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Mark LeVine on his book Heavy Metal Islam

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https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520389380/heavy-metal-islam

Lara Sabra: Your book has shown that especially in the Middle East, which suffers from censorship and authoritarian regimes, art can be and is used as a political weapon/strategy for defiance and even relief from experiences of violence and repression. What can we learn about society or about politics from studying art and music? How can music or art, more generally, function as a resource towards understanding issues that social scientists typically explore?

Mark LeVine: You know that’s kind of interesting because art is one of the first things that humans did, that makes us human. The ability to create symbolic representations of reality or of our imagination and then share them with other humans – that’s probably one of the defining features that separate us from every other species on this planet. So it’s interesting that one of the most basic expressions of our humanity is so rarely used as an arena for investigation or study by political scientists and other social scientists. That’s a problem of political science and the narrowness of their conception of what politics is. It’s not just a problem of art or culture and how they’re excluded from analyses of politics, it’s also a disciplinary problem within the social sciences, this idea that you can separate politics from sociology, or sociology from anthropology. Obviously, there are nuances and every discipline has its own particular focuses, but they also all run into each other and ask different questions about what is quite often the same phenomenon, usually involving power and how humans gather, utilize, maintain, and hold onto power over other human beings. Art is going to be, like you said, a weapon in those struggles. Its also going to be a tool of resilience or healing; art can be medicine. But also, art talks back to power, always.

And usually when people don’t have the power to resist directly, either politically or physically through fighting or some form of mass protest, they can at least resist through art. So art becomes a site of resistance. If art is a site of resistance, then it’s inherently political. Therefore, looking at art and artistic production becomes a way of understanding politics that might not be visible if you’re just looking at the official political realm – the realm of official political contestation and of official political actors like voters, politicians, insurgents, military. Art expands the conversation. Looking at art brings to the surface trends or beliefs that might still be hidden, because bringing them to the surface in that way would expose people to state violence and repression.

And on the other hand, it’s not just about studying the art produced by the oppressed, it’s also about studying the art produced by the oppressor. With Israel/Palestine right now, we can understand even more about the nature of this violence and occupation by looking at the music and artwork created by Israelis and Palestinians since October 7, than we can by looking at official pronouncements to the media. Art is usually way more honest. Even when the art is duplicitous, even when it’s state-sponsored art created to reinforce a clearly nonsense program – it still tells us how the government sees things; or which people the government thinks it needs to speak to in cultural ways and what discourse it thinks it can most usefully deploy to maintain its grip on people.

Lara Sabra: How important was collaboration in the research for and the creation of this book? There are several moments in the book where you describe your participation in various activities with your research participants by playing musical gigs, co-writing and composing songs, and even co-writing or editing chapters of your book. How did this collaboration come about? Was it intentional or spontaneous and organic?

Mark LeVine: There’s a famous quote that I’ve used many times by this great African musician Manu Dibango, who famously said “There is only one race: the race of musicians.” What he was getting at is how musicians from very different cultures can meet each other, and within minutes of meeting each other they can be playing together as brothers or sisters. There is this ability in musicians to create deep relationships very quickly with each other through music. And because I approached many of these artists that I wound up writing about and working with first as a musician, it was much easier for me to work with them and for them to trust me.

I think the traditional mode of doing ethnographic research is extremely extractive and highly imbalanced in terms of power relationships, and very often has no benefit for the people involved. One of the places where this has long been challenged has been in ethnomusicology. The pioneers in doing this have long been musicians who are also anthropologists. If you look at their work – people like Steven Feld or Philip Bohlman – they tend to work collaboratively with the people they’re studying and produce collaborative research that reflects a shared set of values, questions, and assumptions. This is of much more benefit and more respectful to the communities they’re studying than the kind of extractive anthropology that has for so long been dominant, though less now than before.

I’m also very influenced by Indigenous research methodologies and protocols by Indigenous peoples who have always been the biggest victims of this kind of extractive research to begin with. There’s an entire set of Indigenous research principles revolving around collaboration, permission, respect – what I and Prof. Lucia Sorbera of Sydney University call a collaborative ontology. That’s the principle I’ve long worked in. You can’t treat people as merely objects or subjects of your extractive knowledge – the way anthropologists traditionally treated so-called primitive peoples. I always try to begin my relationship with people by asking them, how can I be useful to you? What story can I tell that is helpful and respectful to them and that teaches other people something they don’t know? My philosophy has always been to work with people as musicians first, and then let them tell me what aspects of their lives and their art they think are important to share with other people.

Lara Sabra: While the musical genre the book is focusing on is heavy metal, you make continuous references to musicians who explore other genres throughout the book such as hip-hop, rap, and rock. Indeed, when I think about music in relation to politics, I think of these musical genres first and foremost, especially drawing on my own experience within protest movements in Beirut of the past decade where it was these types of music that was played at protest squares (not heavy metal). Why did you choose to focus on heavy metal specifically?

Mark LeVine: Since I wrote that book, metal has become less popular, a lot of young people have switched over to hip-hop. It’s easier, it’s cheaper to record, it’s more popular in a way. So hip-hop and EDM have kind of supplanted metal. Electro-dabke, Omar Suleiman, all of those people have become big stars by mixing together house, electronic, with Arab(ic) dance music –that’s a huge thing, but it wasn’t yet so prevalent when I was doing research for the book. In that period, from the early 90s to the mid-2000s, metal was the premier form of rebellious youth music. By 2007, hip-hop had taken over as the more popular form of what I call “Extreme Youth Music.”

But metal has more pure emotional power than these other genres; it enables a real catharsis. If a form of art can carry and transmit a lot of power, then it’s also gonna transmit a lot of political power. So naturally, it was a very easy music genre to politicize, even if it’s political in a very subcultural way. When Egyptian or Iranian artists are singing metal songs in English, they are usually saying things that would get them arrested or thrown in jail. Metal was able to transmit political protest, even if it was just within the in-group or subculture. Hip-hop is powerful because of the vocal element, the words, the lyrics, the specificity. Metal is much more about the power of the music and the guttural-ness of the vocals. The words are important too, but less important than the power and the way they are being sung. I created a term called “aeffect” – a combination of affect or effect – to refer to this kind of affective power that has political effect. Metal music is very aeffective – it’s got incredibly affective power, at a pre-political, pre-discursive level, but that also has immediate discursive political implications.

Lara Sabra: I’m fascinated by one of the ideas you seem to be exploring in this book, which is the similarity and subsequent competition between the alternative, youth-driven heavy metal scenes in the Arab world and the religious/political authorities dominating their societies. Can you elaborate or expand on this?

Mark LeVine: Metal as an intense, affective music shares many of the same practices as extreme religious practice, like Sufism, for example. When you see Sufi practices of dance and rhythmic movement to very intense drum beats and you watch people moving, it looks like they’re headbanging. And they are headbanging. It’s the same thing, the way the human body goes into a trance-like, repetitive extreme movement, to rhythms that encourage that. So of course, metal is gonna have a lot in common with that, because it’s an ecstatic form of music. Same thing with a mosh pit in a punk show – it’s the same kind of ritualistic intense movement that produces this emotional psychic state that is very similar to religious states that get produced through extreme practices. That’s why a friend of mine in Pakistan, this famous musician named Salman Ahmad, from the band Junoon, said, “The reason why the mullahs hate us is because we’re their competition.” And he didn’t mean politically – what he means is that they satisfy the same human needs of young people as religion. And that’s why there are attacks on metal and other musicians by conservative religious forces, because they understood they were a threat to them.

Lara Sabra: Much has changed in the political landscapes of most of the countries you write about in this book, and arguably much has gotten worse. What would you say makes this book relevant today? What are the implications of this book now? Is art/music still a legitimate and transformative space of resistance/alterity/creativity in light of the extreme violence we’ve witnessed very recently?

Mark LeVine: What I said in Heavy Metal Islam is that music is like a canary in the coal mines for looking at changes that are going to happen whether or not the elite in these countries want it or not. In some ways, I think it’s fair to say that I’m one of the people who predicted the explosion of youth activism that we saw with the uprisings of 2009 and beyond (really, 2005-06 in Lebanon). Many of the people and the music that I was studying in the early 2000s went on to be very important in the revolutionary moment of 2009-2014. Most of the young activists in the Arab uprisings or Iran were people who came out of the extreme music scene. And this is because – and this is key – the set of skills you need to form an underground DIY song culture are the same set of skills you need to form an underground DIY political or social movement. You need to know how to organize, you need to know how to circulate ideas and cultural production, you need to know how to get people together – all without the authorities knowing. You need to create something that appeals to a lot of the people in your group without being noticed by others. And these are all the things you need to do underground politics. So it wasn’t surprising to me that the people who were running Tahrir Square when I got there on day four of the uprisings were all my metalhead friends. The landscape has changed, and metal is not as important today in the region as it was then. But find what is the metal of today: find what music today plays the role that metal did, and spend time looking at it.

Marc L. Moskowitz on his book Internet Video Culture in China

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https://www.routledge.com/Internet-Video-Culture-in-China-YouTube-Youku-and-the-Space-in-Between/Moskowitz/p/book/9781032092881

Marcella Szablewicz: In media anthropology there is always the question of place. Where is the work situated? Your book is entitled Internet Video Culture in China and yet that region-specific title clearly doesn’t do your work justice. In fact, throughout the book you consciously challenge the reader’s understanding of place, referring to videos and popular culture phenomena that traverse time, geographic location, medium, and genre. What is more, just as your book examines Internet video mashups it is also, itself, a mashup of methodologies and scholarly approaches. Can you tell us more about how you made the decision to put these complex case studies in conversation with each other, and your mixed-methods approach to studying Internet videos?

Marc L. Moskowitz: Yes, this is an important point. Book titles about this region are inherently tricky. “China” is of course a topic that more readers are interested in because of the PRC’s raw size, its historical legacy, and its current place in the global political economy. But you are right that most of my book is focused on border crossing in one form or another. Unfortunately, the other title options would have led to their own set of problems. “Chinese-speaking Internet” is more accurate but clunky. “Sinophone” tends to place it firmly in an academic discourse but alienates a broader readership that does not know what the word means. Also, this term gets bandied around a great deal with no one fixed meaning. I have seen Sinophone used to refer to only Taiwan and Hong Kong, for example. It is also frequently used to include all Chinese-speaking cultures outside of the PRC, including the Chinese diaspora. At other times it refers to all Chinese-speaking cultures, including the PRC and beyond. So, I agree, labeling all of this as “China” does not do the range of my study justice, but for those of us who are not exclusively focused on the PRC these things are surprisingly complicated. Hopefully “the space in between” in the title did a better job of indicating the full scope of the project.

Building on this point, there is a tendency in academia to think of China’s internet as the internet in the PRC, but the internet is never truly bound by national borders and there is a whole set of other issues that come up once one acknowledges this fact. In my book, the dialogue between videos and the written commentary posted to those video sites, reveal both cultural proximity and profound rifts between those living in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the US.

And thank you for highlighting that methodologically and theoretically I tend to mix and match a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, and internet studies. I think it was Duke Ellington who once said, “There are only two kinds of music, good and bad.” In my book I try to take a similar world view to get at these issues from a range of different vantage points by using tools, and drawing on theoretical frameworks, from several disciplines to unpack just what is going on here.

Marcella Szablewicz: Even as this book is a study of sweeping “cross-cultural dialogues” and “transnational sharing” it also feels intensely personal. In one chapter, for example, you recall your own childhood identification with the character Spock from Star Trek. In this chapter we then follow you to Taiwan, as you engage (at first awkwardly) with the science fiction club at National Taiwan University. What does your book have to say about fandoms’ ability to toggle between personal and shared experience?

Marc L. Moskowitz: Yes, we tend to think of the personal and academic discourse as separate spheres but the kinds of topics one chooses, the areas of inquiry that attracts us, are intensely personal aren’t they. In anthropology reflexivity, in which authors put themselves front and center in their research as an exercise in honesty and ethics, has become the norm in recent years. I think this also lends to better storytelling—creating something that can draw in readers that include academics but reach a much wider audience as well.

Marcella Szablewicz: The uses of humor in online meme culture have been a subject of much debate among scholars. Often Internet humor is intentionally offensive, as with the popularity of “Hitler reacts” memes in both the U.S. and China. You argue that such difficult humor serves to “connect disjointed realities” and that by, “appropriating these historical narratives in this way, one disarms them.” However, Whitney Phillips, who has studied Internet trolls and meme culture in the United States, has since argued that humor of this kind has also served as a “trojan horse” through which more extremist content has slipped into the mainstream. (See Helen Lewis’s article for The Atlantic in which she interviews Phillips about her work on Internet trolls). What do you make of her argument when viewed through the lens of the Hitler YouTube meme you discuss in the book? Does her argument about extremism in the U.S. translate at all to the Chinese context?

