also challenging because it’s so small. The absolute numbers of medical aid in dying utilization in Vermont, while reflecting national rates, are rather small—just 52 patients filed paperwork to use it in the first four years after the law passed. So, while it is a fascinating case study, I understand why it may be tempting to ask why this case matters on a bigger scale. However, the themes that I elucidated regarding agency and choice at the end of life are relevant beyond the context of assisted death. In the Conclusion, I discuss how we are seeing these desires reflected in a variety of other end-of-life practices in the US, though typically they focus on burial and funerary practices. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s excellent book American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2021) shows similarly. Medical aid in dying makes it possible to realize a particular aspect of aspirational death—namely, control over the time of death. This enables one to eliminate certain types of suffering that often accompany dying from a prolonged terminal illness. But even if controlling the time of death is not possible, there are other ways in which middle-class people strive for aspirational deaths, within and outside the US. This is also demonstrated beautifully in Anne Allison’s recent book, Lonely Death (Duke University Press, 2023).
Hyemin Lee: Upon seeing the title of the book, Scripting Death, and reading your beautifully written Chapter 6, Choreographing Death, readers might be interested in the concepts of “script” and “choreography.” Both refer to certain modes of action but also entail significant social phenomenology of aid-in-dying deaths. How did you come up with posing these as key concepts for understanding human control over death and, ultimately, for portraying a bigger picture of aid in dying in the American cultural context?
Mara Buchbinder: The concept of scripting speaks to broader concerns about managing, ordering, and controlling death, as well as theoretical questions about human agency over death. Choreographing serves a similar function in Chapter 6, yet I see its analytic scope as more narrowly focused on the scene of death, as opposed to scripting, which encompasses all aspects of the process, including following the bureaucratical protocol to ensure compliance with the legal requirements, obtaining a lethal prescription, and regulating clinical communication. These were not emic terms; they emerged in my interpretive analysis. As I mentioned above, I came to scripting because I had previously engaged this concept in my work on abortion counseling. I was struck by its relevance to the case of assisted dying and I thought I could build on, and deepen, my earlier use of this terminology. The concept of choreography came to me, in part, because I noticed the ways that caregivers performed crucial social, emotional, and material labor to help their loved ones realize aspirational deaths. It occurred to me early on that they were essentially “stage-managing” these deaths, particularly because their loved ones eventually grew too sick and weak to carry out the necessary tasks on their own. The choreography I am concerned with in that chapter is very much a relational practice, which highlights the intersubjective nature of assisted death. It’s not a radically autonomous act, as people often presume.
Hyemin Lee: It is striking to find out the structural constraints that lead to critical access inequalities embedded in the legalization of aid in dying. Could you elaborate more on what your finding tells us about the larger patterns in US health care and the best path forward for improving the access issue?
Mara Buchbinder: It should not have surprised me to find that patients encountered significant barriers to accessing assisted death in legal jurisdictions. As you note, this pattern mirrors largescale, deeply entrenched access barriers that patients find across many sectors of US healthcare. On the other hand, these access barriers contradict the dominant messaging from advocacy groups promoting legalized assisted dying, which suggests that the primary barriers are legal ones. The access difficulties repeatedly surprised, troubled, and enraged patients and families in Vermont. This pattern is reflected in media reports supporting my findings from other permissive jurisdictions in the US. One of my major goals in writing Scripting Death was to expose the illusion of end-of-life choice. I wanted to highlight the gaps between advocacy narratives regarding patients’ rights to self-determination and autonomy at the end of life—which tend to make the option of assisted dying seem to be a simple matter of legalizing the practice—and the realities of access barriers, bureaucratic obstacles, and multiple forms of assistance from caregivers and clinicians that must be navigated to accomplish an assisted death.
My findings tell us, perhaps not surprisingly, that relatively affluent people who are better connected to physician networks will have more options at the end of life, including medical aid in dying. Constrained access to medical aid in dying presents a conundrum for both scholars and practitioners, however, because it is a medical service that is death-producing rather than health-producing. For many physicians, access to assisted dying should be hard; they see access hurdles as a safeguard against abuse or coercion. We don’t want to improve access to a swift death for people who cannot access good care. For this reason, I think that improving access to palliative care is much more of a priority than improving access to medical aid in dying, particularly for socioeconomically marginalized groups.
