Interview by Erving Goffman’s ghost, on the assumption that he would have had opinions about this research
Erving Goffman: Why, when I stated multiple times during my life that the goal was to study sociology and not sociologists, did you even write this book?
Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz: I should clarify at the start that I did not set out to write this book. In fact, my goal was not to study your life so much as your ideas. Lots of others have written about your ideas (and your life), but there has been surprisingly little concern about the context within which those ideas were developed. I have previously published on several aspects of disciplinary history, including on “The role of theory groups in the lives of ideas.” So, it made sense to me to sort out more than had been written previously about the invisible college you built. And, of course, once I started, the project just grew.
Originally, I was asked to present a paper in honor of the 100th anniversary of your birth; once that was published in Portuguese, I wanted an English version to publish as well. The original presentation was short, including only a few projects, and focusing on a few colleagues, all based at the University of Pennsylvania. But once I got started, I kept learning more, both about other projects at Penn, involving a much larger number of colleagues across many disciplines, and also about projects in which you had been involved before or concurrent with your time at Penn.
Erving Goffman: How, given that I did not deposit my papers anywhere, did you even do this research?
Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz: First, I was a graduate student at Penn across the years you were based there and so knew some things that were not generally discussed or written about by others. That was enough to get me started. Second, even though you did not donate your papers to any archive, many of your colleagues did. Just to list a few examples: Dell Hymes, Virginia Hymes, Sol Worth, Ward Goodenough, Anthony Wallace, and Henry Glassie, all of whom overlapped with you at Penn; Allen Grimshaw, Thomas Sebeok, and Richard Bauman at Indiana; Alan Dundes at Berkeley; Everett Hughes and David Schneider at Chicago. And these days, it is quite easy to use digital guides posted online to discover what archive has what materials. In addition, several people have published details about what was happening in projects that involved you, such as John Szwed in writing about the Center for Urban Ethnography, when he described the way in which you helped him write up the original grant proposal. And, in a few cases, I conducted interviews to clarify details that were not described elsewhere.
Erving Goffman: Given that you did all this research, what did you actually learn?
Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz: Well, I learned some things about you, as well as some things about Penn, invisible colleges, multi- vs. interdisciplinarity, and disciplinary history generally.
About you: I had not known the role you played in early sociolinguistics, even though I thought I knew something about that topic. I never would have named you as a sociolinguist before this research, but you were “in the room” for multiple critical early steps in the development of that research strand. I learned about the surprisingly large group of people with whom you collaborated in various ways over decades, and the ways in which people who are not generally recognized as a theory group (or even overlapping theory groups) worked together, not once, but on a series of projects, some more and some less successful. While the fact that theory groups need both intellectual and organizational leadership had been pointed out previously by others, your frequent role as what you labeled a “carper” (what others more typically call a respondent), had not been documented. Your ability to synthesize what had been learned as the result of a conference, and to outline the next steps, was impressive, and shows up a surprising number of times. Again, this was not something previously noted by prior authors. It did, however, show a way to help move ideas along significantly without being the organizer of an event (although you also played that role far more often than previously acknowledged.) You looked beyond disciplinary boundaries for the best and the brightest stars – and they were all happy to work with you.
More generally: I learned not only something about invisible colleges (especially the ways in which they can be built up gradually, with overlapping sets of members engaging in multiple projects) but also about the differences between multi- and interdisciplinary projects. I was surprised by the fact that more of the latter were successful than the former (something meriting further study in other contexts).
About Penn: I knew that Penn was a wonderful graduate school for me, but through this project I discovered just how much the administration explicitly encouraged interdisciplinarity, both for faculty members and students. And just how successful some of the projects they supported turned out to be. The scholars who participated in the projects described in the book were willing to ask questions beyond the obvious topics for the disciplines in which they had been trained, and/or into which they had been hired.
About failure: As one of the projects described in detail (the Multiple Analysis Project, or MAP, sponsored by Grimshaw at Indiana, not someone at Penn) failed in most ways – eventually completed, it took decades and by the time it was published, no one cared – that serves as a fascinating example of just how much we can learn from failure. The implication is that we ought to study failure more often – if nothing else, it might be a way to ensure more successes.
About disciplinary history: I had used archives previously, but this project reiterated how important it is to look at contemporary documentation rather than making assumptions or accepting received wisdom. It is only when all the pieces are put together—publications and unpublished reports, agendas and meeting minutes, interviews and correspondence—that the full story is most likely to be understood.
Finally, the project reiterated for me that ideas do not stand on their own. They cannot be generated, discussed, or transmitted except through the agency of not one but multiple people. Even brilliant ideas, even yours.
Erving Goffman: Granted you have learned some things. But who will care? Who will make the time to read it, and why should they bother?
Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz: It is absolutely true that an astonishing number of books about you and your work already have been published at this point, so perhaps it is unlikely anyone will want to read yet another. Yet perhaps the fact that your story so clearly demonstrates how invisible colleges work, and how interdisciplinarity works, and how ideas are shared and expanded through a network of scholars, will be what convinces people to make time for it. For me, better understanding why we study the things we do, in the ways we take for granted, explains much of why I make time to study disciplinary history.