Marc L. Moskowitz: I confess that I was not familiar with Phillips’ work before your question so my response to her research might be a bit superficial in that it is limited to Lewis’s four-page essay that you mention here, and Phillip’s equally brief article that Lewis cites in her interview. It should be pointed out that both articles take research that specifically focused on posts on 4chan and then applies this to the internet as a whole. The very real dangers of 4chan, and internet trolls more broadly, should not be ignored but it is misleading to conflate this with the internet in its entirety. Of course, if you hand a bunch of neo-Nazis a Hitler meme it is going to go in unhealthy directions pretty quickly. But I have also seen right wing attempts at appropriating Star Wars and The Office with memes so, as my students might say, “haters are going to hate” regardless. To use a somewhat simplistic analogy, one might ask what the structural factors are in heteronormative families that can lead to domestic abuse, but that does not mean that domestic abuse or heteronormativity encompass families in their entirety. There are dangers to taking the forest for the trees here.

To some degree, scholarship that is so critical of internet culture is building on a pervasive and long-standing undercurrent in a good deal of academia that voices an unmistakable mistrust of popular culture as a larger category. This dates back at least to the Frankfurt school in which Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and others evinced an oddly elitist sense of old-world class hierarchies in their analysis of popular culture, evoking a marked unease concerning the masses. And, of course, these scholars’ profound anxieties regarding the potential dangers of popular culture were in large part because of what they witnessed in Nazi Germany.

In my book I argue instead that humor in popular culture, both on the internet and in other contexts, has long been in the sphere of those doing battle with the very forces that the Frankfurt school was concerned with. In the US, for example, the far right has weaponized the domain of angry outrage quite effectively but I can’t think of a comedy news show on the right that can be seen as a successful counterpart to humorous left-leaning shows like The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, or SNL’s Weekend Update. As an older male living in the American south, Facebook algorithms inflict a pretty wide range of conservative memes on me (though none as offensive as those Phillips witnessed in her research on 4chan) so I am fairly familiar with the strained attempts at appropriating memes for right wing agendas. Good humor, the stuff that really makes us laugh, usually helps us to see familiar issues in a new light. In contrast, the conservative attempts to be funny that I have seen on the internet (memes revolving around the notion that vegetarians/people getting vaccines/those using electric cars are just silly, for example) are confirming biases within a particular community rather than challenging a wide range of viewers to see things differently. As such, the attempts to co-opt memes for these political ends fall flat on several levels but, most importantly, they are just not funny. I cannot agree, therefore, that these memes are inevitably the candy hiding an inner poison of hatred and bigotry as Phillips and Lewis seem to suggest, because right wing attempts to co-opt popular memes are inevitably preaching to the converted and they fail to reach anyone else.

Because, as you point out, both Lewis and Phillips refer to the same “Hitler Hates” genre of memes that I discuss in my book, I did a quick search on YouTube looking for the most popular videos in this genre today and could not find any examples of the bigoted or mean-spirited cases that they saw on 4chan. The popular versions of these videos on YouTube (by which I mean videos with more than 100,000 views) are laced with profanity but for the most part apolitical. The “Hitler Hates the iPad” video that I discussed in my book is a good example of this. Others leaned left, such as the video “Hitler can’t get his cupcakes and he is pissed” in which Hitler is made to seem like he is outraged at a woman refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Even in this instance, however, the funniest parts of the video are arguably its apolitically humorous take on Hitler’s perceived obsession with baked goods rather than dwelling on the more serious issue of homophobia.

To the degree that the problem of internet trolls translates to China’s internet, one does see fairly rampant sexism and ethnocentrism, but these are features of China’s thought and society that date back long before the internet. As such, I am not convinced that the internet has created these issues as much as provided us with a window view into this preexisting cultural milieu. In my research on Chinese-language internet video culture, the closest comparative point to the politics of hate that I saw was the nationalistic vitriol that emerges in response to some seemingly harmless videos that were intended to make people laugh. In other words, it was the outraged reactions to the videos’ humor, rather than the underlying messaging within the videos themselves, that revealed the most conflict-ridden aspects of Chinese culture. Rather than being a Trojan horse, as Lewis and Phillips suggest for the “Hitler Hates” videos, this antic frivolity has the potential to counter some of the venom that one is confronted with on the internet, and in our daily lives. I also argue that this humor often subtly subverts nationalist demands, in both China and the United States, in that in refusing to take the world so terribly seriously they disarm angry political trolls with a gentle hand. As I suggest in my book, in the PRC culture is so heavily saturated by politics that to be apolitical is a profoundly political stance—one that arguably undermines the Orwellian tendencies of an authoritarian government as viewers choose another path.

Marcella Szablewicz: Michael Jackson appears twice in this book. In your opening chapter you discuss a mashup of Jackson’s Beat It with a Chinese Cultural Revolution performance. In this case, it would seem, American culture has been creatively reappropriated in the Chinese context. In the second instance, Michael Jackson is the butt of a joke created by Taiwan’s Next Animation studios, which is playfully mocking talk show host Conan O’Brian’s creative reappropriation of their signature animation style. In media globalization discussions, the subject of the directionality of cultural flows comes up frequently. What does your book have to say about the common perception that pop culture often flows from the West to the rest?

Marc L. Moskowitz: Yes, these mash-ups are humorous videos that use Cultural Revolution visual footage combined with music from a wide range of countries, one of which is Michael Jackson’s song “Beat it”. Other videos might feature anything from K-pop to Taiwan’s pop and a range of other music. I also examine the written commentary that is posted on these video sites. On one side of the spectrum are people celebrating the apolitical frivolity of the videos. The other side, as seen in some of the comments posted to the videos, are people in the PRC who are enraged that China is somehow being insulted by the humor (based on the perceived sacrilege of combining Cultural Revolution visuals with Jay Chou’s song about Japan, for example). It should be noted that political vitriol is far rarer than those commenting in celebration of the sheer playfulness of these videos, but unpacking the dialogue between the two groups is an important part of coming to understand regional differences.

And you are absolutely right that this kind of cultural production problematizes notions of “The West to the Rest”, a point that I explore in my book. Although in truth the idea that the West dominates popular culture around the globe has always been problematic. I grew up watching Japanese television shows and movies that were very popular on American television in the 1970s. For me, and many people in my generation, Godzilla, Speed Racer, and Ultra Man were at least as influential as the American-produced shows I was watching as a child.

Regarding the Cultural Revolution mash-ups, we know that the video footage originated in China and we are aware that that Michael Jackson’s soundtrack originated in the US, for example, but I was never able to determine who originally created the first mash-up in this genre. This issue is exacerbated because videos are often removed from servers because of alleged copyright violations on YouTube, and for political reasons on the Chinese video server Youku. But these videos are quickly reposted by other people so they are never gone long. Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum seems appropriate here in that with these videos there is no longer an original so it would be meaningless to frame the others as derivative. This is not only because of the uncertainty of who the first creators were, or because the various components of the video have so many different cultural origins, but because the meanings are so very different according to who is watching them, as well as when and where they are doing so. Even the first person to create this meme cannot really claim ownership at this point (in part because no-one would believe them) so the idea of trying to imagine the flow from one country or region to another is equally problematic.

Marcella Szablewicz: Scholars of digital media struggle with the speed of change. What we write about one day is gone the next. My students in New York tell me that YouTube viral videos are over. Instead, they now prefer short-form vertical videos such as those found on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Is China experiencing a similar shift and, if so, has the artfully created mashup video already become a thing of Internet past?

Marc L. Moskowitz: That is so interesting. I was just talking about this with students in my gender class. When I asked them if their generation even looked at YouTube videos anymore, twenty-four out of twenty-five students enthusiastically said that they did. The one student who did not said that she felt a gap with her peers because of this, in that if her friends asked what she’d like to watch with them on YouTube, she couldn’t respond. This would actually be a great research project of its own. It would be interesting to try to better understand if our students’ different responses were regional (New York vs. South Carolina) or has to do with the class being taught. My course was not specifically focused on Internet or popular culture studies, for example, so it may be that these students have different tastes and sensibilities than students who are particularly interested in taking classes about the internet. Or perhaps it simply boiled down to every class having its own personality. Regardless, it does seem to highlight the fact that there is no longer one reference point in popular culture that all of our students are linked to. In class, I can no longer make references to recent films or television shows as I once could, for example, because I only get blank stares when I do. With a very few exceptions, there is no longer a shared “it” show that all of my students will have seen. One exception to this was when I mentioned the movie Cocaine Bear my students became very animated, but my impression is that none of them had actually seen the film (nor had I)—our exposure to it came through YouTube movie trailers and, for them (and me), the trailer was clearly enough—there was no need to actually see the film. The internet is very much a part of this fissioning of cultural sharing because, as you point out, there is such a wide range of ever-changing internet venues to interact with. But also, among my students at least, these brief trailers and other even shorter videos, whether on Instagram, TikTok, WeChat, Youku, or YouTube, have to a large degree replaced moviegoing culture, with its longer demands on attention.

As I outline in my book, one of the PRC internet’s greatest differences with its Western counterparts revolves around the ways that it must maneuver around censorship as an ever-present reality. People in the PRC contend with an even increasing surveillance by the state. It used to be that the Internet was a relatively free sphere in China, as compared with, for example, large public protests that the government was quick to crack down on, or State controlled media such as the movie or television industries. Today the internet in China is far more heavily monitored. China’s Great Firewall is far more effective than is used to be, and even VPNs, which used to give many people in China the freedom to access internet news and entertainment outside of China, is no longer the risk-free or easily accessible solution that it once was. The 50-Cent Army (people paid by the government to write pro-State agenda posts) or the Voluntary 50-Cent Army (people who truly believe in the nationalist agenda about, for example, Taiwan’s independence, and therefore write State propaganda for free) are another force for government surveillance and control on the Internet. In contrast, most people in Taiwan are looking at streaming videos both through the Chinese streaming server Youku and the US server YouTube, depending on the content that they are looking for at any given time.  

This gets back to your earlier comment about what “China’s internet” really means. If we extend this to Chinese-speaking cultures such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Chinese-speaking diasporic communities across the globe, or students who are temporarily abroad and have access to these wider range of cultural productions for a few years before they return to their homeland, then the questions and answers become very different. In my book I compare and contrast the different written reactions to humorous videos on Youku in simplified Chinese and YouTube comments in simplified Chinese which were probably written by people in or from the PRC, with complex Chinese characters indicating the writer probably lived in, or originated from, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Those writing in English from a range of different countries across the globe complicates this mix. I contend that one cannot truly understand Chinese-speaking internet culture without an exploration of these border-crossing dialogues.

But at the core of your question, I think, is the important point that trying to keep up with internet culture, or popular culture more broadly, is like playing Whack-a-Mole because things change so quickly. Given the nature of how long it takes to write and publish an academic book, we will always seem painfully out of date if we try to present our work as a current trend. What we can hope for, though, is that the themes of our analysis continue to be relevant even if the particular examples that we base our theories on wax and wane in popularity. In this sense, although for the moment the videos I discuss in the book continue to be popular, they are in fact less important than the dialogues they represent between factions that seem likely to continue to be at odds for some time to come—those who embrace nationalistic rage vs. playful irreverence, for example, or the important ways that border crossing exhibits both cultural proximity and profound cultural difference depending on place and space.

Thank you for your exceptionally thoughtful questions about my book. I have very much enjoyed this virtual discussion of these issues in response to your insightful thoughts about my work and for that I am grateful.

Arseli Dokumaci on her book, Activist Affordances

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https://www.dukeupress.edu/activist-affordances

This interview was conducted in February 2023.

Nate Tilton: How does activist affordances address the limitations of the social model of disability in terms of environmental disabling effects? As someone who is personally navigating chronic pain, I appreciate your thoughts on how chronic pain changes someone’s daily interaction with their environment?

Arseli Dokumaci: Before addressing your question, I want to first contextualize the concept of the social model within its historical emergence and recognize its achievements in this context. The model first gained traction in the 70s in the UK, followed by the US and later got incorporated into global human rights frameworks. At this historical conjuncture in these geographies, it did the necessary work of politicizing disability, turning it from the sole issue of medicine to an issue of societal organization. This need to be acknowledged since the political consciousness that the model instigated has brought in tangible transformations in disabled people’s lives. However, as with any other concept, the social model has, thanks to the important work of feminist and postcolonial disability studies scholars, proven to be less effective in addressing certain realities than others. And I am hoping shrinkage, with its focus on process and differentiability, can help with those, building on the tradition of feminist transnational disability studies.

Let me begin with chronic pain. When in chronic pain, your world can terribly shrink. The more pain you are in, the more the perimeters of your environment narrow down, at times, even to the confines of your bed. In extreme cases, your bed can become your whole environment to the degree that it affords not only sleeping, resting (or doing nothing!), but also eating, socializing, maybe working and even making art (like Frido Kahlo painting from bed). The action possibilities that would have – in the absence of pain – been normatively offered by different places of the environment (but note that offering is not equally offered for everyone) collapse to the circumferences of your bed. It is precisely such experiences of disability, which don’t necessarily result from a solid barrier, that the social model omits, and that shrinkage can help account for in our disability politics. In so doing, it can allow us to recognize a commonality between, say, how the environment’s affordances collapse to the circumference of one’s bed when in pain, and say, how the environment of a person in a wheelchair shrinks in the absence of ramps, pushbuttons, and lifts.  

