https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501776465/throw-your-voice/#bookTabs=1

Alex Warburton: Your two main sites, a puppet theater and a children’s group home, aren’t obviously connected, yet you weave the worlds of the puppet theater and the children at Hope House together beautifully, not least through the book’s figurative backbone, a Chekhov tale performed by the puppet theater (“Kashtanka”). All three are imaginatively drawn into a shared narrative. Can you say more about your process designing the project and choosing your ethnographic sites, as well as putting them together—how initially were you thinking these sites together, and where did your research lead you?

Meghanne Barker: Ending up with two sites seemed random, during my fieldwork. I knew I wanted to work with children, and that access to a group home such as Hope House would be difficult to obtain, so I found the puppet theater as a kind of backup. But then, when both admitted me, I could not give up either. In hindsight, I can see that I came to the field with a curiosity regarding government-run, postsocialist institutions and a fascination with children’s fantasy worlds. In both sites, I found the surprising coupling of these two elements. 

They also balanced each other out, somehow. When I was planning a simple ethnography of children living in postsocialist institutions, people’s reactions tended towards, “That’s sad.” I sensed they felt sorry for me, and that they felt they could already imagine the orphanages I would find. When I started telling people I was researching puppet theaters, I received cheerful remarks such as, “That’s random!” And the truth is that childhood in Kazakhstan, as in many places, often contains hard realities mixed with playful activities that might get dismissed as trivial, but that I find wonderful.

Upon defending my dissertation, a committee member (whom I love) congratulated me on herding cats. I was encouraged to make the research into two books. At first, this two-for-one deal struck me as extremely convenient.

However, keeping the sites together for the book seemed like an opportunity to try to make something surprising and beautiful. Both sites created fantasies that had social significance. Instead of alternating between sites, as I did for the dissertation, I wanted to frame them in the book as components of a single story. “Kashtanka” struck me as a tale that resonated at both sites. For the puppet theater, it was the play where I saw the most lucid discussions of puppetry. By coincidence, Kashtanka’s story, of getting lost and eventually finding her way home, mapped onto the children’s own trajectory.

Alex Warburton: Your book focuses on what you call the familiarization techniques used by these institutions of childhood to generate affect-laden relationships. A primary technique is what you call the animation of intimacy. Why think about animation and intimacy together? 


Meghanne Barker: In common uses of puppetry as metaphor for social relations, there is an idea of total control, with one party completely passive to the whims of someone more powerful. I wanted to show how play and performance helped to hold together the institutions themselves, while also contributing to a larger ideology of childhood as the responsibility of the state. For this, I needed to move beyond an understanding of animation as some mechanical exertion of will over another body. Issues of affect were essential to the process.

I first got interested in questions of animation when reading literature on materiality. It was the doll that first got my attention in a course taught by Kriszti Fehérváry, when we read Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency. Then Alaina Lemon, my advisor, led me to work by Paul Manning and Teri Silvio on animation, and all of this blew my mind! They have been invaluable interlocutors as my work has progressed, along with other writers on animation such as Ilana Gershon, Molly Hales, and Shunsuke Nozawa.

When it comes to animation, two aspects that resonated with my sites were 1) a distributed participation framework (of a principal, animator, author, and so on housed in different bodies) that disturbs the neatness of a singular subject (which is useful for thinking both about the agency of objects and of children) and 2) the slippage between the animate and the inanimate. A distributed participant framework brought me to examine animation as an act of intimacy, while the slippage between the animate and the inanimate highlights the risks of bodies putting themselves in positions of dependence on others.

When I started my fieldwork, I planned to connect the two sites primarily by comparing the way children played with their toys to the ways adults brought puppets to life for the children. As I spent more time with both, I saw that the adults at Hope House also treated the children a bit like puppets or dolls, dressing them up and calling on them to perform for visitors. This initially struck me as an interruption to the children’s “free” play. However, the children sang and danced for one another during their “free” play. I came to see the teachers’ work with the children as an act of love, as a way of ensuring that care for them would continue when they left the temporary home.

Alex Warburton: Most anthropologists primarily work with adults. In addition to taking into account adults’ beliefs about children’s experiences, you also talk about the children’s lived experiences themselves. Why take the everyday world of children and their creative play seriously? How do you theorize the role of fantasy in producing and maintaining social relations, through what you call the creative chronotope?

Meghanne Barker: I think for many readers these two questions may not be obviously connected at first. However, if we change the questions and ask, “Why don’t many anthropologists take either children or their play as central objects of inquiry?”, one might argue that children are less interesting to anthropologists than adults because it is hard to disentangle what scholars understand to be psychological from cultural issues and because children are typically less consequential, politically, in many societies. And regarding the triviality of play and fantasy, these are by definition not real, so why should we study them? We put these together in children’s play and such a topic seems hardly as important as something serious like adults fighting over money and power, for example.

The notion of the creative chronotope as a space or activity that constantly moves between the fantastic and the real is one way of arguing for the consequentiality of fantasy. Because many children such as those at Hope House are constantly creating fantastic frames for themselves and others, we can treat them as experts in such endeavors. This helps me justify why children should be more important to anthropologists who do not have an immediate interest to them.

It is my hope that the theoretical frame outlined in the book will serve anthropologists of art and anthropologists of childhood. I would love to motivate anthropologists of non-children to read more ethnographic work on childhood. There is a rich tradition of anthropology of childhood, but these works are usually read and cited primarily by other anthropologists of childhood. Linguistic anthropology is perhaps an exception to this, in that the work on language socialization by key figures such as Bambi Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, along with ethnographic work done in educational settings, have become somewhat canonical.