Hyemin Lee: As a concluding question, I would like to ask about your method–doing ethnographic research that documents, broadly, death. Could you speak more about your research design for ethnographically investigating death and dying? Did you encounter any challenges and questions when you first designed your research on this research? How did you manage your positioning as a researcher and a person with your own stance, values, and views?
Mara Buchbinder: One challenge I encountered was that it was very hard to identify patients to follow prospectively who were willing to speak with me about their desire to use medical aid in dying. I understood and deeply respected the fact that few people close to the end of life would be willing to share some of their limited time with a stranger. I decided to lean heavily on retrospective accounts from family members and friends when it proved difficult to recruit many terminally ill patients. An unexpected advantage of this approach was that I was able, in several cases, to interview multiple people about a specific individual’s death. This enabled me to triangulate accounts across multiple sources and identify areas of converging and diverging understandings, a strategy that proved analytically fruitful.
With regard to my own positioning, this really evolved over time. When I started, I told everyone I met that I was approaching this project from a position of neutrality. I found my views repeatedly challenged as I sympathized with perspectives that I had not anticipated sympathizing with—such as a pro-life advocate who explained to me that she was not afraid of death because she had been exposed to it from an early age. Over time, I began to reframe my “neutral” perspective through the lens of ambivalence. (I write about this in the Introduction.)
I am frequently asked how I experienced this fieldwork on a personal level, often by people who assume that it was difficult to hear stories about death and bear witness to survivors’ suffering. This research was certainly sad. For the most part, however, I did not find it personally challenging. My overwhelming feeling was one of gratitude for the connections I formed with my interlocutors and the stories they shared with me. I deeply appreciated the intimate encounters with research participants and all that they taught me about living well while dying. I felt like this project—more than any of my previous projects—had taught me something that would be valuable on a deeply personal level, rather than just an intellectual or scholarly one.
References
Buchbinder, Mara. 2016. Scripting Dissent: US Abortion Laws, State Power, and the Politics of Scripted Speech. American Anthropologist 118(4):772-783.
Eléonore Rimbault: Much of the energy of The Globally Familiar derives from your candid and involved focus on the young b-boys and rappers you worked with in Delhi. Their everyday experience is a point of departure that leads you and the reader to engage with many longstanding lines of anthropological research. It also informs the concept of the globally familiar that is the central analytic of this book. In a few words, could you explain why the globally familiar emerged as a central idea for this book, and how it reflects the practices and experiences of the youths and artists you spent time with?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Thank so much for engaging with the book and for your thoughtful questions! I first started to think about what familiarity and the familiar might mean for my project in early 2013, when I spent time with a couple of branding consultants who were hired by global multinationals interested in cultivating India’s enormous youth market segment. Drawing from 21st century marketing discourse that has increasingly moved away from marketing products towards inculcating lifestyles, these self-styled experts were charged with fostering the nascent and globally wired youth scenes in the country by curating a series of events in major cities across India (Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi) that featured local b-boys, skateboarders, BMXers, graff artists and so on. In our conversations, the consultants repeatedly used the term familiar to describe the desires and aspirations of young people across the world in relation to consumption, urban space, and practice, specifically youth cultural practices like b-boying or skateboarding.
For these branding consultants, producing the familiar through the events they curated and the digital traces of them that circulated in social media was a way to signal the kind of always already global connectedness between metropolitan centers across nation-state boundaries that has only intensified through digital connection. They did so by mobilizing youth cultural practices and amplifying their aesthetics in the events they curated as well as introducing new ones, hoping they would stick. Something clicked for me in these conversations. I realized the hip hop practitioners in Delhi I spent time with, albeit in a different register and towards different ends, were also producing the familiar through their online and offline practices in ways that put them, their city, and their neighborhoods on the map, so to speak, as global subjects.