Ifigeneia Gianne: What is the central focus and argument of your book on Tantsi, and why did you select this album as an ethnographic lens for Ukraine’s late Soviet cultural history?
Maria Sonevytsky: In 2019, I was approached by the editor of the 33 1/3 Europe series, Fabian Holt, and asked whether I would pitch an idea for the series based on a Ukrainian album. That’s the conceit of the 33 1/3 series – each short book is dedicated to one album. I was excited by the invitation but then confronted a small crisis: what album should be (at least for the foreseeable future), the representativeUkrainian album represented in the series?
Honestly, my first thought, which I thought was too idiosyncratic to take seriously, was VV’s Tantsi, if only because of my longstanding fascination with the title song and accompanying music video: I simply wanted to know more about this strange artifact and to understand the late Soviet social world from which it emerged a little better. But then I listed all the amazing Ukrainian albums I love. I crowdsourced on social media and among friends. I debated with myself and some of them about the downsides of picking something as obscure as Tantsi, when I could have picked something much more mainstream and/or contemporary, like the Ukrainian rapper Alyona Alyona’s debut album Pushka (2019), or the “ethno-chaos” band DakhaBrakha’s Light (2010), or even the important Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy’s Model (2001) or Gloria (2005). And then I considered Soviet Ukrainian albums I love, like The Marenych Trio’s 1979 record (the Peter, Paul, and Mary of Ukrainian state-sanctioned folklore), or the cosmic folk trio Golden Keys (Золоті Ключі) and their Soviet-era recordings, or the amazing from-the-vault reissues put out by labels like the Kyiv-based Shukai. In short, it felt weighty to settle on one.
At the same time, I had already put out feelers to VV’s original band members and started to see that this research might be possible—while not everyone associated with the band at that time was willing to speak to me, many people, including the lead singer and original bass player, were. I was on sabbatical in Kyiv with my family that year, and was falling freshly in love with that amazing city. The Tantsi idea also became a way to focus on Kyiv as a dynamic urban space in late Soviet society. And then I had a moment of researcher’s serendipity in which a late Soviet map of the Kyiv Underground fell practically into my lap out of a random encounter on the street (I write about this in the book). That map, made by Ukraine’s foremost rock journalist at the time, superimposes the network of late Soviet rock, jazz, punk, and indie bands onto a map of the literal Kyiv Metro. I realized I needed a lot of help to decode it, just to orient myself. So that sent me down the first deep rabbit hole, but also helped me justify my choice. VV was depicted as the central node in the network of lines of musical-aesthetic influence on the map. If they were so central to this Kyiv Underground, maybe the choice wasn’t so idiosyncratic after all.
It’s funny because the individual who demystified that map for me more than anyone else, Oleksandr Rudiachenko—who had been an influential newspaper editor in the 1980s and instrumental in the Tantsi cassette’s circulation through the Kyiv Underground—told me in an early conversation that I was making the wrong choice by choosing Tantsi. He worried that I had failed to select an album that would do Ukrainian music justice. But now, having written the book, I see how Tantsi also allowed me—as a Cold War kid—to revisit the 1980s, and to make sense of a part of Ukrainian cultural history not yet explored deeply in scholarship. Tantsi is more than just the story of an odd and hastily recorded semi-illicit cassette album that traveled through networks of late Soviet nonconformists; it is a monument to a time and place that is so often misrepresented along stark or reductive Cold War imaginaries. It was a moment inhabited by people who faced historically specific constraints, and acted in novel ways within and against them.
Ultimately Tantsi pulled me more strongly than anything on my list because I wanted to attempt to humanize that late Soviet period by exploring what I saw as weird and cool people and their weird and cool Kyivan scene. So the choice was also subjective: I liked the music and band’s affect. I also wanted to evaluate how those last years of the Soviet experiment in Ukraine are remembered today. Tantsi became the focal point for triangulating among the rather scattered Soviet historical accounts of this scene (the fragments that exist in official archives and the more robust informal archives created by fans), against the first-hand recollections of people who were there at the time; and to interpret how volatile memory politics complicate the picture. Of course, the Russian full-scale invasion of 2022, which occurred while I was about 75% of the way through the first full draft, surfaced difficult questions about which leg of that methodological stool to lean on: how to evaluate the scattered archives against the current testimonies, especially now that the question of Russian revanchist imperialism was on the forefront of everyone’s mind.
Ifigeneia Gianne: In paraphrasing the band’s declaration, “Ok fine, we will dance, but we will do it in our ungovernable way,” (p. 5) you foreground a tension between embodied joy and political resistance. How do you understand this unruliness, not only as a musical aesthetic, but as a cultural stance, emerging within the specific post-Soviet moment? To what extent might Tantsi be read as enacting a form of sonic sovereignty through its genre-bending performance?
