nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496235466/

Interview by Steven Feld

Steven Feld: Congratulations on Sensing Others, which I found a thoroughly rich inquiry into how Batek “voice their own experience of difference.” Can you introduce us to the key themes of this intellectual project that always places “otherness” in question, under negotiation? And can you tell us about the general shape of your book and how it takes up the challenge to sensuously and ethically engage indigenous rainforest lives confronted by myriad social, historical, and ecological change?

Alice Rudge: Thank you so much for this generous prompt to expand on the key themes of the book. My reason for making negotiations of “Otherness” or “difference” the focus of the text is that for me it is both an intellectual concern, and an ethical imperative. And thinking about Otherness as both an ethical and intellectual project in an anthropological sense is directly derived from how Batek people theorise it intellectually, ethically, sensorially and politically in their own lives. Over the course of my fieldwork, it became apparent that the ways that Batek voice their experiences of and encounters with difference is highly subtle, sensitive, and always shifting. To them as much as me, Otheness was an intellectual project – something to be held to the light and examined at every available opportunity. This examination often took place through vocal utterances, which Batek use to negotiate degrees of difference with a constant attunement to the effects that articulations of difference can have in the world.

At the same time, I became acutely aware how in academic and public spheres in both the UK and Malaysia, whether indirectly (through media or commonly circulating perceptions), or directly (in tourism, policy, and conservation), Batek are rarely granted this subtle attunement in return. Whether it was through the idea that a presentation of radical differenceis necessary for theoretical anthropological innovation, or through crude stereotypes and their harmful on-the-ground effects, attention to the particularities of what difference is, how it comes to be known, and its effects in the world, are often missing. Without attention to these questions, there is a risk that notions of difference in anthropology can become reified, missing the real-life contingencies that bring it into being in unique circumstances. When we’re talking about a context of profound and rapid change such as Batek’s, this becomes especially problematic.

The book traces some of these contingencies across various domains of everyday life. In each chapter, I take a particular tension of everyday life in which conceptions of ‘difference’ are articulated. I first explore haʔip ‘longing, yearning, nostalgia’ and explore how the dynamics of closeness and loss that are evoked through this sentiment shape notions of interpersonal relations that are suffused with this bittersweet knowledge that what you hold close will always be eventually lost. In turn, this prompts a retheorisation of temporality, as through haʔip both past and future are felt as coexisting bodily in the present. This is a challenge to classic colonial and some contemporary accounts of “hunter-gatherers” which often portray them as modernity’s ultimate Others, existing in a pristine past. Yet Batek theorise themselves and gɔp (‘outsiders’)as always having coexisted in the complex messiness of the present – a present which is always situated in relation to the past and to the future. I then explore the tension between aloneness and togetherness through Batek ethical visions of being blaʔ (‘alone’) as the basic order of existence, an idea which coexists with the fact of the intimate togetherness and mutuality of everyday life. Moments when people react to perceived wrongdoing are when this tension – and the orders of difference that it makes clear – come to the fore. In the third chapter, I explore how people attune to the effects of difference through their uses of voice, expanding on the idea of ethical ‘aloneness’ through attention to Batek aesthetic theories of the danger of likenesses – a potential impingement on the bodily autonomy (or aloneness) of the person. With this autonomy in mind, I then inquire into Batek sensory experiences of the non-human persons of their forest, proposing that an appreciation for the unknown, and unknowable, aspects of non-human life are essential for ensuring that those different persons are permitted an autonomous existence. Finally, I explore sharing as a material means of creating both mutality and detachment through the creation of alignments and distinctions. Reconceiving difference as a negotiation that is always in flux, it becomes possible to understand how living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating Otherness’s ambivalences, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. When looking from the boundary, what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down.

Steven Feld: In your introduction you say that the book is not an attempt to “give voice” but rather an exploration of what voice is and what voice does. Some readers might gloss this to mean that you are more interested in ontology and metapragmatics than you are in politics and ethics. But in fact you go on, deeply in chapter 3, to complicate and overtake any such simple reduction in your ways of presenting and unraveling Batek narratives. These are very rich themes for the anthropology of language; can you speak to how your theoretical interests emerge with your many revelations about Batek metalinguistics and conceptions of language, speech, and narration?  