Let me also raise the issue of environmental racism to highlight another limitation of the model. As part of the Access in the Making Lab’s “Air, River, Sea, Soil: A History of Exploited Land” online exhibition, I had the honor of getting to know Mohamed Mahdy’s fascinating “Moon Dust” project. In this photodocumentary work, Mohammed traces the everyday life in Wadi El Qamar, a small town in Egypt where a cement factory was built just 10 meters away from people’s houses. This is a town shrinking in its liveability. Dust and dirt are everywhere to the extent that, Mohammed notes, “the houses are covered with dirt every 5 minutes”. You cannot really open your windows. At the same time, the weather is so hot, especially during summer, and people cannot afford ACs as this is a largely impoverished town. Even with the windows shot, dust and dirt still seep in. Air, which affords breathing simultaneously affords the unimpeded mobility of pollutant particles, which settles on your lungs, ears, and eyes. In a cyclic shrinkage, it is not just the perimeters of your navigable environment but also breathe-ability of air, and along with that, your lung capacity that shrink. The damage done to the air becomes inseparable from the damage done to your gradually disabling body, which, in turn, are inseparable from global injustices that put that cement factory in this town, actively generating its conditions of shrinkage.  

Now, we cannot really address any of these complexities with a term that derives its politics from – no matter how strategically – a deliberate separation of the environment from the disabled body. (Recall the social model’s motto: “It is the environment that disables us, not our bodies”.) At these times of planetary shrinkage, where shrinkage is happening at multiple scales (not just at the periphery of a disabled individual), we need less rigid vocabularies, and I am hoping that shrinkage can help with that.

Because shrinkage refers to a process, not to an object or a moment, its referents may change. We can talk of shrinkage even in the absence of a tangible barrier or an impairment. Because shrinkage allows for differentiation across experiences, scales, and paces, it enables us to look for disability in places that we (as disability studies scholars) are not used to seeing it in, and account for those disparate occurrences in our disability politics, regardless of whether they involve an impairment or not, whether they happen to a single person or masses, whether they are experienced by humans or other-than-humans.

In brief, I think of shrinkage as a solidary-building tool – one that can allow us to scale disability across (such as in the case of impairments, species) and up (from the shrunken worlds of a disabled person to those of debilitated populations, and to a shrinking planet).

Nate Tilton: I am neurodiverse and struggle with PTSD, I’m curious how shrinkage affects affordances for people like myself? What role do social and cultural factors play here?

Arseli Dokumaci: Thank you for this question. Actually, I wonder how you would have answered your question!

Other readers have also asked me about the applicability of activist affordances to different kinds of disabilities, especially mental disability. I tend to think of this way: every book having its own project and its own story to tell. In my book, I focused on particular kinds of disability. How shrinkage or activist affordances might look like in the context of, for example, neurodivergence or PTSD could be the project of another book and I eagerly look forward to learning from them.

After finishing Activist Affordances, I’ve done fieldwork in a psychiatry ward in Turkey, based on that brief ethnographic encounter; what I’ve read in the field, and on my own experiences with obsessive compulsive disorder, I would think that social norms, the pressures to properly perform societal scripts, as you point out, would shrink one’s environment. So does institutionalization, where confinement functions as the ultimate shrinkage. It is also worth noting that, in some cases, shrinkage might result from (sensory or cognitive) overload, leading to, for example, a fear of stepping outside one’s home, or a need for a sensorily shrunken space, such as a quiet room. My hunch is that in such cases, activist affordances may take the form of people as affordances. When a disabled person is unable to improvise activist affordances on their own, then other people around, like kins, caretakers, neighbors, and so on, might take over the creation of activist affordances on their behalf (or fail to do so).

Again, these are just some thoughts that need much more work. The question of how shrinkage and activist affordances might materialize differently (if at all), depending on the kinds of impairment, who is experiencing them, under which conditions and where, is a question for future projects (maybe yours) to explore.

Nate Tilton: Thank you, I feel your exploration of shrinkage and activist affordances opens up new avenues for understanding complex realities faced by dynamic disabilities such as neurodivergence and PTSD. It invites us to consider how environmental adaptations and communal supports can mitigate the disabling effects of societal and structural barriers.

Arseli Dokumaci: Thank you, Nate, for sharing your thoughtful reflections, which are really helpful in terms of expanding my understandings of who or what might count as an affordance for whom. The question you raise about our animal companions is especially important. I’d surely agree with you that our animal friends can become our affordances in a way that we might become theirs. Like a mutually choreographed dance of negotiating daily environments that might shrink and expand differently for each of us. Thinking together with you, I also wonder about my plants.

Nate Tilton: As someone who has a keen interest in the intersection of disability, environmental sustainability, and performance how do you see activist affordances advancing this discourse?

Arseli Dokumaci: I wish activist affordances to make two interventions in this discourse. The first one has to do with shrinkage, and its centrality to emergence of activist affordances. Shrinkage, in a certain sense, is a precondition for the making of activist affordances. In situations where the affordances of the environment don’t necessarily contract and are just there for its inhabitants to “take advantage of” (this is James Gibson’s wording), then there is no need for them to come up with activist affordances. Of course, they may still create affordances; hack existing uses of things; innovate DIY solutions and so on. But I would be cautious to call them as “activist affordances”, precisely because it is for a political reason that I want to think of “activist affordances” as something separate from these, and all other affordances.

Activist affordances are activist in the sense that their creation strictly emerges under the conditions of constraints, scarcity, and losses that I broadly conceptualize as “shrinkage”. By shrinkage, I mean the shrinking of bodily and environmental spoons or both. When your everyday world shrinks, you experience contractions, and in extreme cases, complete deprivation, or denial of affordances. This shrinkage necessitates making do with less, and at times, with none. 

This is exactly where performance comes in, and along with that, the second intervention that I wish to make into the debates around the crossovers of disability and the ecological crisis. Because in performance, you create in and through your body. What differentiates the world-making involved in performance from all other forms of world-making is that in performance, you make up other possible worlds in and through your body, and whatever happens to be in its vicinity. Think of dancers on stage. (Of course, their bodies are supported by the stage and other materials around, including each other’s bodies. My point is not that performance happens in a vacuum, rather that it asks for less, which is what makes it apropos to shrinkage.) Think of this: while, say, a sculptor carves out an object with marble and chisel, dancers carve out the contours of an imagined world in and through their bodies and whatever happens to be in their surroundings. Again, this is not to claim that one form of making is morally preferrable than the other. Instead, it is meant to expand our current conceptions of world-making, especially to situations of precarity, where we might not necessarily have access to stuff to make things with.

The concept of activist affordances is meant to pluralize our vocabularies of disability creativity and allow us to name and recognize the kinds of world-making that can still take place even under extreme conditions of shrinkage. Because all that the creation of activist affordances asks for is our bodies and imagination, we may still improvise the affordances that we imagine, even when all other ways to make worlds becomes inaccessible. Meaning, even when everything else is taken away from you, you will still have your body and imagination, and as long as you have the two (or if not, then have someone else who does, as in “people as affordances”), you may still try to find some sort of comfort in an activist affordance – no matter how momentary, tiny, imperfect and immaterial that affordance may be. Even if it may just be an imagined affordance that keeps you going nonetheless…

What I wish to emphasize here is the humility inherent in activist affordances and their particular kind of world-making. Because it is precisely this humility and their capacity to be created even in the most limiting of circumstances, with the fewest bodily and environmental spoons, that makes activist affordances particularly relevant to our era of ecological crisis. In our times of planetary shrinkage, it is clear that the entire planet is spooning out! And if we can take shrinkage from the level of the disabled bodies to that of the planet, we may as well take some lessons from what disabled bodies have all along been doing within that shrinkage. That is, improvising activist affordances with the least of spoons left. 

Here I want to shift the focus to Gaza. Before I do so, let me emphasize that this shift is in no way meant to be an indulgence in academic theorizing, especially when people’s lives are at stake. I do it because I cannot talk about disability, shrinkage, access and affordances without talking about what is happening in Gaza and more broadly, occupied Palestine. 

It has been for months now that the Israeli state has been committing genocide in Gaza, making death and debility at a mass scale with total impunity. The Israeli military has erased entire livelihoods out of existence; destroyed buildings, targeted, and blown-up life-sustaining infrastructures, and reduced entire places to rubble. Through systematic assaults, Gaza’s whole range of affordances – built or otherwise – has been wiped out, including breathable air, drinkable water, desalination facilities, aquifers, olive trees and other indigenous flora, food resources, roads, sewage systems, electricity, and others. As it has been the case throughout history, settler colonialism is once again aiming to de-furnish the Land of all its existing set of affordances and relations, and make it shrink to the point of utter uninhabitability. And yet amid this unimaginable scale of violence, where the land is stripped of almost all its offerings, people of Gaza have been trying to survive by making up affordances with whatever is left at hand, which, at times are literally their bodies, already so worn-out and depleted. They are making up shelters out of scrapes; conducting medical procedures with whatever is around (be it cell phone flashlights or vinegar); and carrying one another and becoming the affordances of each other’s missing body parts and kins. Even when they are left with nothing but their exhausted bodies and imagination, people of Gaza try to create affordances for one another with just those – no matter how painful, risky, and dehumanizing the conditions are. When I look at these incredible struggles for survival, I see hope and I want to recognize and hold onto that hope. 

Even in the face of utter destruction where everything else is violently taken away, the capacity to imagine persists and refuses to go away. You may destroy all those that were given a material existence. But you cannot capture, steal, tear, or eradicate what is born of free of material conditions. You cannot make dreams shrink. I wish to honor the staying power of imagination (which may be a poem) and how it resists being stripped away even when everything else might be. 

Nate Tilton: Could you explore how planetary shrinkage is portrayed in disability stories, particularly in the context of large-scale disasters and events such as COVID-19?

Arseli Dokumaci:  In the context of COVID-19, marked by confinements and lockdowns, shrinkage is rather obvious. In fact, when the outbreak occurred, some people referred to COVID-19 as mass disablement. However, I see it more as a process of shrinkage. With the pandemic, what disabled people have long been experiencing – the shrinking of liveable worlds – has scaled up to the level of populations, albeit unevenly. Shrinkage allows us to grasp this scaling up (from the micro level of the disabled body to the level of masses) while cautioning us against jumping scales and losing touch with the unevenness of the ground over which any crisis unfolds. Surely with the pandemic, shrinkage became the problem of larger populations, but at the same time, people’s lives differently shrunk, depending on where they are located globally, and what privileges they hold or lack in terms of class, able-bodiedness, citizen status.

Consider, for example how the peripheries of some people’s daily environments contracted compared to pre-pandemic times, while those of others, such as front-line workers, were negatively expanded and stretched. Delivery drivers had to cover longer distances, grocery workers and healthcare personnel had to work around the clock to the point of being stretched thin.

On the other end of the spectrum, the livelihood of those already living in precarity, such as elderly people in care homes, or disabled and chronically ill people whose survival dependent on daily vital care, got shrunk further at an accelerated pace. In devastating cases, this acceleration led to the extent of death, due to deliberate government neglect, eugenicist triaging protocols and other forms of structural violence.

On a global level, vaccine apartheid highlighted the historically shrunken confines of the global South when it comes to accessing lifesaving and life-sustaining affordances of biomedicine.

All these (and other) differentials remind us that any crisis never occurs in a vacuum. Instead, they unfold in an already rugged field where some livelihoods will shrink more rapidly, extensively, and intensely than others. Unlike the linear crisis narrative, which assumes crises and disasters to be disruptions in an otherwise smooth world order that suddenly toppled and disrupted “us all,” the concept of shrinkage can allow for differentiation in pace, extent and intensity.

Consider coastal shrinkage, and take the cases of low-lying coastal cities in Netharlands and Banjul in Nambia, which is literally sinking. Clearly, shrinkage varies in pace, breadth, magnitude and preventability, depending on who/what/where your reference point is and what its histories are.

Crucially, because shrinkage is a process that is always already ongoing, it lacks the distinct beginning and end points that disasters are supposed to have according to linear crisis narratives. Even if the pandemic may no longer be causing the mass disablements that it once did, COVID-19 – from a shrinkage perspective – is not and will not be over as long as the everyday living parameters of chronically ill, disabled, elderly and vaccine-deprived people continue to contract.

Joshua Reno on his book, Home Signs

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https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo210361609.html

Danilyn Rutherford: I’m so excited to see Home Signs in print.  We found out about each other a couple years ago and have been corresponding, off and on, ever since. I often felt like we were writing variants of the same book – yours about Charlie, mine about Millie, who also lives, in your lovely phrasing, beyond and beside language.  And now your book is done, and it’s wonderful. Let me start with a simple question.   How did you come to this project?

Joshua Reno: Thank you, I am excited about your forthcoming book as well and the correspondence we’ve had over the years has meant a lot to me. I actually wrote this book while trying to write another book about a different Charlie – namely Charles Peirce. That one was ostensibly going to be about how his ideas concerning sign use (or semiosis) relates to his “continuism,” or the metaphysical notion (to put it a bit simplistically) that all things are connected, and how that had impacted and could still impact anthropology. The initial pages of that planned book project used some examples from my life and mentioned my own Charlie a little. A smart editor noted that, in a way, the sign work I described in those passages was the real book. They were right, so this book was born from that abandoned one. I went from semiotics to home signs and, to my surprise, from engaging with the legacy of Charles Peirce to that of William James! In a way, though, Home Signs is still about how we are all connected — me to Charlie, him to me, both of us to all the people we know and even to all those we don’t.