Once I got hooked on the concept, I couldn’t stop thinking with it! It did, however, take me a while to write about it as I couldn’t wrap my head, at the time, around how the different spatial and temporal scales these young people traversed – the local, national, the transnational, the past, and the present – coincided and informed one another. I also felt uncomfortable, early on, with utilizing a synthetic term as an explanatory analytic when it wasn’t a term that my hip hop interlocutors were using or a concept within the broader global hip hop lexicon. I finally came to terms with theorizing the familiar, partially because I couldn’t unthink its explanatory power but also and importantly because I felt that it resonated with my experiences in Delhi in ways that were respectful of my youthful participants self-making projects.
Eléonore Rimbault: I was struck by the way your writing about hip hop in Delhi conjures up a portrait of the city that includes so many of the intimate, idiosyncratic, and perhaps, globally not-so-familiar features of this city. Whether it is the transformation and gentrification processes in the Khirki neighborhood, or the routine ways in which people of different class backgrounds have made Delhi’s malls or the metro their own, or the kin networks of hip hop artists and their anchoring in specific neighborhoods of the city, your work is an invitation to think about urban space through people’s engagement with the city. Do you think that the book’s attunement to Delhi can be explained by the street-focused character of hip-hop, or does it have more to do with your approach and your commitments as an anthropologist?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: I knew, early on, that I wasn’t interested in writing a book that focused on hip hop cultural production in Delhi in ways that, for instance, narrowly focused on one of its elements (b-boyin’ or MCing, or DJing) or that thought through the media histories between Indian popular cultural forms and the emergent practices of the young men I was getting to know. More to the point, I didn’t want to write a book that either obscured hip hop or over-invested in the micro-specificities of its practice in Delhi and India. I was more interested in how my participants’ mobilization of hip hop’s artistic practices and their media making endeavors for online circulation offered a lens to carefully think about their lives within the changing contours of the city.
Hip hop, of course, lends itself to an engagement with the urban. As a musical, poetic, visual, and kinesthetic genre and discourse of practice that was born in the tumult of structurally produced economic inequality that engulfed the South Bronx in the 1970s, it has been long engaged with the politics and poetics of street life with depictions—both realistic and fantastic—of classed, racialized, and spatialized struggle and projects of emancipation. My participants’ hip hop experimentations—as rappers, graf writers, and dancers—took me metaphorically and physically into Delhi’s intimate and idiosyncratic topographies. Our meanderings through the city offered me an opportunity to think about and, ultimately, write about their vision of and for the city that at once celebrated its particularities even as it strove to make these very same features familiar.
Eléonore Rimbault: The Globally Familiar pays great attention to the technological mediation that conditions the aesthetic of hip-hop in India. Your portrayal of groups of young people hanging out and gathered around their phone screen, for instance, is striking, but your attention to fieldwork-like interactions occurring through social media long after your fieldwork was over is another reminder of how the anthropological method is evolving. As you point out in the book, these moments and modes of sociality are familiar much beyond ethnographic work. Do you think some of your findings on the mediation of a hip-hop aesthetic in South Asia are applicable to other domains of our lives and to professional cultures, such as our own as anthropology professionals?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Absolutely, although application can be a tricky thing. I hope the familiar, as I have theorized it in the book, invites engagements within other social domains in ways that recognize and attempt to broadly and specifically think through the profound ways that communications technologies are shifting how we interact with each other and how we imagine the world. To specifically engage with processes of inventive mediation, however, requires a careful appraisal of the particular material, social and political stakes of online/offline participation within designated communities of practice.
For the working-class young men that I worked with in Delhi, producing the familiar was and continues to be a way to stake a claim to the city they grew up in and, crucially, a means to create local and transnational relationships through these claims. An integral part of the individual and collective claims they make through hip hop’s practices is that Delhi is part of a global network of capital that locates racialized, classed, and gendered bodies in ways that are at once recognizable, legible, or familiar, even as they are particular. This process of claiming through creative mediation is generative and, as I show in the book, creates economic, political, and social possibilities for these young men. It might be the case that the familiar, as I have developed the term, doesn’t quite offer the conceptual framing that is required in other worlds of practice and exchange. In that case, new conceptual language needs to be developed. Regardless of the conceptual language we use to theorize processes of digital mediation within specific communities, what I think is important is that we—as ethnographers—attend to the material, political, and social underpinnings and consequences of online communicative and creative practices.