Maria Sonevytsky: I often think of the line that Sashko Pipa, VV’s bass player and (in my view) chief philosopher in the 1980s, repeated to me: “We simply made the music we wanted to hear.” The Soviet 1980s were characterized by so many governmental reforms and not-always-durable constraints—rules that seemed to change weekly and often arbitrarily, as I was told by a VV superfan at the time—that these young creative punks brilliantly played against them, to great and often hilarious effect. The Soviet Party-State in the mid 1980s was a gerontocracy. It maintained a sclerotic censorship regime and had declared a War on Rock that identified neofascist themes and images in Western bands like AC/DC, 10cc, and Sparks. It had its Leninist Youth League, the Komsomol, sponsor ideologically correct dance parties at government-controlled Houses of Culture, and it expected dutiful Soviet youth to attend these discotheques where they would dance, I suppose, in an ideologically correct way.
The song “Tantsi” ludicrously skewers these expectations placed upon young people by the state – the song is an over-the-top fantasy of dancing at the House of Culture after a long hard week of work. In the music video, the band members dance in their raucous way, juxtaposing their manic movement against scenes of the band standing stock still, shoulder-to-shoulder in a line. In the video, and in live performances at the time, they would bring out familiar signage in the form of the agitprop parade banner, but instead of a Soviet political slogan, the banner read “dances” (tantsi). The effect is classic stiob, a form of late Soviet satire written about perhaps most influentially by Alexei Yurchak in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, his study of the last (mostly Russian) Soviet generation. Stiob, a form of extreme satire that works by overidentifying with its target, is meant to blur the lines between complicity and protest. “Tantsi” the song, and many of the songs on Tantsi the album—“There Were Days,” “Politrok,” “Polonyna,” etc.—do this expertly, perfecting the art of total stiob.
VV and their allies did not think, at the time, that they were enacting any deliberate kind of politics. Even in interviews done in 2020, and 2022, people laughed if I asked this too pointedly: “was this the music of resistance?” It is of course a romantic idea—rock as resistance is a Cold War trope—but I was struck by how everyone I interviewed sought to nuance that idea, or rejected it out of hand. Some people reflected that their awareness of the political effect of the music came later, as new frames emerged in the post-Soviet 1990s that allowed them to reinterpret what they had been doing back then—whether within what we could call decolonizing frameworks (for many, this was the rather personal confrontation with internalized inferiority instilled through Soviet Russo-supremacy), within emergent civic nationalist frameworks, or in the new political economic frames afforded through the explosion of wild capitalism and commercial music industries. In the conclusion, I refer to their politics across these temporal frames as “accidental anti-imperialism.”
The band members of VV, and the allies and fans that surrounded them, were not particularly fearful of the state. This was not the Stalinist 1940s. Yes, one of Ukraine’s brightest poetic lights, Vasyl Stus, died in a labor camp in 1985 at the age of 47, but most Ukrainians at the time did not know that because the state suppressed such information. Yes, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor had irradiated much of Ukraine and Belarus and displaced some of its population in April 1986, but to the punks, this confirmed the state officials’ incompetence and hypocrisy; these were not the people leading contemporary so-called eco-nationalist movements in Ukraine. The members of VV and the Kyiv Underground tusovska went to the Balka black market to trade in illicit records expecting, almost ritualistically,that it would be broken up by the police every week. They went anyway and spotted their young hip professors there; they saw their friends from the shows and the cafes; they found the music they wanted to hear there. Yes, they thought the state was irredeemably corrupt, but they also thought it was feckless.
If we read Tantsi as enacting some kind of incipient “sonic sovereignty” in the 1980s, we can appreciate the range of ways in which this music was received in its time and place: while many cultural elites dismissed or decried it as punk grotesque, or as demeaning to Ukrainian culture, others recognized it as exorcising the demons of a colonized subjectivity, of the inferiority complex instilled by centuries of Russocentric messaging that overtly or obliquely demeaned the Ukrainian language and questioned the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and culture —as the future culture minister of post-Soviet Ukraine, Ivan Dzyuba, reportedly did. Dzyuba perceived the punk satire of the Tantsi music video to be a valuable step in Ukrainian culture’s emergence from centuries of structurally unfavorable comparison to culture produced in the Russian imperial metropoles. It is easy now to assume that this was a dominant position at the time, but I try in the book to take seriously what people who were there then told me: this was about revealing hypocrisy and reveling in the creative possibilities that the contradictoriness of daily life afforded much more than it was about attempting to bring about a change in political conditions. This was something more elemental for many young punks. As Eugene Hütz—then a teenaged VV superfan, now the frontman of Gogol Bordello, poignantly explained to me over a series of conversations—VV allowed for a kind of shared recognition: this irreverent punk display, with its hybrid language and its murky Ukrainian themes and its obscure messaging and its sense of humor, is ours.
Ifigeneia Gianne: You reflect on growing up in the Ukrainian diaspora and describe the affective dissonance between a romanticized Ukraine and the country you came to know through fieldwork. How did that personal and diasporic vantage point shape your approach to the album and your interpretation of its cultural significance?