Danilyn Rutherford: I’m intrigued by how you handle the power relations involved in the ethnographic encounter at the heart of Home Signs: your life with your teenaged son, Charlie.  Like so many of us writing about disability, for better or worse, personal experience has fed our commitment to this topic.  When you’re writing about people with whom your life is tightly bound, the ethical quandaries implicit to fieldwork become particularly palpable.  I’d love to hear about how you managed the tension, not just between ethnography and parenthood, but also between your position of relative power (in life, in the wider world, and as author of this book) and Charlie’s position of relatively vulnerability.  How did you manage the tension between what to disclose and what to withhold?  I can’t help but think of Audra Simpson’s reflections on this problem. What kind of ethnographic refusal is at work in your book? 

Joshua Reno: That is well said. Simpson’s take is important and in a way I did the obverse of ethnographic refusal to deal with an obvious power imbalance. I tried to do that with what I call my interruptions throughout the text to remind the reader that my perspective and privilege are behind everything said.

Indeed, as I wrote that just now, on a late February afternoon in 2024, Charlie summoned me to his side in his room by slapping his bed loudly. I was a bit annoyed because I am trying to get this interview done in a timely manner out of respect for you, Danilyn, but he is also leaving with his mother in a little to see her father. So, I say to myself maybe in an effort to believe it, that the least I can do at this moment

is to come to him when he asks for attention while she showers to get ready…

…I just got back from that. When I get there, Charlie swiftly sent me away again, taking my hand in his and sending it towards the door to his room. Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe the whole point was an experiment to see if I’d come. Maybe I misinterpreted a fun way to make noise for a home sign.

I use interruptions like that to interfere with the text, with statements made like the one I making now, that is, in a typically disembodied and authoritative tone.

But I am still that person whose wife is showering and son could make sudden demands. I am. He just did.

Charlie cannot speak or read what I and others write about him. And people will speak and do speak for Charlie all the time even if I remain totally silent: politicians, teachers, family members, doctors, activists are shaping his world as I write this. So my imperfect solution to the power imbalance is to sometimes say too much about how I, specifically, am saying it, when and where and what is going on around me as well as inside me. Throughout the book, I tried to disclose more than I was sometimes comfortable doing about myself to frame what I say about him, so that my descriptions of my disabled son are less easily mistaken for an objective view from nowhere. I am made more vulnerable in the process, if differently than he is.

Danilyn Rutherford: I’m also interested in the power Charlie wields.  In writing about my daughter, Millie, I’ve found myself thematizing something I call cognitive mystery – a space of desire and speculation just shy of convention. This space comes into play in all our relationships — even when we think we understand one another, the possibility remains that we do not.  As I see it, cognitive mystery opens a space for Millie’s agency.  How should we think about Charlie’s agency (in your life, in the wider world, and in the writing of this book)?  You give Charlie the last word.  Why?  How does Charlie refuse?

Joshua Reno: That is such a beautiful idea — can we just talk about your book? Anyhow, I think my argument that home signs be taken seriously, in all kinds of situations where it is otherwise ignored entirely (say with tickling or toileting) or which are typically understood differently (say with Helen Keller or Koko the gorilla), is broadly connected to the perspective on agency that you wonderfully explain. Home sign awareness is my way of giving Charlie’s actions significance, meaning that they are taken to be something more than pure reactivity or instinct on his part, as if he were trapped in his own mind and only bouncing off of an impersonal world of intransigent objects (people and things) that surround him. That is often how autism is popularly and problematically imagined. My argument is that if home signing is taken seriously, then it becomes clearer how Charlie routinely and expertly communicates with us and anyone who comes into his orbit.

I should add that Charlie refuses things quite a lot; he is an expert at passive resistance, which he does by making his body heavy and dragging his feet, remaining still or running away when called for. That does not do away with mystery, in my view, far from it. I think that because home signs are what they are, no more, no less, and they inherently involve uncertainty and confusion (like the scene I mentioned in the previous question). We do not always know what Charlie means or that he means anything at all, and vice versa. But that just makes those moments of (apparent) intentional communication so strong at the same time.

Danilyn Rutherford: Notably in this book, you steer clear of the question of the human. Non-human communicators play important roles in your story.  Your reflections on communication experiments with non-human primates receive quite a bit of space in the text. Lately, I’ve been reading the older literature on freak shows and, in particular, William Henry Johnson, a Black disabled man whom P.T. Barnum marketed as an uncertain hybrid of man and monkey.  When you bring humans and non-human primate into the same frame, some readers might find themselves thinking of this history; others might be reminded of Peter Singer’s notorious writings.  What would you say to these readers?  Why was it worth running this risk?  Sunaura Taylor offers tools for responding to these kinds of questions.  But it seems to me that you’re making rather different moves.

Joshua Reno: I argue in this book that home signing is a legitimate and meaningful, but not therefore an exclusively human, form of communication. So that is part of why I make the move you describe. For this reason, like others in disability studies who inspired my work, my primary engagement with the human concerns able-bodied ideologies regarding who or what counts as human, especially as this overlaps with assumptions about language. Because I am interested in the home signing that Charlie does and we all do, I want to trouble the twin assumptions that all human beings speak and only human beings speak and the related, glottocentric elevation of human language above all other forms of communication. This is not only about ableist standards that exclude people with linguistics disabilities, moreover.


Actual techno-scientific practices over the years have routinely enrolled, not only disabled humans, but also disabled and debilitated non-human animals (as well as in some cases “recaptured” humans who were raised by non-human animals as Kalpana Seshadri shows in her work). So, in every chapter, I include scenes with ordinary and exceptional dogs, cats, monkeys, gorillas, or chimps, both to challenge ableist and glottocentric ideologies as well as to show how they have been and continue to be propped up and supported through animal analogies and experiments.

These peculiarly modern projects (putting it broadly, experiments with consciousness) are not only relevant to how ideologies about language work, but have also been central to our everyday lives with Charlie. This is most obvious in the chapter where I talk about our seemingly failed attempts to do language training with him. I explain there how the origins of that language habilitation protocol, known as PECS, are similar to those for ape language experiments, as they both owe the form they take to the behaviorist epistemology of Edward Thorndike, student of James. Put differently, I am not selecting examples of non-human animals as beastly metaphors for humanity, but am instead examining how a broad episteme of American psychology, largely inspired by James’ radical empiricism, is metonymically woven into how we have been taught to help our son to speak as well as how some people have tried to teach our primate cousins to do the same.

At the same time, everyone is right to be troubled, as I am troubled, when people diagnosed with a disability are placed side-by-side with (usually captive) non-human animals. I should reiterate, first, that home signing is not somehow disabled communication but something we all do all the time — people like Charlie and carers for people like him just use them a lot. Here I am following work by people like Elinor Ochs and Olga Solomon, for instance, who characterize “autistic sociality” as a way all people relate, not as something exclusive to people with a medicalized diagnosis. Still, analogies between disability and animality have been and continue to be a source of racializing dehumaniziation in the way you describe. Here I align with Sunaura Taylor: non-human animals are, precisely for this reason, important to include, carefully, in discussions of disability since they have been part of and remain part of stories about human exceptionalism.

Danilyn Rutherford: You have written extensively on militarism, waste, and white supremacy in the U.S.  How did those concerns make their way into this book?  In what ways is this a book about the U.S.?  How, if at all, has writing this book changed the way you think about themes from your earlier work?

Joshua Reno: While sometimes it is hard for me to step back and see continuous threads from one project to the next, I can see how a lot of the subjects that captured my interest in this book are things I have written about before that are arguably very American (having to do with crises in waste, militarism, and white supremacy), to which I add in this book, though this was not my goal originally, some discussion of a crisis in public services and health care.

So it is probably no accident that I became fascinated and troubled, as I read the vast literature on non-verbal communication, how some of this work has become entangled with policing and the national security state. So in the first chapter, I write Charlie’s seeming “aggression” but also about how seemingly “aggressive” non-verbal communication can get you killed in the U.S., especially if you are a person of color but also if you are disabled. And this overlaps in unexpected ways with the history of academic study of non-verbal communication, with some psychologists (namely those affiliated with Paul Ekman’s approach to facial expressions) training military and police to read body language for purportedly universal meaning.

It is also probably no accident that I spend a lot of time, in the penultimate chapter, talking about toilet training, which is the form of waste work I have been the most concerned with over the last two decades, rather than the landfills, biodigesters, and carbon emissions I have written about in the past. I am sure that my interest in Charlie’s toilet habilitation and the paradoxes thereof, is related to my earlier work. It is also something that people in discard studies have had much less to say about, despite the fact that all of us begin life incontinent and more than half of us will end up that way, if we are lucky to live that long. That made me want to think about the care relations associated with hygiene, which I describe as an ethical process in alliance with feminist and disabled writing on the subject.

Finally, my peculiar way of positioning myself throughout the text, as not only white but as privileged in a variety of ways, as a white, able-bodied, neurotypical, cisgender, heterosexual, upper-class, man (or a “wan chum,” as I put it throughout the book), is also shaped by work on whiteness and power I have been influenced by. It is only a little textual experiment, and in no way dismantles the many structures that maintain my privilege, but it has helped me make sense of the quasi-genre I am contributing to with this book, that of able-bodied parents writing about their disabled children. Stacy Clifford Simplican writes about the fact that this often goes unnamed as a genre, and I think she makes an important intervention. To be clear, this is no more a literature entirely of white people writing about their children than it is of cis-het men only, but it is absolutely a genre subtly shaped by the power relations you mentioned in your second question above, including by white supremacy. I argue in the preface, for instance, that one of the reasons some white men like me are drawn to write about our disabled children is that it dashes the sense of privilege we’ve otherwise come to expect (that things should basically work out for us, to put it simply). That does not mean we should not write the things we do, I just want us to call attention to the privileged positions from which we do so and how that shapes our desire to represent others whom we love and care for.

Danilyn Rutherford: If you had to choose one word to describe what this book is about, what it would be?

Joshua Reno: Imagine, reader, that I do not speak a word at all, but instead lean back, raise my right hand above my head and deliver a swift slap onto my desk, loud enough to send a sharp echo throughout the apartment.

As I do that, Charlie, who is in the next room, exclaims “baah!” as if in response. He recognizes the slap (he uses it a lot as an attention-getting gesture). He knows I delivered it even though he cannot see me right now.

What was that response? What does it say about what my slap meant to him? What does it mean that he did it again after a moment passed and his “baah!” went unheeded?

Let’s have “baah!” be the word we are left with. It is not a word (although maybe….“bah humbug”?). But I bet, whether or not you’ve heard it before, that you would respond if someone at home with you exclaimed “baah” or slapped a desk suddenly. You might wonder what they meant too or if they meant anything at all (maybe the slap sound came from them dropping something onto a hard surface by mistake, maybe the “baah!” was a vocalization made out of fear when they saw a spider on their lap). But you wouldn’t consult a dictionary in either case. You might wonder what it means for that person you share a home with and how you respond would say something about what they mean to you.

Baah. That’s home signing and that is this book.

Adolfo Estalella and Alberto Corsin Jimeniz on their book, Free Culture and the City

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Cornell University Press

Nomaan Hasan: I want to begin with the observation that the ethnographic attention of this book is devoted to the minor. At the very outset you frame the work as a corrective to histories ‘about the accomplishments of big men’ (p. ix). An eclectic cast of characters – from curators to hackers, from musicians to lawyers – populates the pages, replete with ostensible cultural marginalia such as punk zines and art installations that one would not expect to encounter in a book on urban activism. The minor is conventionally understood as a debased position, lower in hierarchy to the major. Could you tell us how your focus on the minor instead challenges the major by widening the ambit of the political?

Adolfo Estalella: Thanks for the question, for it brings up an issue that has not been uncommon in many conversations not only about the book but about the relevance of the projects we describe and in which we have participated for a long time. Nevertheless, I would reframe the question by contesting the assumption that certain issues we pay attention to are minor, for they are only minor in appearance when we consider their experimental nature.

Our book is traversed by the experimental ethos that characterizes the activities of many of our interlocutors. If we take seriously these forms of experimentation, then I would argue that we cannot judge their value by their position in an assumed hierarchy but by their ability to open questions of relevance and make visible certain urban problematizations. We never judge an experimental laboratory by its dimensions or physical scale, but by its epistemic capacity to subvert our conceptions of the world we live in. The same applies to the projects, initiatives, collectives, and objects we pay attention to in our book.

Nomaan Hasan: There is a tension in the relationship between media and the political that traverses the book. At various junctures, your interlocutors express skepticism about the possibility of instrumentalizing a technology or medium. Discussing the fallout from a self-regulating bulletin board created by a free software server, a developer derives the lesson that ‘it undermines the assumption that one can aim for…an objective’ (p. 48). You transform this question by proposing that the relationship between media and politics be understood not as identity-based or issue-driven but as sensory, that media create a distribution of perceptibility. How does this analytic move reconfigure the problem of political indeterminacy of media?