Alice Rudge: Thank you so much for asking this! It was writing Chapter 3 (which appears in a prior form in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology), that prompted the broader theoretical framing of the book in terms of developing an exploration of what voice is and what it does (as you point out a question of ontology and metapragmatics), and yet it was the same chapter that initially prompted my desire to formulate an ethical, political challenge to standard conceptions of ontology. Which is suffice to say that I see these two aspects of the work as deeply entangled! And this very much goes to the heart of Batek theories about voice. Thinking about the metapragmatics of voice in detail – beyond description (as you do so beautifully and influentially in Sound and Sentiment) – is a unique way in to understanding how people theorise their relationships with the həp (‘forest’ – which I use here as a proxy to actually mean the hugely diverse human, animal, plant, and ghostly other-than-human presences contained within this term). We come to see names as part of human and animal bodies, for example, and their utterance as a powerful way to impinge on or inhabit the being of another in ways that can be experienced as a form of violence. We may see songs as part of the bodies of fruits, and bird sounds as inextricable from the being that utters them. There is danger in vocalising too great a likeness between one thing or person and another. And yet we see beauty and strategies for living well found in toying with this danger, evoking just enough likeness to hint at connection, while encoding the ethical and aesthetic importance of just enough difference. And so when we follow Batek metapragmatic theories (or language ontologies), it becomes clear how metpragmatic concernns are political and ethical concerns because they dictate the terms and outcomes of your engagements with Others (Batek or not, human or not). And in particular, they lead me to challenge the reliance of common conceptions of ‘ontology’ in anthropology on ideas of radical difference – because as Batek ethical and aesthetic strategies show, difference is not something that exists on its own, it is something that is created, negotiated, played with, and held in focus as an everyday of enquiry – both in terms of the metapragmatics of voice and in other domains of people’s lives.

Steven Feld: As a narrative and intervocal and intermedial (with photographs) device, your book’s five “chapters” are interwoven with five “interludes.” Unpack for us a little the textual poetics and politics of these interludes and the meta-narrative and meta-theoretical spaces that they open. How do they play into your larger intellectual aims with engaging vocal, sensory, narrative, and interspecies authority? Did you also imagine the interludes to connect to audio streams, so that these narratives and their ambient surrounds could be acoustically sensed and audibly entangled by your readers? 

Alice Rudge: This question makes me wish I had included audio streams as part of the book! But to begin with the first part of your question, my reason for including the interludes as they are – separated out from the rest of the text (though with a little contextualisation preceding each) – was that I wanted the presentation of the stories in the book to reflect a little the feeling of how they emerge in Batek everyday life – as always connected to, yet set apart from everyday existence. They might be referenced in everyday moments where their topics or messages come up, in jokes, or when people hear the sounds of the birds that they speak about such as the pompakoh who appears in Interlude One. Or they are told in those hazy moments between wakefulness and sleep, where the children who begged to hear them are drifting off and its only the adults still trying to listen. As appropriate as ‘interlude’, might also have been ‘refrain’, something told in full in one moment, or perhaps appearing in other guises in other moments (as they do across the book’s various chapters).

As well as an aesthetic concern, it was also a practical concern because I wanted to present the stories as they were told to me – with enough interpretation that someone yet to be immersed in Batek life could still understand them – but not so much that my narrative imposed too much interpretation on them (as I may have done had I included them in the body chapters). I think including a sounded aspect would be an exciting direction for future work. Yet at the same time, now I think about it, I wonder if there’s something to be said for the written form in terms of it somehow evoking how Batek aesthetics rarely dictate exactly what something is and how you should interpret it (as I write about in Chapters 1 and 3). Instead, a space for ambiguity – perhaps for individuals to interptret through haʔip for different kinds of things – tends to be opened up by aesthetic creation. Would presenting a recording be presenting too much of a likeness? Does reading perhaps allow for difference to remain in interpretation as readers sound the words in their own minds? Maybe, or maybe not. These are questions I will definitely continue to think about!