Maria Sonevytsky: In graduate school, I first read Sherry Ortner’s famous essay that asserts that ethnography attempts to apprehend social worlds “using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing.” That formulation remains an anchor point for me, it confronts a core instability in our scholarly accounts that simultaneously contributes to the truthfulness of what we do as anthropologists. So yes, my position vis-à-vis the object of study is always something I want to foreground, so that the reader has some sense of who the self is that mediates the knowing in any given project.
In this book, I write in the opening pages about how astonished I was when I first heard the song “Tantsi,” and later again when I saw the video, because it fundamentally shook up the gray-scale imaginary I had of late Soviet Kyiv—it infused the scene with vivid color (even though the music video is in black and white!). I was born in 1981 into a family of political refugees from Soviet power, who appreciated Reagan’s tough stance against the “evil empire.” From early childhood, I was inculcated with a strong sense of my Ukrainian heritage, of my duty to this imaginary elsewhere. I possessed a dual sense of this Ukrainian elsewhere: on one hand, it was a place of radiant beauty, endless sunflower fields, folk songs, a halcyon and mythical homeland, round dances, freedom-loving anti-imperial fighters, potato dumplings that we called varenyki instead of pierogies, a place proud of its 19th century poet-hero who rose from serfdom to articulate an ideal of democratic statehood. Second, it was a place sucked bone-dry through cycles of repression, Russian domination, mass violence, and Soviet hypocrisy. This vision of Soviet Ukraine was of a captive society; it was thuggish, corrupted, gray.
When I started to travel to Ukraine—first, as a child with my family; then independently, as a teenager; and eventually as a researcher—I was always negotiating between these two incommensurate visions. How to square my beloved aunt’s warm recollections of being a competitive cyclist in the Soviet 1960s if everything was always so sad and hopeless? How to make sense of the conviviality of people I encountered in all regions of the country if social life had really been so stunted, so shot through with fear? The “Tantsi” song and video was a kind of evidence that, even as I was growing up on the other side of the Cold War superpower line, there were people familiar to me who had been making noise in Soviet Ukraine. I wanted to know more.
Ifigeneia Gianne: Given the current context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the fact that Tantsi was reissued in 2023, how did the experience of writing and publishing this book during wartime affect how you understood the stakes of the project? Did your interpretations, methods, or sense of what was at stake shift in light of these events?
Maria Sonevytsky: As I mentioned earlier, this presented a real methodological challenge. I did not want current events and the understandable emotion associated with them to overtake my analysis. I began the research in 2019, and by late February of 2022, I had completed practically all of the research. But I did reopen conversations to take stock of whether, how, and to what degree, the full-scale invasion might prompt new interpretations of the moment in history that Tantsi represents. Personally speaking, the full-scale invasion knocked all the wind out of the project for me initially. It felt pointless to write a book like this when Ukraine’s survival as an entity distinct from Russia was in question. I turned my attention elsewhere for a while. But after a few months, some of my interviewees—one of whom, I remember, was by then living as a refugee in Germany—started checking in on the project, wanting to know when it would be done. This motivated me to pick it back up; if it mattered to them, it should matter to me.
The plan to reissue—or really issue, for the first time, formally—the Tantsi album had been in the works since 2020, when Sashko Pipa alerted me to the existence of the master tape from the 1989 session, and I located a label (the wonderful Org Music, based in the US) interested in putting it out. Oleg Skrypka, the lead singer of the band back then and now, gave permission for the remastering to happen, even though he had doubts about the value of the record, since it was made before the band had access to a proper recording studio or high-quality equipment.
It was in the winter and spring of 2022 that we were actively translating the lyrics. I worked on that most intensively with Sashko Pipa as I was in the Hudson Valley, he was in Kyiv. After late February, Pipa generously gave his time (in between air raid alerts, electricity outages, and his volunteer work in territorial defense and drone-building operations) to debate how to best capture the nuances of 1980s jargon—I remember we cracked up trying to render some of the playful obscenities—in translation. I worried that I was asking too much, but Pipa reassured me that this collaboration was giving him a sense of normalcy during a time of intense violence in the city and acute uncertainty for Ukrainians facing Russian aggression.
For me, it has been gratifying to see the instances where Tantsi has been accepted as a small but significant contribution to fleshing out the late Soviet Ukrainian social world. Because the album is so emblematic of its time, I think it resists being easily co-opted into present-day wartime narratives that dehumanize both victims and perpetrators, even as I sympathize especially with Ukrainian rage at the present circumstances. Tantsi is proudly, almost freakishly, Ukrainian, but it is also enmeshed in global popular music histories that traverse the West-East divide, Soviet imperial relationships, changes in the political economic order, and the apparently perennial will of young people to make culture anew.
SherineHamdy: Roxanne, I can’t believe the sequel to Death in a Nutshell is already here! As you know, I was a huge fan, but I think I loved this one even more.
Roxanne Varzi: Thanks, Sherine!!
Sherine Hamdy: This time our intrepid anthropology graduate student Alex is starting a new field project in Oslo, Norway, with a lot of funny nods – winks? – to Nordic noir. So my first question – why Norway?