Alberto Corsín Jiménez: I like very much how you have reframed the relation between media and its effects as one of sensibility rather than instrumentality. Thank you for that. Yes, we would like to think that that is one of the key take-aways from our ethnography: how the effects of media are differently reperceived depending on the plane of articulation, whether we think of media in terms of digital relations or we shift its plane of engagement to the urban condition. Or, as our interlocutors often did, if these planes are differently gradated, interweaved or blurred in different ways at different times.

In the book we speak about how free culture activism in Spain playfully disturbed the political domains of bricks and bytes. Only recently have scholars started to pay attention to the complex entanglements of the digital and the urban in the gargantuan operations of platform capitalism. But such entanglements have in fact been ongoing for over twenty years, for, as we show in the book, digital activism in Spain was urban-oriented almost from the start.

The fallout of the self-regulating bulletin board is a good example. Activists were well aware that the assemblage of the bulletin board as a socio-technical system might not quite translate the needs of the political assembly behind it. As it indeed turned out, the assemblage and the assembly failed to overlap, and the traffic of sympathies, affects or agonisms that they were designed to provide outlets for collapsed. Some people thought this was a problem of instrumentation, which could be corrected by designing a more agile and efficient technical system. For others, however, the deficit was not technical but sensorial, not something to be corrected, but an alignment of places, bodies and experiences to be reorchestrated and lived anew.

Much of the book is dedicated to fleshing out the regimentation of such technosensorial landscapes, what we call matters of sense. It seems to us that Latour’s “matters of concern” and Puig de la Bellacasa’s “matters of care” remain somewhat attached to or bounded by the problem of assemblage. By following free culture activists flights and travails from the digital to the urban, we show however that their commitments and concerns travelled across realms and orchestrations, mattering themselves into slowly cultivated sensorial projects and gatherings.

Now matters of sense do not accrue overnight. They don’t manifest in response to the urgencies and short-termism of factual politics. They have different modes of deposition, also, from the ethical exigencies of solidarity or the obligations of relationality. This prompted us to think, then, not about the indeterminacy of media, but about its slow-determinacy, not because it takes a long time for its effects to become visible, but because it takes us (ethnographers) a long time to cultivate and inhabit their sensorial significance.

Nomaan Hasan: Throughout the book, you trace how the work of free culture activism draws upon various – at times perhaps even divergent – currents of thought, ranging from Italian autonomism to social welfarism to Zapatismo to movements for digital rights or against conscription. Significantly, you refrain from flattening this heterogeneity into ideological coherence. At each step you foreground the provisionality of coalitions, recounting in absorbing detail the debates and compromises, for instance over public funding. ‘Bricolage of apprenticeships’ appears as a key concept in the book and your interlocutors can be seen as bricoleurs, assembling diverse strands as a patchwork in a style of collaboration marked by disregard for political purity. Often the quality of admixture that characterizes this practice is construed as a sign of impoverishment; could you elaborate on how it instead fosters pragmatic versatility?

Alberto Corsín Jiménez: “How we can we make any progress in the understanding of cultures, ancient or modern,” Hocart famously asked almost a century ago, “if we persist in dividing what people join and in joining what they keep apart?” (Hocart 2004, 23) Although ethnography has long excelled at demonstrating the empirical instability and abstract purity of assumptions and rationales taken for granted in political discourse, policy-making circles or other social sciences, it remains the case that we are ourselves often caught up in disciplinary conventions that are not of our own choosing. Thus, ethnographers of the digital are rarely, if ever, in conversation with ethnographers of the urban, and digital anthropology seems to inhabit conversational publics and problematics distinct from those of (say) urban studies or social movement studies.

In Free Culture and the City we did our best to stick closely to the conceptual elaborations and practices of our ethnographic partners, and we followed meticulously through the problematics and imaginaries that they traced out. We also did our best to reweave these conceptualizations back to debates in digital, urban and social movement studies, yet did so by promoting vernacular conceptualizations that highlighted transversal affordances and connections across the digital, the urban or activism, such as concepts of prototyping or intransitivity. This is another way of saying that the best way to prove the efficacy and versatility of a practice is often by resisting its justification or explanation in a language that is extraneous to it. But that demands, as Roy Wagner long taught us, reinventing the vernaculars of anthropological exposition.

Nomaan Hasan: Lastly, the question of method is not only a central thematic but is inscribed in the very form of the text. Notably, the book performs urban deambulation, drifting across the Madrid landscape in an attempt to recover the psychogeography of what you call an intransitive urbanism which simultaneously strives to defend the public and liberate the commons. What you argue about the practice of prototyping can be claimed of the book itself – that it ultimately discloses not necessarily an epistemological object but a ‘climate of methods’ that outlines possible worlds. In this context, how does this book make a contribution to anthropological method more broadly?

Adolfo Estalella: This is certainly a key issue of our book and a concern that we have sustained for years. From the very beginning of our ethnographic endeavor, we came across people of very different sensibilities and abilities who were somehow engaged in urban investigations of diverse kinds. They sometimes shared our conceptual vocabularies, showed similar epistemic aspirations, and used and repurposed research methods for their experimental endeavors in the city, and we realized that these inquiries were indeed central to their modes of inhabitation. The repertoire of creative and inventive methods they use is very often different from those we use in the social sciences, so when coining the concept of “climate of methods”, we aimed to capture the heterodox amalgam of practices and devices through which our interlocutors tested the limits, and experimented with, what was possible to do together in the city.

George Marcus and Douglas Holmes argued some time ago that in these kinds of para-ethnographic contexts (in which anthropologists relate to subjects with quasi-ethnographic practices), we are forced to relearn our methods of investigation from them. The book tries to show that these learnings and apprenticeships do not happen as a mere reaction to the difficulties of our ethnographic encounters, but they happen as integral parts of them.

We are well aware of the extended experience among many colleagues that our methods are overwhelmed by the empirical situations we take part. And we are convinced that in these uneasy times, it becomes more important than ever to be able to speculate with different modes of investigation, as our colleague Martin Savransky has recently argued. How could we do that? Where could we find inspiration to refunction our ethnographic modes of inquiry? I would say that if we take seriously the para-ethnographic condition of our interlocutors, then perhaps we could reanimate our ethnographic endeavors by relearning from them how to investigate a world of growing complexity. This is the reason why an ethnography of prototypes like ours has turned into an ethnographic prototype, for we have recursively incorporated into our ethnographic practice the modes of inquiry of our interlocutors. As Alberto sometimes says, our anthropological activity demands novel complicities to face the growing complexity of our world.

References

Hocart, A. M. 2004. The Life-Giving Myth and Other Essays. London: Routledge.

Christina Woolner on her book, Love Songs in Motion

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University of Chicago Press

Amanda Weidman: First of all, thank you for this beautiful, ethnographically and sonically rich work! You’ve brought together ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and voice studies to weave a theoretically rich account of how expressive culture is working in post-conflict Somaliland to rekindle a sense of intimacy and shared experience, and rebuild a public sphere.

To start off, can you describe a moment from your fieldwork that you feel produced an important discovery or realization?

Christina Woolner: Oh that’s a great question. It is hard to pick just one but let me share something from fairly early in my research. About 3 or 4 months into my fieldwork, I was chatting with a friend from Boorame, and explaining a bit about what I’d been up to. By this point this included a somewhat bewildering number of activities, including everything from working in a sound archive to hanging out in artists’ homes, visiting radio and TV studios, listening to music with friends and attending live performances. I told him that I sometimes wished for a more predictable daily schedule, and that it wasn’t always clear how these very diverse types of encounters were connected. His response was simple: “What seems to unite these things, Christina, is love songs.”

In retrospect, this is an incredibly obvious observation – and, given I had ended up in these places because I was attempting to “follow the thing,” to borrow from Appadurai, of course the link between them was love songs. But hearing that comment at that point in my research made me realize that part of love songs’ significance lies precisely in the fact that they are this link: they move across places conceived as public and private all the time, and link people and feelings across both time and space. This realization eventually became a central part of the book’s argument and title: songs are not static, they are always in motion, and their political-affective power is very much tied to this fact. This idea also gives the book its structure: each chapter documents love songs at a different point in this movement, from private to public and back again—from the intimate disclosures and artistic collaborations that birth love songs to their public circulation, from private listening to public performance.

Amanda Weidman: Love, sincerity or “singing from the heart”, intimacy: these are concepts that come up throughout the book. Can you give us a sense of how you walk the fine ethnographic line between appealing to your readers’ intuitive understanding of what these mean, on the one hand, and on the other, emphasizing their culturally and historically specific emergent meanings in 1950s-2010s Somaliland?

Christina Woolner: One of the most productive and challenging features of my research was the fact that many of the central concepts you’ve identified seem to have intuitive appeal to diverse audiences. And indeed, my interlocutors often presumed that I would understand what they meant by things like “love” and “singing from the heart,” in a manner similar to the way that I presume my readers might have a sense of what these ideas invoke. As Weston notes of the concept of intimacy as an analytic: it carries with it a kind of “generative imprecision.” Significantly, love songs themselves are intimately generative in this way—they are powerful precisely because of how they presume the experience of love(-suffering) will be intelligible to others, yet also leave space for listeners to hear their own experiences. So as a writer, at times I have taken a cue from the poets I work with by leaning into this generative imprecision and heeding the saying “dadka u dhaaf iyaga ayaa micnaysan” (“let the people find the meaning themselves”).

But, as you note, these concepts also have a very specific cultural history and significance. I deal with this in two ways. The first is Chapter 1, where I chart the cultural-historical origins of ideas about love and voice as they congeal in love songs. This gives readers a sense of how these concepts are locally conceptualized and explains why I often use the term love(-suffering) rather than simply love. The second is by being transparent about instances when I realized there was a rupture between my interlocutor’s assumptions and my own. This happened regularly when discussing love experiences, as many interlocutors assumed these would involve suffering in a way that I did not; it also happened when discussing “singing from the heart,” because I initially had different ideas about what might make a voice sound sincere. I recount several such moments throughout the book, including in the conclusion, where I try to make sense of why one interlocutor and dear friend, the late singer Khadra Daahir, wished suffering upon me. I ultimately use this as a jumping board to reflect on the challenge you’ve identified, and that I think is at the heart of all ethnography—how to balance respect for the specificity of experience with a desire to say something about the human condition that resonates with diverse audiences. This ultimately brings me full circle to a consideration of how love songs and ethnography might both be about “a desire for a narrative about something shared” (the “generatively imprecise” definition that Berlant suggests for “intimacy”). It will be up to my readers to decide if I’ve been successful.

Amanda Weidman: In constructing your treatment of voice in this ethnography, you introduce the concept of envocalization. Can you explain the relationship of this idea to the concepts of entextualization, decontextualization, recontextualization?  What does the concept of envocalization do for ethnomusicologists and linguistic anthropologists that these other concepts don’t?

Christina Woolner: Several related things. Firstly, I do use it as a kind of shorthand for the trio of concepts you’ve listed, but I use a single term to emphasize that a text is always in the making. Envocalization also obviously draws attention to the fact that these texts are animated by the voice, so the term implicitly highlights that texts that are voiced come into the world and move about in a particular way. So it’s a bit of an attempt to rescue these very helpful concepts from a notion of text that has become so expansive in its metaphorical applications that it’s lost some of its analytical precision. But given that I treat the voice as both a sonic and social phenomenon, I also use this term to show how the way people use their voices (what I refer to as practices of voicing), and the ideas people have about what the voice is and does (what you’ve helpfully termed ideologies of voice), are mutually reinforcing. So what this term offers is a framework for understanding how voiced texts—songs, oral poems, or otherwise—move about and do things in a manner very much enabled by their sonic form, in an ongoing process in which the voice as a sonic and social object is constantly reconstituted.

Amanda Weidman: Additionally, in relation to your theorization of voice, you use the concept of multivocality and draw a helpful contrast between ideologies of voice and practices of voicing. What role do these concepts play in the understanding of voice that you are building in this book?

Christina Woolner: Following on from my previous answer, I try to show how the power of the voice resides in the interplay of specific ideologies of voice and actual practices of voicing. I do this because, in the case of love songs, I found that vocal ideologies and practices intersected in ways I initially found counter-intuitive but were key to what was going on. To be more specific: I was often told that the voice should “sound from the heart.” The affective purchase of songs thus rests on an ideology that figures the voice as the natural and sincere expression of an individuals’ deeply felt internal sentiments. But if you look at the actual practices of voicing by which songs are animated, they emerge as multivocal at every turn: in the way they are collaboratively composed, in the way they are performed, and in the way that people talk about, listen to, and re-voice songs. What I attempt to show is that this multivocality doesn’t undermine people’s expectation that songs “sound from the heart”: in fact, it helps to constitute and reinforce it as songs are continually envocalized.

You include a chapter about your experience of learning to play the oud.  Why was this an important part of your fieldwork? Can you say more about the role of this instrument and the relationship between instrument and voice in this context? Does the oud have a voice?

Christina Woolner: Perhaps naively, I didn’t originally conceive of my oud lessons as a major part of my research. But I quickly realized that I was learning a lot more than how to play a few tunes. To start, my lessons gave me a front-row seat to the incredible determination and the socio-political sensibilities that it takes to be a musician in Somaliland. My teacher, Cabdinaasir Macallin Caydiid, had been an active member of the Somali National Movement—as an exiled musician, then an armed combatant—and he’d played a key role in rebuilding the arts sphere after the war. He was celebrated as a musician and a veteran, but he also lived an incredibly difficult life, not only because it’s hard to earn a living as a musician, but also because musicians still occupy an ambiguous social-political-religious space. Cabdinaasir recently passed away, and I feel especially grateful for the time we had together.