Eléonore Rimbault: From a regionalist standpoint, your attention to the digital mediation of hip-hop sociality and your development of the idea of the globally familiar resonates with previous works conducted in India on mediation and on the global as a scale, including the works of some of the scholars that you cite, such as Arjun Appadurai, Arvind Rajagopal, William Mazzarella, and several others. It seems like the conceptual work on the global in India closely tracks the transformation of the media through which ideas, politics, and aesthetics are produced and reproduced. How do you position your book in relation to these other ways of articulating the immanence of a global scale, and do you think there is something about Indian cities as locales that prompts this form of theorization?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: I would caution against approaching a particular socio-historic context, in this case India, as more conducive to theorizations of global mediation than other places in the world. This sort of approach reminds me of a bit of apocrypha that I first encountered in graduate school many years ago and again, in the British social anthropology worlds I traversed when I was based in London. In this 20th century anthropological formulation young, enthusiastic anthropologists from across Europe and North America were encouraged to study certain themes or topics in certain parts of the world – hierarchy in South Asia, exchange and gift economies in the Pacific, political systems in Africa, and so on. One’s theoretical interests, in short, determined where one went to do fieldwork.
Perhaps another way of framing this discussion – rather than thinking about how particular places are more amenable to certain theoretical potentials— is to think carefully about the relationship between fieldwork and citation. Undoubtedly, before and during fieldwork I was influenced by reading all the tremendous thinkers you named who, together, have developed a rich media anthropology of global India. In addition, there were many other media/visual anthropologists working in India that also shaped (and continue to influence) my thinking. For instance, Chris Pinney’s work on visual cultures in India, Frank Cody and Sahana Udupa’s work on the news, AmandaWeidman’s work on practices of distinction amongst Carnatic musicians, and Teja Ganti’s careful and sustained work on Hindi cinema worlds have all pushed me to broaden and specify my thinking around my encounters in Delhi. However, I couldn’t solely engage and carefully think with these scholars who have worked in India or the region around questions of mediation and cultural production.
My unique challenge and responsibility, given that I was trying to understand why young racialized men in Delhi were somewhat suddenly picking up digital hip hop to create new self-descriptions, social worlds, and economic opportunities, was to carefully engage with hip hop scholarship, specifically, and Black Atlantic scholarship more broadly, particularly the work that has focused on the African diasporic arts and its spread across the globe. For me what was at stake in my book project centered on bringing these distinct bodies of scholarship into conversation in a carefully calibrated relationship to what I was witnessing and participating in on the ground in ways that animated the otherwise obscured colonial underpinnings of the global in India. So, while all of the scholars you mentioned were incredibly important, particularly in the years before fieldwork where I was voraciously reading everything I could to prepare myself, my fieldwork demanded a different engagement with immanence that put race, gender, and place across colonial geographies at the forefront of my thinking.
Eléonore Rimbault: Finally, I am wondering if you had some thoughts you’d like to share on the way hip hop has developed more recently in Delhi and/or India. Do you see the affirmation of caste, class and ethnic identities in South Indian hip hop (for instance) as re-articulation of the Hip-Hop ideologies you identified circa 2012? More broadly, what are your thoughts on the current circulation of desi hip hop outside of Delhi, for instance, in South India, or on Punjabi hip-hop produced in Canada?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Thanks for this question. There is a lot to say on this but try I’ll keep my response concise. There have been enormous shifts and changes in what can now be described as an Indian hip hop scene since I finished fieldwork in 2014. First and foremost, mainstream hip hop music production has exploded in the last several years as Indian diasporic entrepreneurs, transnational media conglomerates, and more recently, big players in Indian popular cultural worlds, have invested in its potential. As a result, several of the MCs I met in Delhi who were just getting started when I met them and whom I helped produce their first YouTube videos have been catapulted to fame. Their rise to stardom, of course, has had a direct impact on their younger peers who see and want to emulate their success.