Oslo, Bjørvika, Photo: Roxanne Varzi
Roxanne: The beauty, the light! (It’s a photographer’s dreamscape) The serenity and Scandi culture – I taught in Sweden almost twenty years ago in the UC Education Abroad program in Lund and traveled to Copenhagen. I loved Scandinavia and wanted to return. I was going to England to meet with folks researching dyslexia and found a flight through Oslo. So I asked my friend Paige West who had spent some time in Norway to introduce me to cool anthropologists there and she introduced me to Thorgeir Kolshus, one of the coolest anthropologists in Norway and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo.
He invited me to stop by and do a multimodal workshop at the University of Oslo. I loved it and decided to go back for my sabbatical. I was both scouting a new fieldsite and doing a sound project on climate change. Soon my real project became my protagonist’s fictional project and Alex, my protagonist, took over my project in Oslo! I was actually in the middle of writing Armchair Anthropology Book Two which takes place in California (and will now be Book Three).
Sherine: Thorgeir? Any chance he inspired your character of Thorvald, the anthropologist who knows about burial practices in Melanesia?
Roxanne: Thorvald is a fictional character! Your first guess was an American retiree from our department! Which goes to show he’s a composite character! Every reader will have their guess!
Sherine: Okay, that’s fair! The first scene begins with your characters bobbing up and down to silence …at a church in Oslo. How did you come up with the idea of a silent disco night?
Roxanne: I was at dinner with friends in Oslo and their son was headed out to a silent disco. I’d never heard of it before and he was kind enough to fill me in. A month later there was a silent disco at a large sauna near where I was staying. It was past my bedtime, but, you know: “anything for research!” I literally got back out of bed, dressed and trudged along the Fjord to the disco spot to “research” it.
Sherine: Edward Munch, famous for his painting The Scream; the playwright Henrik Ibsen, and children’s book author Roald Dahl all make appearances in your book, as important Norwegian creators (I’d never known Roald Dahl was originally Norwegian!). Why is it important for your character Alex to reflect on the lives and works of Munch, Dahl, and Ibsen?
Roxanne: I’m a big believer in using theories and philosophies from the field. I don’t like importing theorists to explain another culture. With Iran I used Hegel, because he’s considered the Rumi of the West by Iranians, but I also used Ibn Arabi, Attar. Theory and philosophy is part of doing fieldwork. I lived across the street from the Munch Museum in Oslo so Munch was omnipresent for me, part of my Oslo landscape. And Dahl was my Dyslexia example from the field so it worked out really well! There’s an element of serendipity to writing these mysteries that I love–like Jack Horner [in the first book] was a character, and also as a person with dyslexia. Aside from that I’ve always loved Munch. He was a writer as much as a painter and when I saw his notebooks at the Munch museum in Oslo I knew he was someone whose life I wanted to delve into deeper.
Munch Museum, Oslo, photo: Roxanne Varzi
Munch’s tea kettle, photo Roxanne Varzi
Sherine: Themes of neurodiversity continue in this book – one of the most heart wrenching parts of the book for me to read wasn’t about the slain victim, but when Alex overhears other graduate students in her cohort talking about her learning disability, and questioning her right to even be in a PhD program if she has dyslexia. While Alex was drawn to creating miniature sites as a form of visual ethnography in the first book, in this one she takes up sound ethnography. What do you think is the relationship between experimentation in the academy, multi-modality, and neurodiversity?
Roxanne: Great question!!! First, there is the fact of non-linear thinking and finding alternative ways of doing things. And Dyslexia comes with enormous gifts and strengths, what Brock and Fernette Eide call MIND strengths: M for material reasoning or 3d and spatial reasoning, I for interconnected reasoning or big picture thinking, N for narrative reasoning (my favourite, and what makes Alex a great detective. She has the ability to construct a connected series of mental scenes from past personal experiences, to recall the past, understand the present, or create imaginary scenes. And the D is for dynamic reasoning – connecting elements of the past to predict the future, which, again, fits perfectly with detective work. That’s also where paleontologists [like Jack Horner, Book 1] with dyslexia have a major advantage! Multimodality allows practitioners to work in their areas of strength. So, if someone is better at 3d spatial reasoning, then a diorama makes sense. If someone excels in narrative reasoning – why not write a murder mystery? Not only does this allow us to make data and research more accessible for people with learning disabilities, but these works are also more accessible to the general public, who didn’t go through the training that we did to read theory and research – or in other words, academese. This is why I loved coming across Robert Frost’s words about professorial writing.
Sherine: I know you are referring to a quote in the book, but I think it is worth citing in full here. Can you tell us the whole quote you are talking about?
Roxanne: Sure, I was going down a proverbial rabbit hole on the sound of language. I had read Frost’s correspondences before, and when I went back to them, there he was promoting poetic writing.
Frost says:
Just so many sentence sounds belong to man as just so many vocal runs belong to one kind of bird. We come into the world with them and create none of them. What we feel as creation is only selection and grouping. We summon them from Heaven knows where under excitement with the audile [audial] imagination. And unless we are in an imaginative mood it is no use trying to make them, they will not rise. We can only write the dreary kind of grammatical prose known as professorial.