Steven Feld: In chapter 4 you write: “In speech, in music-making, and in sharing other sensory experiences, Batek and the other-than-human entities of the forest attempt to make sense of one another, in the process constructing one another as moral agents.” This kind of cohabiting actant relationality is quite familiar to me through my experiences of rainforest Papua New Guinea, and it leads me to ask you a question that has been posed to me in one way or another often in the last 50 years. Why are rainforests so good to think? Is it that the (inter)sensory affordances are so overwhelmingly dense and multivalent? Is it that the (over)abundance of signs stimulates greater complicities of human, non-human, material, and spiritual entities? What figures the ground for the kind of deep listening intersubjectivity that so richly topicalizes moral agency and difference?

Alice Rudge: This is a question I’ve also grappled with both in the process of writing the book and in many conversations surrounding my work! I think that for me the answer is an excited yes, and. To explain, yes I do think that rainforests are amazing to think with – and your own work is a perfect example of what can be gained through deep attention to the (over)abundance of signs in these dense and multivalent contexts, as are recent texts by Eduardo Kohn and others. I also would agree wholeheartedly with the point that rainforests can configure a highly particular ground for deep listening intersubjectivity. And I also have two additional thoughts on this matter. First, that I would always want this point to avoid heading towards arguments that might indirectly support environmental determinism, as though rainforests may be special sites for this kind of polyvalence, they may not be the only sites of it: people may also develop or maintain a deep listening sensitivity outside of rainforest contexts. In a site of rapid environmental change, where people inhabit rainforest and non-rainforest contexts simultaneously, I think it is also important to think through the role of human agency and creativity in developing deep listening skills and an attunement to polyvalent moral agency and difference even amidst profound change and in their lives outside the forest. Second, any such argument must also attend to the particularities of and diversity within how rainforest dwelling peoples attune to and interact with this polyvalence. This is my aim in Chapter 4, where I argue that although Batek are highly attuned to the non-human entities of the forest, they also theorise this in terms of their difference from these entities – and the resultant unknowability of the inner lives of these other persons. I think this is an important point regarding your final question – what figures the ground for the kind of listening intersubjectivity that so richly topicalizes moral agency and difference – because we see how different attitudes and alignments and contingencies with regards to different rainforest contexts may produce quite distinctive understandings of what it is to be a moral agent. In short, I guess all this amounts to my attempting to theorise the political/ethical alongside the environmental/semiotic when thinking about the sensory affordances and meanings of rainforest contexts.

Steven Feld: As a certifiable language nerd I just loved the moment I opened to the page that says “Appendix 1, Grammar.” And I found there many things that captivated my attention and took me back to other parts of the book where you unpack lexical semantics and ethical pragmatics. But hey, this is not what most anthros are used to finding at the end of a narrative ethnography that embraces topics as diverse as difference and Otherness, intentionality, emotion and well-being, living well amidst environmental uncertainties, sensory epistemology, and, most broadly, relational ontology. Horay! I found this embrace of the materiality of language courageous and cool. But hey, tell us more about how you want this section to speak to the majority of your readers, who I daresay will not be linguists or area specialists, but anthros drawn to both Batek and your meditation on sensing and managing difference in the presence of remoteness.

Alice Rudge: I’m so delighted to read that that you were excited by the grammar! As a language nerd myself, that means a great deal, not least because this was exactly one of my reasons for including the grammar in the first place: I wanted the option for language nerds to be able to unpick more, but not to interrupt the flow of my other arguments that might have a wider readership – not least the topics that you list. This goes back to the same point that I made in relation to your earlier question about metapragmatics – that I see the linguistic contributions of the book as fundamentally entangled with its political and ethical aspects.

At the same time, it was also a difficult decision to include the grammar and the lexicon. This was partly because of my awareness of the coloniality of the dictionary/grammar writing endeavour – particularly from British colonial officials working in Malaysia – as so meticulously documented by Rachel Leow’s work in Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaya (2016, Cambridge University Press). And it was partly to do with my understanding of the central role that dictionary writing has historically played and continues to play for missionaries as well – missionary activity being a very live issue in some of the Batek villages where I work. Yet I also had to square this apprehension with the fact that Batek friends often ask me to produce an English-Batek dictionary, and with my own desire to do proper justice to the detail and care with which Batek interlocutors taught me about the subtlety and power of their use of language and its centrality to their everyday lives.