With the release of Gully Boy in 2019, a blockbuster production from Zoya Akhtar, the aspiration for hip hop fame across the country has increased ten-fold. Set in Dharavi, Mumbai, commonly referred to as the largest slum in Asia, Gully Boy narrates the coming-of-age story of Murad, a young Muslim man who rapidly transforms from hip hop enthusiast to local hip hop sensation. Gully Boy, with its constant referencing and aestheticization of music and video production for social-media circulation as key aspects of hip-hop potentiality in the contemporary moment, captures, albeit in clichéd ways, some of the affective sensibility of the globally familiar. The film’s success in India and globally also offers an example of the ways in which marginalized masculinities and the spatialities they index in India are currently being imagined and mobilized by mainstream media interests to produce capital and cultivate desire.
With the commercial success and increasing visibility of Indian rap, there has been an explosion of MCs across the country who hone and practice their skills in local ciphas while producing content for social media circulation. What I have been most excited about is how these emergent rappers have embraced the poetics of hip hop as a modality to be explored in their local languages. When I first arrived to Delhi in 2011 to check out the scene, the rappers I met were trying to rap in English and, at best, were switching between Hindi and English in their raps. Since 2013 there has been a decided move towards rappin’ exclusively in Hindi, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu and so on. The move towards rappin’ in regional languages has opened up new and exciting opportunities to bring together localized musical and poetic traditions with hip hop which, of course, opens up new intellectual and ethnographic projects. I’m really excited for the work of Pranathi Diwakar, for instance, who has explored how young people have combined Gaana musical traditions preserved by Dalit communities in Tamil Nadu with hip hop to produce a new sound that elucidates the politics of caste in a contemporary frame. For Dr. Diwakar, that has offered opportunities to theorize caste, race, and the politics of space in Chennai in ways that are productive and grounded. It’s worth mentioning there was a precedent for hip hop’s linguistic localization in the Punjabi hip hop/bhangra scene, which has a longer relationship – through its diaspora – with Atlantic world cultural formations. But that story, like the work by Dr. Diwakar, is for another time and for another scholar!
The point that I suppose I’m trying to make is that even as hip hop has become a commodity form in the subcontinent, it has also continued to be a viable vehicle for political and social expression that is cognizant of and takes up older cultural forms. As such, hip hop continues its fifty plus year career of unashamedly taking up a capitalist hustle while offering opportunities for its practitioners to explore and critique the normative order while voraciously reanimating and remixing locally available sounds and images. Of course, political expression, critiques of power, and inventive cultural bricolage are not always something to be celebrated. Over the last several years I’ve been tracking the shift in tenor and tone of several of my participants, who have turned towards the so-called decolonial promise of Hindutva. I’m currently writing a piece with my long-term collaborator and friend, Jaspal Naveel Singh, about how the elections in 2014 that brought the BJP into power at the national level have impacted in the nascent Indian hip hop scene. Over the years, some of the key figures in the scene have begun to celebrate a Hindu centric right-wing aesthetic and political sensibility in their creative endeavors and public engagements. This has, unsurprisingly, created rifts amongst practitioners. We are grappling with how to tell this story in a way that elucidates something about how ideology inculcates itself in peoples’ world views in real time and the multiple effects of these shifts in perspective and stance. All this to say, what I gestured to in the book as hip hop ideologies – specifically focusing on the ways external and often diasporic actors shaped, in the early days of the scene, the ways in which social difference should be approached and represented through hip hop – has become multiple and localized in ways that are complex and require further attention and study.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Could you tell how was your first approach to the Eskaya language, and how did Eskayan villages in Bohol become a field site for you?
Piers Kelly: Way back in January of 1980, the Eskaya people were ‘discovered’ by agricultural advisers in the highlands of Bohol in the southern Philippines. These isolated people were wearing clothes made of plant fiber, speaking in an unknown language and writing in a strange script. The story of this encounter spread quickly, prompting a series of informal visits from tourists, adventurers and tabloid journalists. Some of the subsequent reports they made about the putatively lost tribe became infused with local folklore traditions of lost worlds and lost treasures. Eventually a hard-nosed journalist from Manila came and wrote an exposé in which she argued that the Eskaya were in fact a rural cult speaking an invented language. In the years that followed Eskaya people started to defend their interests in terms of access to land and resources. They would eventually make use of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act to do this and from the 1990s onwards they began identifying themselves as Indigenous people. It was through this process that I first came into contact with the community.