Sometimes, activities we associate with children only become interesting to anthropologists once they find adults doing them. In the twentieth century, when performance studies and anthropologies of performance emerged, this was influenced by theorizations of play and its transformation into art and ritual in adulthood. In the twenty-first, as interest in animation and new media has emerged, anthropologists of animation (including work on video game culture and related industries) are mostly focusing on adult consumers and users of such cultures. Again, many of these scholars have been incredibly generous and supportive as my research has developed. But there is still much room for expanding empirical and theoretical work in anthropology regarding children’s participation in various gaming cultures, in the consumption and re-animation of various animated entertainments, and so on. Much of children’s pretend play in contexts where they are exposed to screen cultures is COSplay – there are children who literally put on Elsa dresses every day for years on end, and yet this is seen as unremarkable.

As anthropological interest in animation develops – and I hope for sustained or renewed interest in performance, but this is another topic – there is room for greater conversation between scholars of childhood and anthropologists not particularly interested in children to explore the full range of possibilities of animating, of creating diverse participant frameworks, and of voicing. I hope this book offers some tools for constructing that space.

In the case of this ethnography, I try to show that by following the play of children at Hope House, we can understand the world in which they live and the government-institution in which they are growing up. I also argue that their performances have political consequences, as they become public figures animating an ideology of Kazakhstan in which society holds up children as the nation’s future. That is, in the very act of their being animated by the adults who have them sing and dance for government and nongovernment sponsors, they are nonetheless participating in public and political life.

Alex Warburton: Your book has a number of ambivalences, wherein rupture and loss provides the possibility of new connections and reorganizations, from broken children’s toys to Kazakhstan’s history of forced deportation and displacement under Stalin. Can you say more about the productive use of ambiguities you found in your research? Does this have anything to do with your interest in literatures on developmental psychology (especially on attachment) and psychoanalysis?

Meghanne Barker: The slippage between animate and inanimate first drew me to attend to dolls and puppets, but I eventually found such ambiguity in children’s status. People handled the children at Hope House as if they were objects, dressing them up like dolls and puppets. While Ernst Jentsch’s original essay on the uncanny stresses the ambiguity of animate/inanimate, Freud’s essay seems productive in opening the repertoire of experiences that could produce this feeling and in highlighting the slippage between the familiar and strange. I found this intriguing, alongside theatre theorists’ interest in estrangement, for coming to see relationships not simply as unclear, but moreover as dynamic. I saw the puppet theater exploiting the movement between animate and inanimate. In examining global portrayals of institutionalized children, I found a more pervasive image of the creepy child, so badly socialized as to end up wild or dangerous.

I remain ambivalent about psychoanalysis and about attachment literatures. On the one hand, these are literatures that take seriously childhood and children’s social relationships as central to understanding society. At the same time, such literatures often posit a normative trajectory that imagines children growing up in an institution like Hope House as inevitably damaged. A second issue is their ethnocentric focus on the dyadic bond between mothers and children, a focus that I found insufficient for understanding children’s relationships with adults at Hope House and other institutions. I found that children made productive uses of ambiguity around adults’ statuses – in their play and in their understanding of social relations.

A friend, a while back, complained about the popularity of ambivalence. I think her problem with it was that people seemed proud to admit to having mixed feelings. I believe this friend felt it would be more interesting and useful if people just made up their minds whether they liked a thing or not.

If we look at literature on children and childhood, and based on my experience teaching childhood studies, I find that it’s hard for people to take a neutral stance when looking at children’s lives. When we read about children growing up in different historical and cultural contexts, my students want to know – or decide for themselves – which practices are good and which are bad. For me, the moments of studying children that are the most interesting are when they are hard to pin down, when they are “queer” or “sideways,” as Kathryn Bond Stockton writes, when they are weird and surprising and puzzling.

Alex Warburton: Videoed interactions play a large role not just in your data but in your analysis, in which you foreground the frame (your role as videographer, the presence of the camcorder, and your [re]watching of the videos). In lieu of stills, artful illustrations of scenes from Hope House and the puppet theater, as well as from the Kashtanka story, figure prominently in the book. I couldn’t help but think of how drawings lie at the heart of what we vernacularly call animation. Can you tell us about why you chose drawings versus other illustrative media, and why video turned out so methodologically important to you? 

Meghanne Barker: I wanted to make a film during my fieldwork, but I had no idea how, and everything turned out insufficient for this purpose. The videos turned out to be extremely useful for me, nonetheless, as they helped me attend to fleeting moments that would have gotten lost. Watching them a hundred times helped me understand what was happening. The camera’s constant presence added an additional framing device to worlds that were already full of frames of performance and of fantasy, so I felt this was important to theorize in the last chapter.

When writing the book, I wanted it to feel, at least sometimes, like a fairytale. A fairytale with too many footnotes. My brother Justin happens to be a brilliant illustrator. I wanted to offer illustrations that might remind a reader of a children’s book from the early twentieth century, a book for children who are old enough to read Peircian semiotics but young enough to appreciate the illustrations. I sent my brother stills from the videos to use as references, along with illustrations of various versions of “Kashtanka” that I liked. Yet he has his own style and genius, so while the illustrations based on the video stills are quite faithful, the illustrations of the Chekhov story are entirely his own. The dog Kashtanka bears some resemblance to Justin’s own dog, Toby.

Alex Warburton: What do you hope people take away from this book?

Meghanne Barker: I want readers to cry!

What I mean is, I understand that I need to make an argument and a contribution to literatures, but if my own familiarization techniques have worked at all, they will make readers care about the children (and the puppeteers, caregivers, and puppets). They will recognize the beauty and value in the children’s play and in adults’ endeavors to give them joy. They will recognize, by extension, the everyday aesthetic choices we make to hold one another’s attention, to keep one another close.