And Alex replies, “God save us from professorial…”
Since graduate school I have been trying to avoid academese. It’s a form of gate-keeping and my mission was not to preach to the choir from the Ivory/Ivy tower. My mission has always been education and advocacy.
Sherine: You’ve definitely accomplished that here! You also continue with the format you established in the series’ first book, of including Alex’s fieldnotes as a way to communicate anthropological ideas and theory. How did you approach the fieldnotes sections differently this time around?
Roxanne: This time, I experimented more with form. In addition to the field notes, I used conversations on text messaging, Facetime, and good old-fashioned letter writing. Part of the difference was driven by the fact that two of the characters from the first book were not with Alex in Norway and I wanted them to be there.
Sherine: You mean Will and Kit?
Roxanne: Yes, and as so much of the lives of students with disabilities, including Alex’s life, revolve around assistive technology, I wanted to expose the struggle of writing, (she has dysgraphia which is common for folks with dyslexia) and the extensive use of notes, dictations and texts. I wanted Kit to continue to advise her and be there as a bestie. Their relationship is a wonderful melding of neurotypical and neurodiverse people complementing each other.
Also, with Jack Horner, in the first book, I began writing him in as a paleontologist before I learned that he has dyslexia. This book also had a fun moment with another public figure whom I met by accident and later found out has Dyslexia. I showed a random portrait of a man to someone in the anthropology department who misidentified the person as Terje Nicolaisen. I looked Terje up hoping to share my portrait and found myself fascinated by his work. I asked if I could visit his studio and our meeting there pretty much is exactly what Alex experienced when she went to meet him – which involved a long discussion about handwriting, dysgraphia and dyslexia. I told him about Alex and my Oslo mystery and he brought out all of his notebooks!!
Terje Nicolaisen Photo: Roxanne Varzi
Sherine: Well, if Terje showed his notes – I wonder if you could show us yours? What do fieldnotes for a sound ethnography within a murder mystery look like?
Roxanne: Here’s a note from my own research –you can see my own dysgraphia on full display along with coffee stains (Norway has amazing coffee!) These are what my field notes look like!!!
Sherine: To go back to the multimodality theme – your first book was like a (fun!) primer on visual anthropology, and this time we are learning about sound ethnography, and the concept of time. Why did you choose to do sound for this book?
Roxanne: I was standing in this amazing cultural space, Kulturkirken Jacob with its longtime director, Erik Hillestad and I was telling him about my adaptation of the Shakespeare play Twelfth Night. I was thinking it would be the perfect place to put on the play. I always have 1 million projects going on at the same time and somehow the idea of sound and music in that space got lodged into my head – the next thing I knew, I was placing Alex at a silent disco there.
Kulturkirken Jacob Photo: Roxanne Varzi
Sherine: What do you most want readers to take away in this introduction to sound anthropology?
Roxanne: With each book, I want to show the many sensory ways of knowing. The lack of noise during the pandemic was a profound reminder of the degrees to which sound affects us –and I wanted to look at how that plays out in different ways…without revealing a spoiler, I’ll simply say, sound or the lack thereof can be dangerous.
From roof of Oslo Opera House Photo: Roxanne Varzi
Sherine: While the first book had more of an emphasis, on dyslexia, this one has a greater focus on ADHD and attention. The theme of attention is related to time – how it is spent, who controls whose time, how perceptions of time change from one context to another. Can you tell us a little more on how you came to focus more on issues of attention in this book?
Roxanne: I knew I wanted the next book to emphasize Alex’s ADHD and I also happened upon an interesting researcher, Drew Johnson, who was at a working research group at the university called Good Attention. He and I had some conversations around ADHD, and he introduced me to the RITMO working group – things just serendipitously came together.
Oslo became an interesting intellectual space to think about sound and attention. I continued to tinker with my own sound project on climate change and was reading a piece in “The Conversation” about a sound project by an artist/geologist recording the last breath of a melting glacier. I looked him up, and it turned out that he was at the University of Oslo.
I immediately emailed him, and the next thing I knew he was emailing me back to tell me that he was doing a lunch talk in literally half an hour in the building next door to where I was. I don’t know if it’s luck when these things happen or if it’s just really about being in the right mindset with the right preparation and the right intentions. Or maybe it’s just that these were the things I happened to follow and so it all came together. In that way, Alex’s adventures in Oslo mirrored my own adventures, as I followed my research interests, she found clues. We were often on the same trajectory and path as I explored new subjects and people. And this made the book very different from the first book, or what is shaping up to be the third book in that I was writing as I researched. The other books came years later, after the research.
Window into Costume design studio, Oslo Opera House Photo: Roxanne Varzi
Sherine: I like what you say about being in the right mindset and open to the opportunities that present themselves. That must be how you wrote this one so fast!
Roxanne: Yes, this is the fastest book I’ve ever written, because it’s the first time I’ve put down all of my other projects and concentrated on just this It will be interesting to hear what people think in relation to my other books that took years to write (usually about a decade each!).
Sherine: It’s also shorter than the first one. Was this a conscious decision?