In 2005 I had been working for the travel publisher Lonely Planet in Melbourne when a job opportunity came up in an Australian government aid program to document an undescribed language of the Philippines. I reached the Philippines at the end of that year and worked out of the service center of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples in Tagbilaran, the main township of the island province of Bohol. My role was to produce linguistic reports to help evaluate an Eskaya claim for legal recognition.
When I got to the Eskaya villages I began working very intensely, making recordings, photographing traditional Eskaya manuscripts and trying to learn the language. I was already aware that the status of the Eskayan language was controversial. Some were saying that it had been fabricated to attract government funding to an underdeveloped corner of the highlands. Others were making even stranger claims, for example, that the Eskayan language was really Hebrew or Etruscan.
At the end of ten months I wrote up a report in which I concluded that Eskayan was likely to have been created within a single generation, and that this theory was consistent with the speakers’ own origin stories that attributed the creation to a heroic ancestor. I also suggested that this creative event likely occurred some time after Spanish colonization in the 16th century. This was on the basis of the fact the Eskayan appeared to share the same morphosyntax as Visayan (the dominant language of Bohol), but with a radically different lexicon, and that this lexicon exhibited a strong influence from Spanish even in core vocabulary. In other words, there were Spanish loanwords turning up in parts of the lexicon that don’t usually attract loans, for example, in body part terms. It looked very much like the creative ancestor had taken Visayan morphosyntax as a basis but systematically replaced all the lexemes with newly devised terms. In doing so, the ancestor was influenced by Spanish as a model of linguistic foreignness.
I was worried that these findings would reinforce a narrative that the Eskaya people were inauthentic since their language was recent. But in fact the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act is less about establishing indigeneity and more about finding evidence for ongoing occupation and cultural continuity.
I was still very interested in this topic but my lack of qualifications ended up weighing on me and when I returned to Australia I started studying linguistics for the first time. I eventually enrolled in a PhD so that I would have the opportunity to go back to Bohol and keep researching.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: The book starts with a question you heard repeatedly from local people: “Is Eskayan real?” How did this question motivate your research on the Eskaya language and how has your work challenged previous approaches to study this language?
Piers Kelly: In some ways this question is the crux of the entire book. From the 1990s onwards Eskaya people began identifying themselves as Indigenous. This was not a category that they had used before so it involved a certain amount of adaptation to meet the administrative requirements of government. For example, each village had to appoint a chieftain and make official lists of tribal customs and laws. At the same time, Eskaya people have always maintained that their special language and script were both invented by the ancestor Pinay, whom they recognize as the first pope in the Philippines. In effect, Eskaya people had a traditional set of beliefs about themselves and their language that didn’t neatly match up with the lowlander image of an exotic lost tribe, nor with the tick-the-box requirements of a government department. All of this is to say that the answer to the question “Is Eskayan real?” depends on what you take linguistic authenticity to be.
Adding further complexity, Eskayan has never been used as a language of everyday communication but is used only in the context of schooling, speechmaking, prayer, song, and the written is used in the reproduction of traditional stories. What I wanted to do was ask the Eskaya people themselves what they thought about their language, where it came from and what their own criteria were for defining a language. Equally, I wanted to do a better job at analyzing the language itself since I was confident that its grammar, lexicon and writing system would reveal something important about the context of creation, mythic or otherwise. This was a departure from previous media commentaries that neither examined the language, nor paid any serious attention to Eskaya perspectives.