It was also in my lessons that I started to appreciate more fully the sounded dynamics of love songs, and the importance of their instrumentation to their affective force. The oud has been critical here since the beginning—it was the fabled clandestine arrival of an oud in Somaliland in the 1940s, brought by Cabdullaahi Qarshe, that is credited with birthing qaraami, the earliest form of love song. Then, as now, the oud’s cod—which means both “voice” and “sound” in Somali—is critical to how songs convey emotion, and many listeners described to me the relief that the sound of the oud brings. The oud does this by introducing the melodic motif, adding heterophonic texture, and dialoguing with the singer. Good oud players are also adept at adding xawaash (spice), or embellishments, that are especially important for conveying feeling and a sense of spontaneity. So I suggest that the oud’s voice, and the process by which musicians acquire the ability to sound love, is critical to love songs’ intimate multivocality.

Amanda Weidman: Again, congratulations on this terrific and inspiring work and thank you for doing this interview! Now that the book is out, what are your next steps?

Christina Woolner: Thanks, I’ve really appreciated the opportunity to think back through the work with these questions. As for next steps, I’m currently wrapping up a project about the more overtly politically dynamics of giving voice in Somaliland: my focus here has been a 2017 poetry chain, in which dozens of poets debated issues related to government corruption and accountability in a series of poems that circulated on Facebook. Following this, I’m hoping to start a project that looks more explicitly at the role of music and poetry in Somaliland’s peacebuilding process in the 1990s. Several musicians I worked with were involved in this and there are anecdotal reports of the important role played by women poets, but it’s not really been documented. So I’m hoping to help document this, and to more explicitly explore how sound as a medium is imbricated in the quest for reconciliatory politics.

Pavitra Sundar on her book, Listening with a Feminist Ear

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https://press.umich.edu/Books/L/Listening-with-a-Feminist-Ear2

Anaar Desai-Stephens: One of the primary interventions of the book is this beautiful idea of “listening with a feminist ear,” which you explicate as attending “to aural and oral manifestations of social hierarchies. It is to heed the intersections of gender, sexuality, nation, and other vectors of identity, and to note how the aural forms of these constructs exclude as much as they include” (6). Can you talk us through how you developed this idea? What prevailing conversations – in cinema studies and in studies of South Asian cinema and music – necessitated this intervention?

Pavitra Sundar: Thank you so much for this opportunity to talk through some ideas at the heart of my book! The phrase “listening with a feminist ear” has been with me for a while, as far back as my dissertation, I believe. Initially, it was a nod to that project’s feminist moorings and my interest in how gender, sexuality, and nation were manifest in film soundtracks. This book, though, came into its own around the time sound studies began flourishing as a field. As I started to think of cinematic and musical analysis in relation to sound studies, I realized that we needed to think more about listening itself—what it entails, how we do it, and what listening makes possible. My insistence that we listen to the aural domain of cinema echoes the interventions of film music scholars and other feminist theorists of sound and voice in cinema. Decades on, there is still a need for that intervention, as cinema and media studies remains a very ocularcentric discipline. While South Asian cinema studies does exhibit this preoccupation with the image, ethnomusicologists have done much to elaborate the industrial and representational worlds of Indian film music. There is also robust discussion of the politics of voice (both in terms of playback singing and political speech, particularly in South India) and an emerging interest in sound studies. I’ve tried to build on these various, overlapping conversations to inspire greater attention to Bombay film soundwork and also greater reflexivity about listening.

The challenge is not just to shift or expand our object of analysis—from the visual to the aural, or better yet, to the audiovisual—but also to consider the relationship between that object and our method. What social hierarchies and axes of identity take form because of the particular ways in which we (scholars, audiences, fans) listen to Hindi cinema? How have we adopted certain ways of listening over time, and to what extent have those changed? What might it mean to shake off those conventions and practices? This is what I mean when I say that “listening with a feminist ear” is both critical and utopian in orientation. It tunes in to aural/oral constructs, but in so doing, it also opens a path to listening differently. The recognition that listening is political—that it has the capacity not only to objectify sounds, but also to unsettle wellworn habits of the ear—runs through the broader corpus of feminist scholarship on sound and music. Listening may be a sensory practice into which we are socialized and that we often repeat thoughtlessly, but it needn’t remain just that.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: Woven through the book is an attention to pedagogies of listening, and how we might listen otherwise. Can you say more about how viewers learn to listen in the broad ecosystem that surrounds Hindi cinema? Do you have thoughts about how we might explicitly learn to listen against the grain, that is, to work against our own listening habits?

Pavitra Sundar: An important thread in sound studies, and one that I develop in this book as well, is that listening is not a passive exercise but an engaged, interpretive activity. We cultivate ways of engaging with sounds over time, through exposure to various media and aural cultures. Films themselves direct us to listen in specific ways, as do particular genres and musical traditions. I was recently reminded of Vebhuti Duggal’s wonderful work on “becoming listener.” What exactly does it mean to call oneself a listener? She teaches us that radio listeners conceptualized their practice in layered ways—listening was as much about writing fan letters and running radio clubs as it was about tuning in to a radio station. Likewise, in Isabel Huacuja Alonso’s recent book (also on radio), we learn of how listening and talking are intertwined. My own emphasis is on the interface of listening and seeing, on how these modes of perception interact with and shape each other.

In my first chapter, I reframe playback singing using Michel Chion’s term “audiovisual contract,” which names how audiences give tacit assent to the conjunction of sound and image in cinema. But, of course, it’s because Indian audiences have agreed to a different contract than, say, American film audiences that it is commonplace to hear actors singing in a voice that is not their own in Bombay cinema. I lay out how gendered screen conventions and ideologies trained Hindi film audiences (from the mid-1950s all the way through the 1990s) to hear some women as good and others as sexy, immoral etc. As the media and cultural landscape shifted in the 1990s, so did the way audiences encountered, and interpreted, women’s singing bodies. The changes that economic liberalization wrought, particularly in the television and music industries, are also key to my second chapter. Chapter two traces how the Islamicate genre of the qawwali mobilizes the concept of listening (and listening publics) across seven decades. Generic shifts encourage different conceptions and habits of listening; they push audiences to adopt different understandings of the sound-image relationship. In my final chapter, I identify language politics as another formidable influence on how we listen—in this case, how we listen to speech in cinema. I discuss Hindi cinema’s hybrid tongues (Hindustani, Bambaiyya, and Hinglish) in relation to broader debates on linguistic nationalism, and postcolonial language politics more generally. In listening to characters’ dialects, idiolects, and accents, audiences call up complex racio- and ethnolinguistic imaginaries.

The sheer weight of these cultural and historical forces can be overwhelming. It can make listening seem overdetermined. But, if listening is a matter of embracing historically and socially specific conventions, then we may be able to teach ourselves to listen differently. The first step is attending to how we listen. We need to probe not just what we hear in films, but how we have come to hear femininity, accent, etc. in the ways that we do. I also find that thinking of ourselves as audiences rather than as viewers is helpful. You’ll notice that I use the latter term quite sparingly in the book, relying more often on audience. This word’s auditory roots cues the fact that we are always doing more than watching cinema.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: While reading, I found myself periodically struck and delighted by evocative, counter-intuitive descriptions of listening to cinema, viewing music, hearing bodies, and more. More than just turns-of-phrase, these quasi-synesthetic descriptions seemed central to your project of refiguring how we engage with cinema and cinema sound. How does this multimodal approach connect to your work of re-thinking the relationship between corporeality and sound, and the meanings attached to this relationship, in contemporary Hindi cinema?

Pavitra Sundar: Such a pleasure to know that those turns of phrase resonated with you! You’re right—what I’m trying to do is keep alive the recognition that sound and image work together. In a lot of cinema studies scholarship, including in works that focus on film sound, the body is understood primarily as a visual entity. The very notion of the voice-body relationship, for example, suggests that voice is a disembodied construct. Much of my writing on women’s voices, in this book and in other projects, challenges this arbitrary partitioning of the senses. Part of the difficulty is that assumptions about sound and image are baked into our conceptual vocabulary. Key terms used to parse voice and other cinematic sounds anchor listening in the image: concepts like onscreen and offscreen sound, voiceover, and acousmêtre turn on whether or not the purported source of a sound is visible. This image-centric approach flattens the endlessly pliable relationship between the aural and the visual, and ignores other ways of grasping materiality in cinema. While phenomenological critics have recast film spectatorship in tactile and kinaesthetic terms, their insights about corporeality are rarely extended to listening. That sonic and visual perception are intimately related comes through most forcefully in my chapter on playback signing, where I analyze the relatively recent shift to seeing women’s vocal labor, in paratextual material related to films, but also in other contexts and platforms. I argue that this shift in the visual representation of women’s bodies is crucial to how we now hear them. While I do not foreground this argument about the sound-image relationship as much in the rest of the book, I never lose sight (!) of the interplay of the aural and the visual. Multimodal formulations like the ones you mention—and also my choice to use Michele Hilmes’ term “soundwork”—keep me from slipping back into analytical habits that I think we need to shed.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: In the introduction, you write: “Studying soundwork requires that we listen as fans – voraciously and with little heed to conceptual borders that academic disciplines draw around diverse sounds” (11). Why did it feel so important to you to foreground pleasure, enjoyment, and personal proximity? What might this affective emphasis offer to scholars who work on seemingly text based areas such as film and literature?

Pavitra Sundar: Scholarship is an embodied, affective undertaking. It is driven by our personal interests, and shaped by histories of consumption, pleasure, and practice. But we rarely frame our labor in these terms. In not framing it as such, I think we risk reinforcing the divide between our work as academics and the rest of our lives.

Moreover, some of the categories that structure our scholarship do not function so strictly outside academic contexts. Listening cultures are porous and overlapping. People’s aural interests and practices often cut across genre, medium, time period, and language. By adopting a more playful, boundary-crossing approach—one that I suspect we all indulge in when we’re not fretting about disciplinary debates—we can get a better handle on interaurality. That is, we can understand how sound cultures and media that seem far afield from Hindi films can, and do, shape cinematic soundwork and listening practices.

Finally, the affective emphasis you’ve identified is also related to the reparative critical work that I think listening with a feminist ear can accomplish. For Eve Sedgwick, the reparative reading position is one that invites pleasure, experimentation, and surprise. I’ve tried to demonstrate through my analyses of Satya and Aligarh (in chapter three and the coda respectively) that listening across conventional sonic categories and pausing over odd, and oddly pleasurable sonic fragments, can be generative. Listening with a Feminist Ear is not simply a work of critique; it is also a work that dwells in the aural pleasures of Bombay cinema in the hopes of imagining alternative possibilities.

Anaar Desai-Stephens: One of the most exciting parts of the book for me, as a scholar of music, is your theorization of the materiality of speech through attending to language as sound. This is primarily explored in the third section of the book, on speaking, while you spend the first section of the book, on singing, exploring the materiality of the singing voice. How do you think about the relationship between these two forms of vocal materiality, methodologically and in terms of their relative realms of semiotic meaning? What political implications and possibilities are embedded in the shifting relationship between film sound, film speech, and film music in contemporary Hindi cinema?https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif

Pavitra Sundar: I think of chapters one and three as complementary explorations of sonic materiality. There is a growing body of South Asian scholarship on the materiality of the singing voice, but the materiality of the speaking voice has received less attention. When cinematic speech is discussed, it’s framed as a question of style or political ideology. My own interest is in how listeners make sense of sound in Bombay cinema—the sound of vocal performance. I am less concerned with the semantic meaning of words, whether spoken or sung, than with the semiotics of voice. I am trying to work out how vocal materiality is made meaningful. How are gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity audible and tangible in speech and song? If in chapter one, vocal timbre is used to make moral judgments about women, in chapter three I find that the sound of words (accent, in particular) does similar work in relation to ethnolinguistic identity. In reframing language as sound, I find it helpful to think with Rey Chow, whose notion of the “xenophone” addresses how spoken language gets some cast as foreigners, as other. What I’m also trying to do in that chapter is blur the boundaries between speech and other kinds of cinematic sounds (ambient sounds, sound effects, and song lyrics). My hope is that in closing the distance between these various sonorous markers of place and identity, we can arrive at more capacious conceptions of sound and belonging in cinema.

Joseph Errington on his book, Other Indonesians

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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/other-indonesians-9780197563687?cc=us&lang=en&

Jessica Peng: I would like to begin by asking you to reflect upon the trajectory of your scholarship over the years (perhaps, alongside changes that have taken place in Indonesia) and share how it has led you to ask the questions that you do in this book. More specifically, how do you see this book relating to and/or departing from your earlier work?

Joseph Errington: I left college with an interest in generative grammar, then the emerging high theory of Language. But I wanted also to engage with a little-known ‘exotic’ language: Javanese, to which I had casual exposure via the performing arts.  A glitch in class scheduling during my first quarter of graduate work at the U. of Chicago gave me an opening to take Michael Silverstein’s still new course on language and culture.  Under his mentorship I shifted away from formalist paradigms at the core of linguistics to broader, semiotic issues of form and meaning.