Roxanne: Yes. For one thing I didn’t feel the pressure to have to introduce readers to anthropology and research methods.
Sherine: You mean because you already covered that ground in the first one?
Roxanne. Yes, exactly. Also, I promised my students that it would be shorter. We have shorter attention spans than we once did, and I think also I’ve relaxed into the idea that writing a series means I can leave some for later! And I needed more suitcase space – it’s much more manageable to travel with! But really, it comes with the confidence to not have to put everything I know about sound and attention or Norway in a single book. In any book, there is so much that gets left out – so much more research and so many other points I could have made, but I also have to pace theory and philosophy with story. I can’t throw in more than the plot can handle.
Oslo Opera House, Sauna in foreground, photo: Roxanne Varzi
Sherine: One of my favorite things in this book is your ability to render Norwegian speech in English, with its sing-songy tones, joyful inflections,and other idiosyncrasies. How did your Norwegian colleagues react to finding their speech portrayed in your book?
Roxanne: Thank you, I love Norwegian, it’s a beautiful language. Everyone who read their chapter gave me their blessing – no one commented on the language. One person remembered our conversation well and was excited to see so much of it in the book, which was cool as I did not record our meeting. At the book-reading that you attended, you heard me read aloud part of the book where I slip into the cadences of the language.
Sherine: Yes, I thought it was hilarious!
Roxanne: But I don’t do that in the audio book because I don’t want to offend anyone, and it’s a fine line.
Sherine: You mean a fine line between portrayal and parody?
Roxanne: Yes. So I read it as an American narrator, though I tried hard not to butcher the Norwegian words. A friend was kind enough to send me voice memos of words I needed to hear spoken, and then I just tried to mimic him! At one point. I really regretted having rendered in Norwegian the warning not to shoot polar bears. It was a mouthful to record for the audiobook! Listeners can enjoy hearing me muddle my way through that!
Sherine: Will there be an audio version soon?
Roxanne: Yes, it was important to me as a dyslexia advocate to have the audio book come out at the same time as the print versions. I don’t want to privilege eye reading over ear reading.
Museum of Natural History and Botanical Gardens, University of Oslo, Photo: Roxanne Varzi
Sherine: Well, congratulations, Roxanne, on another great work! I really love the idea of a murder mystery series exploring contemporary pursuits in anthropology and pushing the bounds of what counts as academic research and writing. I can’t wait for your next one!
Roxanne: Thank you Sherine, I always enjoy talking experimentation with you! The third one is set close to home, so who knows what role you may play next!
Image: Roxanne Varzi (left) and Sherine Hamdy, photograph by Erica Sutton
Tony Webster: I want to say how much I enjoyed reading your book Language and Political Subjectivity: Stancemaking, Power and Politics in Chile and Venezuela. It’s really a wonderful and thoughtful book. I appreciated, especially, the chapter on Mata-U’iroa Atan’s poetry, and given I’d just read Janet McIntosh’s Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics, which also includes a chapter on poetry, it seems, to borrow a title from John Berger, which I think rather appropriate, that “the hour of poetry” has come round at last. But, I’m not going to ask about poetry, not directly anyway.
Juan, I know how much Jonathan Hill meant to you as a scholar and a mentor, and I see his influence in this book, so I’d like to ask you to say a bit about Jonathan and his influence on you and your work. Miki, not to exclude you, I’d open it up more broadly to you, to ask about intellectual ancestors and their influence on your work as well.
Juan Luis Rodríguez: Jonathan’s influence is all over this book, most obviously in our theorization of truth. His work on myth in Amazonia has been hugely influential in South American ethnography, and it has shown me personally the way to tackle the relation between discourse and social reality. Myth for Jonathan was history in the words of Amazonian speakers, not just a surface manifestation of their mental structure. For him, attending to myth was attending to the political and power relationship between Amazonian communities and the colonial forces of nation-states settling around them. There is then a direct relationship between that work on myth in Amazonia and my preoccupations with truth and the settling of national truth both in Venezuela and the contexts in which Venezuelans have been forced to move as diasporic subjects. These are things I learned from Jonathan while hearing him hammer away on the importance of discourse, power and history while walking two steps behind him as we walked around campus not knowing if he was still talking directly to me or to himself.
Miki Makihara: For me, that attention to truth is essential because it is what connects an individual speaker’s self and beliefs to history. How do people use linguistic forms to move history forward or capture collective attention? This question is central to Joe Errington’s work on Indonesia. Combining that focus on history and common attention is the basis for our emphasis on stancemaking in the book. Micaela di Leonardo sparked my interest in political economy which helped me to ground our semiotic and linguistic theorization of power.
Both: We should also add that ultimately, what brought us together on this specific project was a deep appreciation for concrete, everyday discourse. This came from our shared engagement with scholars like Joel Sherzer, Bambi Schieffelin, and Elinor Ochs. For Miki, it was also directly shaped by her early study with and work as a research assistant for Niko Besnier on Nukulaelae, Tuvalu. For Juan, it grew out of the countless times Juan interrupted you, Tony, in your office in Carbondale, Illinois. These experiences taught us to ground our biggest theoretical questions in the fine-grained details of how people actually talk.