Eskaya people narrate that their created language was suppressed under early Spanish rule, but that records of it were discovered carved on tablets by their leader Mariano Datahan (ca. 1875–1949). In the wake of the devastating Philippine–American War (1899-1902), Datahan spearheaded a radical sect within the Philippine Independent Church and gained many followers in the mountains. Today such a movement would indeed be characterized as a cult but in the early 20th century, such movements were commonplace throughout the Philippines and they were highly political organizations. They asserted a desire for independence from US rule and expressed a great deal of cultural self-confidence and patriotism. My analysis—based on linguistic, archival, oral historical and genealogical evidence—places the creation of the language (or its ‘revelation’) in the 1920s and 1930s during a period of relative peace and optimism. In other words, it happened at a time when Filipinos living in remote or isolated areas were invited into the national conversation. It was also a time when both elites and non-elites were imaginatively reaching back to a time before colonization and trying to restore a more authentic and uncorrupted Filipino culture to embody aspirations for independence. Throughout traditional Eskaya literature, written in both Eskayan and Visayan, there is a real struggle to articulate a language ideology that reconciles the supposedly natural and the artificial. The Eskayan language, after all, is understood to have been intentionally created and then recuperated, but the act of creation is regarded as organic. It comes directly from the human body and it can’t be falsified or misrecognized. In this way, the language itself is a political statement that embodies a claim to cultural sovereignty.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Your book offers a brief history of language ecology in Bohol. How is language diversity and linguistic contact traceable in Eskaya manuscripts? What do you mean with “sources of inspiration”?
Piers Kelly: The language of Bohol is called Boholano-Visayan and it’s one of several varieties that make up the Visayan language. The Eskayan language has the same morphosyntax as Visayan but a radically different lexicon. I was interested in taking the traditional account of a creative ancestor seriously and then asking, how did he go about making this language? What was his theory of language? What resources did he draw on? It’s clear that he drew on Visayan primarily including regional varieties like Hiligaynon, but when it came to innovating a lexicon he took inspiration from Spanish, especially in the syllable structure. There is also an influence from English. What’s fascinating is that the influence from outside languages doesn’t conform to typical patterns of borrowing. Filipino languages certainly draw on Spanish or English models when it comes to lexifying products, species or technologies introduced during the colonial encounter. But languages in the Philippines and elsewhere do not generally borrow terms for really basic concepts, like ‘air’, ‘water’, ‘head’ or ‘hand’. Eskayan bucks the trend. It relies on Spanish and English words for core vocabulary like body parts (the Eskayan word for skin is piyil from Spanish piel), while creating native terms for new technologies like ‘airplane’ (the Eskayan word is kanis) or introduced animals like ‘horse’ (the Eskayan word is bril). So innovation goes right through the language. The creative ancestor, and his prophet Mariano Datahan, were not concerned with replicating naturalistic patterns of borrowing but rebuilding the lexicon from the ground up.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Could you explain more how the Eskaya writing system is unique among world’s scripts and how it has enabled the Eskaya people and their knowledge to be protected in the Philippines?
Piers Kelly: Unlike languages, all writing systems of the world are artificial. At the same time there are only a limited number of ways that a writing system can encode language, so the typology of writing systems is relatively narrow. What’s interesting about the Eskaya writing system is that it combines so many different typologically distinct methods of representing language. It has alphabetic, alphasyllabic, syllabic and even morphographic characteristics, and there are more than one thousand individual signs. The outward form of the script is said to be inspired by human body parts and in some cases you can recognize this iconicity. There is a symbol that represents an ear, and another that represents a brain and another that represents an esophagus. Interestingly too, the script is visually complex to an almost excessive degree and there’s no evidence that it has been simplifying as other scripts tend to do over time. What I argue is that this complexity if a feature not a bug. It is designed to be cryptic and hard to learn. It acts as a natural barrier to acquisition, so if you learn to read and write in Eskayan it proves that you have passed through a challenging intellectual process. At the same time, the complexity of the script is presented as tangible evidence of cultural sophistication. I see this dynamic at work throughout the Eskayan language and literature, and I use the term ‘mimicry and rejection’ to describe it. It’s all about replicating a colonial model but then ratcheting it up to a more complex formation to then stand in opposition to the original model.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: How does the Eskaya language encourage us to rethink “what is a language”?
Piers Kelly: The creation of Eskayan might represent an extreme situation but it’s one that I think brings the politics and aesthetics of language into sharp relief. Learned from infancy, language is understood a natural and even instinctual aspect of human development. At the same time we’re always forming analogies between linguistic phenomena and social phenomena, and we love manipulating language to do things other than straightforward communication. In a very stark way, the Eskayan lays bare the kinds of language ideologies that underpin language use around the world.
CaMP Anthropology 