Only towards the end of my 3rd year of graduate classwork did I come to grips with the need, prior to fieldwork, for fulltime language study: Indonesian (with John Wolff at Cornell) and then Javanese (at Gajah Mada University in Indonesia).  This kind of lengthy pre-research preparation would likely be impossible now, but served me as a point of a transition from theory to  particulars, and a resource for continuing research. 

After a year of study in the lively town of Jogjakarta, Java, I moved to Surakarta, a royal polity which had been transformed by nationalist dynamics into a bit of a provincial backwater.  Conversations with older (primarily male) members of the town’s old elite often shifted from language and etiquette to the reasons polite Javanese had become a kind of museum curiosity: widely respected, but little known or used.  I became impressed by the ways change/variation in everyday talk was a diffuse, intimate, intersubjective dimension of large-scale social change.  As a point of convergence between linguistic biography and social history, within and across generations, this became a recurring interest in my later work on Javanese/Indonesian bilingualism, and the kinds of Indonesian described in this book.   

Jessica Peng: As is captured by the title, Other Indonesians: Nationalism in an Unnative Language, your book examines speakers of “other-than-standard” Indonesian, a language you suggest ought to be understood as “unnative” (cf. non-native). It is through this vantage point of exploring this overlapping linguistic feature of other-than-standard and unnativeness in provincial towns that you consider how Indonesian enables its speakers to express themselves as members of a national community in pluralistic ways. I wonder if you can explain what you mean when you describe Indonesian as an unnative language. Further, what are the affordances of focusing on those who speak nonstandard varieties of this unnative language to questions of nationalism?

Joe Errington: Native speaker intuition led me to unnative as a term of art before I figured out how English grammar made it more accurate than nonnative.   But its peculiarity gives it rhetorical value for signalling the need to bracket ideologies of native speakership that lack fit with the Indonesian case.   It had an empirical payoff also for framing fine-grained features of biaccentual usage in chapters 2 and 3.  In chapter 4 this accuracy/awkwardness tradeoff played played out in a review of comparative/theoretical approaches to languages-and-nations.  I thought about framing these issues in broadly Bakhtinian terms, but finally decided that Schutz’ quasi-Weberian vocabulary helped make social dimensions of the issue clearer. 

If nothing else, this usage helps identify some of the less obvious naturalizing effects of linguistic nativeness ground for senses of national belonging.

Jessica Peng: Across your analysis of other-than-standard language use among college students in Kupang (Chapter 2) and Pontianak (Chapter 3), I was struck by the ways in which more socially marginalized members of Indonesian society were found to be more oriented towards the regime of the standard. In Kupang, for example, newcomers to the city speak about the values that people back in their rural hometowns place on standard Indonesian. I loved the example of the young newcomer who reminds herself to “flick her tongue” whenever she returns to Alor as to not bring her putatively bad, urban habits of speech back home. Meanwhile, the ethnic Chinese in Pontianak, as a population that has long been perceived as foreign in Indonesia, predominantly use standard Indonesian. I wonder if you can discuss if and how social marginality figures into people’s orientations to the regime of the standard and reflect upon what these examples might suggest about the senses of national belonging felt by these variably marginalized members of the nation?

Joe Errington: Your query raises a paradox darker than that thematized in the book, one illustrated by the Chinese of Pontianak, described in chapter 3.  Some of the most marginalized members of the nation are also those whose use of the national language fits best with the the regime of the standard.  Others live in geopolitically peripheral regions, like NTT, and Papua.  The overtly racial discrimination against fluent Papuan speakers provides obvious, depressing conclusion that hierarchies of language competence may license but do not serve to weaken hierarchies of phenotype. 

Ben Anderson the Indonesianist knew this, and might have referred it to his distinction between nationalism and racism.  Peripheral persons may invest themselves in idea(ls) of a nation biographically through their descendants, who can acquire its language natively as an instrument/symbol/claim to membership.    But such competences, and quasi-official version of nationalism they presuppose, are vulnerable to racist categories–inherited in Indonesia from the Dutch era–that presuppose eternal essences and threats of contamination. 

An upside of this paradox, if there is one, might be Indonesian’s value for overt political mobilization on a subnational basis, as among Dayaks in Kalimantan.  Like the original patriots, they deploy standard Indonesian less to eliminate longstanding prejudice than mitigate its effects.   But they do so in circumstances of marginalization different from those that oppress other groups.

Jessica Peng: At the end of the book, you offer an exciting, revised perspective of the Indonesian story, suggesting that while the widespread state institutionalization of “good and true Indonesian” (Bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar) during the New Order era “began as a project oriented to the kinds of modernity found in the West,” the project “has had the unintended result of enabling a plurality of Indonesians” (p. 92). You further suggest that this plurality of Indonesian might serve as “a harbinger for other nations’ ongoing linguistic engagements with globalization” (p. 78). I’d love to invite you to say more about what the Indonesian case might teach us about the possibilities of “plural unities,” as well as share how you hope readers (of various kinds and across different contexts) might take up the insights put forth in this book.

Joe Errington: To keep the book brief, and open to a wider audience, I did not develop this comparison with Silverstein’s (2016) notion of logocratic nation-states (prototypically, the US).  The absence of such a logocracy, I note in chapter 1, leads some to regard Indonesian as peculiar or perhaps deficient.   But it enables also local senses of national belonging.  

In post-new Order Indonesia, as in other nations, post-print mediatizations of (national) languages are circulating—being produced and perceived—through multiple voicings, both plural and translocal.   In chapter 4 I cite sociolinguistic research in Europe which suggests that these dynamics are eroding print-literate logocracies.  But because Indonesia(n) never had this kind of logocracy it might provide a model for other languages which are more overtly plural and less obviously emblematic of shared national identity.

2016    Standards, styles, and signs of the social self. Keynote address, Conference on “Language, Indexicality, and Belonging: Inaugural conference on linguistic anthropology,” Stephen Leonard et al., organizers. Somerville College, University of Oxford, 8 April. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 9(1). https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/anthro/documents/media/jaso9_1_2017_134_164.pdf/.

Victoria Bernal, Katrien Pype, and Daivi Rodima-Taylor on their edited volume

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https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BernalCryptopolitics

In our new edited volume Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media (Berghahn Books, 2023) we propose the term “cryptopolitics” to draw attention to the significance of hidden information, double meanings, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages in negotiating power dynamics. Focusing on African societies, the volume brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media to consider public culture, sociality, and power in all its forms, illustrating the analytical potential of cryptopolitics to elucidate intimate relationships, political protest, and economic strategies in the digital age.

What is cryptopolitics?

Cryptopolitics manifests as secrets, hidden knowledge, skeptical interpretations, and conspiracy theories, which are at the heart of social and political life. Secrecy and decoding are deployed to produce boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, and cryptopolitics are therefore intimately entangled with inequality and difference. Cryptopolitics involves managing communication in ways that play off ambiguity and the distinction between concealed and overt information. Secrecy, deception, and ambiguity are not novel, but cryptopolitics brings these kinds of activities into view under a unified conceptual framework that reveals how they are deployed politically. It focuses attention on the workings of the hidden and the deceptive in relations of power – trying to make sense of signs and forms that obscure and shield.

Cryptopolitics in the era of digital media:

Cryptopolitics takes novel forms and has new consequences when it enters society through digital media. While digital media seemed to promise a new age of transparency and open access to information, it has also created new sources of ambiguity and deception. The recent rise in fake news, conspiracy theories, and misinformation draws attention to powerful ambiguities manipulated for political ends. We suggest that political conflicts, elections, revolt, and other flashpoints bring cryptopolitics dramatically to the fore. Furthermore, everyday interactions and interpersonal relationships are also fields for cryptopolitics as people increasingly manage their connections with others through revelation and concealment, especially as they conduct their lives across online worlds. What needs to be hidden from whom, and what gains power or protection from being hidden, depends on the social and political context. We suggest that anthropological and ethnographic perspectives are therefore key to understanding the dynamics of cryptopolitics in any given situation.

New forms of cryptopolitics emerge with digital media—including the veiled, complicit partnerships between states and technology companies that enable surveillance or internet shutdowns in times of elections or other tense political moments, as it happens frequently in Africa and throughout the Global South. A growing number of states rely on telecommunication and technology companies to help limit the circulation of information that threatens their political power. States also seek to use data collected by tech companies for various political ends. In both these efforts the official rationale is often that of what is framed as security, a paramount contemporary domain of cryptopolitics since threats and espionage produce and are produced by secrecy and suspicion.

Why Africa?

This edited volume employs the concept of cryptopolitics as a lens that helps bring into focus a dynamic of power and communication that operates in a wide array of settings. It explores cryptopolitics in diverse African contexts through ethnographic perspectives and in-depth qualitative studies. The authors situate their work at the intersection of cultural anthropology, media studies, and African studies. We contend that ethnographies of African digital cultures provide fertile ground for the exploration of cryptopolitics. Indirectness and the cryptic have been preferred forms of communication in many areas of postcolonial Africa, where citizens often have a long history of distrusting their leaders. Digital media, consumed mostly through smart phones, has rapidly become central to African politics and social life: private companies, humanitarian organizations, religious communities, families and other networks rely on digital technology in one way or another. 

Cryptopolitics itself is not a new phenomenon. Discussions about encryption, fake accounts, and disinformation remind us that deliberate confusion, doublespeak, distrust, and deciphering are often part of human interaction and are always embedded in strategies of power. At the same time, we should keep in mind that cryptopolitics is foundational to the digitized world, as technologies amplify the duality of concealment and revelation, and also magnify the scale, scope, and set of stakeholders associated with any particular instance. In our book, we employ the concept of “cryptopolitics” as an analytical space that is fruitful for new investigations in contemporary power configurations. We hope that the chapters of this volume can serve as an inspiration to engage in similar research beyond the African continent.

Digital technologies and social media platforms:

Digital technologies have fostered new surveillance and security measures used by states and private companies. These stockpiles of data are powerful public secrets that are known of yet hidden from citizens: a form of cryptopolitics. The objection of African governments and the U.S. government to the encryption of communications is testimony to the power that rests in information and in data. Struggles over who controls what is known, what can be revealed, by whom and to whom are being waged globally. 

Such new power formations lead to new power struggles, as the tensions between the European Union and American platform companies show. They also generate new strategies and tactics of resistance. All over the world, to varying degrees, people engage in new, digital and non-digital practices in efforts to escape repression, whether enacted by the state or other actors of authority.

The chapters of this book use cryptopolitics as a tool to illuminate the underlying discourses of power and powerlessness that are mediated by the novel technologies. Enabling new strategies of concealing and revealing information and intentions, the digital technologies are shown to disrupt and reconfigure people’s communicative practices and lifeworlds. However, the chapters also show that the emerging virtual public sphere that allows people to connect through a variety of new media, should not be seen as always enabling free speech and empowerment, but is shaped by complex interaction between a variety of actors—individual and collective, public and private. We can therefore see how cryptopolitical practices are anchored in local cultures and social norms, but also interlink online and offline, public and intimate socialities.

Our rich empirical cases:

This anthology brings together original research on diverse countries in Africa and diasporas, including Somalia, Eritrea, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Mali, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. All chapters examine the role of emerging digital technologies and platforms in mediating knowledge production. A common theme is the relationship between the state and society with particular attention to conflicts, migration, ethnic rivalries, and authoritarian systems. The chapters demonstrate how political and social practices are always anchored in local sociality, and suggest that the analysis of the role of social media in Africa is often central to understanding the present-day cryptopolitical dynamics between the powerless and powerful.

The rise of digital communicative platforms can be seen as central to contemporary activities of obfuscation and revelation—offering new possibilities for the empowerment of the marginal, but also creating new mechanisms of surveillance and control. The book casts light on the emerging dynamics of digital platforms in Africa that are often characterized by ambivalent implications to power and agency—the ability of individuals to make their own choices and act upon them. Various social media and internet search platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Google, increasingly feature as an arena for construction and negotiation of alternative meanings and strategies of resistance.  

Our anthology explores the new digital publics that emerge on diverse global and local social media platforms to question and contest the political legitimacy and narratives of the state. It draws attention to important continuities in political cultures, and the ways long-standing cryptopolitical understandings and practices are adapted to digital media. The chapters of our book provide rich empirical material to illustrate these topics. For example, social media in Burundi draws on the patterns of selective concealing that are part of the cultural repertoire in Burundian politics, while providing citizens with new avenues to combat the machinations and violence of the state. In post-conflict Somalia, the enduring struggles to reify and strategically manipulate otherwise fluid and contextual clan identities have been transferred to the digital world of algorithmic search engines. Communication on Congolese digital platforms is shaped by a locally specific aesthetic of ambiguity that foregrounds socially conditioned modes of concealment and revelation, forming an important strategy for managing personal relationships. New digital technologies of identification aimed at regulating and surveilling migrants in Kenya give rise to new strategies among Somali and Burundi refugees who evade and manipulate the state authorities, while providing them with informal ways to draw on their customary ties of sociality and mutual security. Among Eritreans and the diaspora, the double meanings and ambiguities of humor both mirror and decode the cryptopolitics in the narratives of the authoritarian state and expose these to public scrutiny.

While digital media may render participation in political and economic governance more accessible to the masses, the outcomes remain contested and ambiguous. Thus, for example, digital platforms such as Twitter have disrupted state control over the circulation of information in Kenya and introduced new, participatory practices of engaging with institutional politics. At the same time, digital platforms also entail new opportunities for the state to strengthen its repressive regime. Similarly, the restrictions and freedoms produced by the engagement of the users with Western-owned BigTech platforms that often dominate the digital economy landscape in Africa are also ambivalent and context-dependent. In South Africa and Kenya, for example, WhatsApp-mediated informal savings groups have emerged as an alternative to digital group accounts offered by commercial banks and dedicated FinTech platforms. While they build on vernacular templates of mutuality and allow broader financial access to the masses, they have also given rise to rapidly spreading scams, and data capture by technology companies. Fundraising campaigns increasingly combine WhatsApp with offline contribution networks and mobile payment channels, demonstrating the continued importance of integrating offline and online modes of livelihood management. As the chapters show, digital publics in Africa are thus constituted through multiple materialities and communicative forms, and digital spaces shaped by a variety of actors that include individual users, governments, civil society organizations, diasporas, and increasingly, technology companies and investors.

Cryptopolitics and ethnographic fieldwork:

Cryptopolitics is not only a topic to study in the lifeworlds of our research subjects. Collecting ethnographic data and publishing research involves strategies of exposing, concealing and obscuring as well. As anthropologists, we have sometimes failed to acknowledge the politics of ethnographic research and scholarship, and the local and global power relations that shape our engagement with the people we write about.

Our usage of pseudonyms or the alterations of various idiosyncratic characteristics of local people with whom we interact are also practices of cryptopolitics, of producing layers of meaning, of hiding and obscuring so that our interlocutors or our relationships with them are not harmed. These processes of anthropological research are well-known. Yet, with the ubiquity of social media, practices of data collection, contacting interlocutors, and maintaining relationships with them are constantly being transformed. Scholars increasingly need to reflect on how digitally stored ethnographic material will be protected from risks such as data hacking or theft. Just as citizens are not always fully in control of the data flow of data they consciously produce or inadvertently generate, neither are researchers. All this points to a need for new approaches and perspectives in the discipline that would allow for more balanced disclosures in an environment of mutual dialogue and respect, to replace the old, extractive modes of knowledge-making.

Lisa Messeri on her book, In the Land of the Unreal

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https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-land-of-the-unreal

Stefan Helmreich: Your first book, Placing Outer Space, asked not only how place was imagined on and for such off-Earth entities as exoplanets, but also placed such imaginations within the (mostly) American cultural contexts within which they emerged. In In The Land of the Unreal, you again place a technoscientific imagination with respect to a social address. This time the technoscientific object is virtual reality and the place is Los Angeles. Can you get us up to speed on what difference LA makes to the VR that is created there?

Lisa Messeri: Thanks, Stefan. That comparison between the two books is a great place to start. As you point out, in both books I’m interested in the relationship between place and technoscientific endeavors. In the first, I catalogued how scientific elites made place in the cosmos. In this one, I flipped figure and ground and was interested in how place – in the sense of geographic location – shaped technological work. Ethnographically, it was quickly apparent that conversations and development around VR in specific and tech more generally in LA felt different from my prior experiences in Silicon Valley (and spending a decade immersed in MIT’s tech culture). In the book, I therefore attempt to tease out LA’s technological terroir; the features of local geography, history, and expertise that cultivate a different sensibility around tech. Hollywood’s impact on the political economy of LA is of course a driving factor, but so is the longer history of the region’s aerospace and military histories that, as I came to understand, have long been entangled with the entertainment industry. Alongside these different institutional configurations for tech development is also the simple fact of a geographic removal that provided LA’s VR scene space to be something slightly different than San Francisco’s Silicon Valley dominated activities. To be clear, the differences I attribute to place’s influence on tech development and conversations are subtle. They slowly became apparent throughout a year of ethnographic research. On the surface, one could find many connections between VR as it existed in LA and other globally situated hot spots. But teasing out these subtle differences became essential for understanding how particularly claims about VR – for example, that it could supposedly be an empathy machine – came to hold power, both in LA and beyond.

Stefan Helmreich: Anthropologists have taken an interest in virtual realities for a spell now. I think of early speculations in 1990s cyborg anthropology. And then I turn to Tom Boellstorff’s 2008 Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human and Thomas Malaby’s 2011 Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life— which took somewhat opposed approaches, with Boellstorff doing his fieldwork “in” Second Life and Malaby looking at the physical workplace of Linden Labs. I wonder if you might say something about how you think about the relationship — or, even, difference? — between ethnography in virtual reality and ethnography about virtual reality.

Lisa Messeri: When I first began this project (I can offer my NSF proposal as proof!), I imagined I’d be studying the institutions that develop VR, following Malaby, and the sociality of the virtual, following Boellstorff. While such a “mixed reality” project is possible and admirable, it quickly became clear that they require distinct methods and do not necessarily have intuitive points of connection. In the end, I conducted all of my fieldwork IRL and so even though this is an ethnography about virtual reality (and, to some extent, aims at theorizing the virtual) it is not a virtual/digital ethnography. This was partly because the VR experiences whose creation I was documenting were largely cinematic VR rather than social VR; meaning they were experienced individually and not part of a persistent, inhabited virtual world. While I did a lot of VR during my fieldwork, the sociality I was studying as an anthropologist all occurred outside of the headset.

This distinction is really important, as Boellstorff points out in a recent article, “Toward Anthropologies of the Metaverse.” So maybe the metaverse has already peaked and fallen, but the point he is making is that the virtual (be it Second Life or Meta’s Metaverse) is not necessarily something that is only experienceable in virtual reality. When these two are conflated, the field that is taken to be the virtual or the metaverse is prematurely constricted. I agree with this, but the article limits anthropologies of the metaverse (perhaps we will update this to include anthropologies of spatial computing, in light of Apple’s Vision Pro) to be studies of virtual (in headset or not) sociality. Here I would interject and suggest that anthropology’s potential is to create an anthropology of the virtual/metaverse/spatial computing that capaciously includes both ethnography in the virtual and ethnographies about the virtual. Indeed, the conflation Boellstorff points out between the virtual and virtual reality is ethnographically interesting! How might we understand Apple’s and Meta’s insistence that the future they are promising comes in the form of a headset? And how do we understand the communities that form around the promises of such futures (whether they are formed in good faith [to make a quick buck] or not)? We need to study both the makers of technology and the users of technology. Even if this is not a single project for one investigator, they are necessarily complimentary, as Boellstorff and Malaby’s initial work on Second Life demonstrated.

Stefan Helmreich: Your book is keen to look at the work of women innovators in VR, especially in the immediate (and at the time very encouraging) aftermath of #MeToo. You encountered some women who made claims that their work might generate more compassionate technological development — claims that you usefully complicate by directing the reader to feminist work on the multiple and not always straightforward politics that arrive any time notions of care are invoked. Can you tell us what it was like to be in conversation with some of these innovators — in ways that both heard them out and that offered your own feminist STS expertise to the discussion?

Lisa Messeri: My biggest concern at the start of this project was that I knew I would be in conversation with people whose VR projects I might not fully be behind. After all, the impetus for this project was trying to understand how a community comes to believe that their technology can make the world a better place. Given ALL the studies we have about how well-meaning technologists (and technologies) often … do the opposite, I was very aware of my positionality. Therefore, going into the field, my strategy was that for those who would let me be a participant observer, I would take the participation seriously. I was not going to sit back with my notebook and document practices that (unintentionally!) inscribed problematic politics into VR experiences, but I was going to participate – I was going to offer my feminist STS lens as a resource for these teams. A small example was when I was working on a VR experience about a mission to Mars, I was asked to read a preliminary script. It was riddled with references to “colonizing” Mars. I suggested we find other language, noting how that loaded metaphor presupposes certain social (including human-nonhuman) relations. We rewrote the script and that conversation led to a slightly different ethos behind the fictional Mars world that continued to be built out. Anyway, that was an easy enactment of participation.

There were harder situations where projects were admirable – and too far along in their development to change – but I could see potential pitfalls. I still wanted to document these cases, as it was important that I hear the creators out (as you say) and really try to understand the well-meaning intention behind such projects. As my year of fieldwork progressed, and as these relationships became more trusting, I would be able to discuss some of my concerns and never was there a case where these concerns were rejected. And most of the time, these concerns weren’t even a surprise but ones that the innovators themselves had been privately puzzling over.

When it came to writing, I employed several strategies to layer in the critique. Sometimes, my interlocutors would open the door to critique with their own observations. Other times, I made the object of critique not individuals or even projects, but the structures and situations that make potentially harmful VR experiences seem potentially helpful.

Stefan Helmreich: “Unreal” — Can you talk about what this/word concept means from the point of view of your interlocutors? How and where do their uses of the term resonate — and not — with your use of the idea?

Lisa Messeri: The unreal got stuck in my brain really early in fieldwork. I had gone on a studio tour at Paramount and our guide played a clip from the 1961 Jerry Lewis movie The Errand Boy, which began with an arial shot of Los Angeles that slowly zoomed in on Paramount studio. A voiceover narrated, “This is Hollywood. Land of the real and the unreal.” This was in my mind as I began to better understand LA as a city and VR as a technology. The unreal would pop up in weird places. Usually it was a colloquialism, exclaiming that a really cool VR experience was “unreal.” But after fieldwork, I also came across a 2016 marketing report that was tracing the trend of “unrealities.” This trend included escape rooms and astrology and Snapchat filters and meditation retreats and, of course, virtual reality. These things are all appealing not exclusively because of the fantasy they offer, but because that fantasy is experienced in dialogue with a reality that is being pushed against. In the book, I define the unreal as that which “holds in tension an extraordinary rendering of reality with what might be thought of as an everyday reality.” There have always been multiple realties, but the unreal marks moments when such multiplicity demands attention. So, saying a VR experience is “unreal” is from a delight in knowing your body was in the physical world but having an experience that is deeply at odds with those surroundings.

As I was conducting fieldwork in 2018 – right in the middle of the Trump presidency and its explosion of alternative facts – I marked US politics as also unreal, in so far as many liberals struggled to comprehend Trump’s “extraordinary rendering of reality” with how they understood reality. This political reading comes from an intellectual genealogy of theorizing US politics from LA, from Baudrillard and Eco’s hyperreal to Soja’s real-and-imagined thirdspace. To these 20th century theories, I add the 21st century twist of the unreal.

Stefan Helmreich: You write in the book about VR boosters as sometimes eager to pitch their projects as in the service of empathy. And you point us to the fact that the register of empathy can be a way of avoiding questions to do with institutions, the distribution of resources, politics — with things beyond the scale of the sheerly well-meaning individual. The silicon panic of our time is to do with generative AI — and some thinkers, like Sherry Turkle, have kept their eyes on the rise of tools promising artificial intimacy, thinking here about therapy chatbots that promise artificial empathy. What, if anything, do you think recent AI development has done for/to the promises or VR? Is empathy still important? Or are other terms of conversation now surfacing?

Lisa Messeri: When I was doing fieldwork, VR was in frequent conversation with blockchain and AI as a triumvirate that would usher in the future. I mention this to mark that they are part of the same ecology – and draw on many of the same institutions, resources, people, and so on. So in general, much of what I write about in my book is a primer for today’s genAI moment. And the persistence of empathy as a category is a frightening reminder! An October 7, 2023 headline from the Wall Street Journal asked “Can AI do Empathy Even Better than Humans?”

But all the thinking that has been done about VR and empathy gives us a head start on how to think about AI and empathy. Turkle was one of the first thinkers I looked to when getting at the empathy angle. In a chapter in which she responds directly to claims that VR is an empathy machine, she worries that “the feeling of conversation becomes conversation enough.” Denny Profitt, a psychologist at UVA who provided me with my first exposure to VR, observed to me sometime around 2015 that VR empathy experiences were potentially dangerous because they could induce a feeling of false catharsis. In caring deeply, do you forget to actually act in a way that remedies the problem? Or as Nakamura has put it, what is the morality of “feeling good about feeling bad”?

In figuring out how to think about empathy – be it AI- or VR-induced – I have been guided by Atanasoski and Vora’s Surrogate Humanity. They show how technologies that seek to replace or conceal human labor very often replicate dehumanizing logics of race, gender, and colonialism. So, yes, we need to be incredibly wary of VR that promises instant empathy or AI that does empathy better than a human. But, one of the case studies of my book suggests that replacing or concealing human labor isn’t the only strategy for deploying VR (or possibly AI). Should these technologies instead be used to augment human labor, perhaps there are less destructive applications of these tools. In other words, I don’t think there is something inherently bad about attempts to leverage technologies in an effort to help people and situations become better. In fact, I think such pursuits, done genuinely, are admirable! However, social problems will never have exclusively technological solutions and therefore thinking of solutions in which technologies augment – rather than replace – human labor and sociality seems to be a plausible way forward.

And that will be the hopeful note with which I end this Q&A!