Tony Webster: I think one of the more striking and distinctive things about the book is its collaborative nature, so I’d like to ask you to say a bit about that collaborative process. It seems, not just a shared writing project, but a shared research project.
Juan Luis Rodríguez: That collaborative spirit is something we both learned from our mentors. For me, as a relatively early career linguistic anthropologist, one of the most fortunate things was landing in a department where I found true mentorship. As I’ve learned over time, that isn’t always common. But in my case I found a colleague that took me under her guidance and from whom I truly learned this style of collaborative work.
Miki Makihara: While I learned fieldwork and solo writing from Niko, it was Bambi Schieffelin who introduced me to the modalities and rewards of deep collaborative writing soon after I arrived in New York. Working with her on the book Consequences of Contact was a marvelous experience. We applied that exact model to this book, literally weaving together every single sentence of the book over the course of many long working sessions. And this collaboration was not just about writing but about truly doing research together and creating a synergetic interaction.
Tony Webster: There seems currently in linguistic anthropology an attempt to delimit or contain the sweep of language ideologies; you cite Gal and Irvine on this point, and one could add Paul Kroskrity’s recent work on language ideological assemblages, that language ideologies can’t mean everything, and there needs to be some rethinking of the concept. Your intervention here, is to argue for lived beliefs and corporeal consciousness, which aren’t meant to replace language ideologies, but rather to refocus some of the conversation. Have I got this right, or am I misreading your argument?
Both: That’s an excellent reading of our argument. Language ideologies have been an influential idea in linguistic anthropology in one form or another for almost half a century. We are not trying to replace or delimit the concept of language ideologies, but to zoom in on how they are actually lived and felt, clarifying its relationship to subjectivity, experience, and practice. For us, an ideology isn’t a fixed set of ideas that people download into their minds and take up as awareness. It’s something that has to be built, felt, and transformed through lived experience. We focus on corporeal consciousness because these beliefs aren’t just abstract thoughts; they are felt in the body, often in ways that aren’t fully articulated. That is the lesson we draw from Raymond Williams. It is not that people are aware of experience or not but whether and how experience becomes available to thoughtful and feelingful actors. For example, when the Navajo poet Blackhorse Mitchell told you during fieldwork that he wanted to “give the listener an imagination,” he wasn’t just trying to convey ideas; he was trying to share an experience. This is a point that Rapa Nui poets also emphasize.
That is also what our concept of stancemaking gets at. It’s the messy, ongoing process where we use language to become and reshape ourselves and the world. Ideologies are not clear sets of ideas that are already existing but something that has to be made and transformed through experience and action. Ideologies are such semiotic objects embodied in behaviors. Languages are such embodied ideologies. They do not just guide and narrow our perception of the world, nor do they just allow speakers to intentfully do things with words, but more importantly we use them to become and reshape ourselves in society. They are in a constant state of becoming in relation to our positions in the world. This, we believe, is in line with Gal and Irvine’s idea of the partiality of language ideologies, and also Kroskrity’s idea of language ideological assemblages. Ideas such as a Chilean democratic nation-state, a pure Rapa Nui language, or that “we Venezuelans come from the future” are powerful, but they are always partial and always in the making. Our project is to understand how these partial ideas are incorporated, believed, and made real in the world
We want to emphasize experience as a process for the making of the individual and subjective world. This experience is felt and becomes intimate to the individual body. It is not just learned to become an object of thinking. Think of the Rapa Nui poet Mata-U’iroa Atan. He does not just list political grievances. He grounds his truth in personal, bodily experience to create an exemplary self for future generations of Rapa Nui speakers. He wants to convey what it feels like to have ancestors.
Tony Webster: The book is–while certainly ethnographic–densely theoretical and an attempt to map out a set of theoretical terms to account for diasporic communities and Indigenous communities in their struggles for sense-making. Many of the concepts, stancemaking most obviously, are meant to be portable and usable beyond the particulars of this book. But for me, I think your rethinking of truth is particularly insightful (Chapter 4 especially). But, I’ll leave the question more open-ended, what do you see as the most portable of the concepts you introduce, and why?
Both: That’s a great question. We put a lot of care into developing concepts that could travel, and three stand out for us. First, as you mentioned, is truth. This is no coincidence as we pointed out in the answer to your first question. We’re concerned with the future of diasporic communities, both indigenous and not indigenous, who are facing larger nation-state formations that threaten their very existence. In places like Chile, the idea of truth has been central to democracy since the end of the dictatorship. The idea that it is possible to agree on truth is also driving political efforts all over the world and is challenged with almost equal intensity everywhere. We try to show how settling on a constructed national truth is a political project. Whose testimony counts? In Chile, the voices of victims of the dictatorship were collected as testimonies and platformed as powerful national symbols. But these testimonies make the individual voice controllable in the name of peaceful coexistence. On the other hand, the voices of Indigenous peoples in their own truth commission were largely substituted with so-called expert knowledge. So, for us, truth isn’t about facts alone; it’s about the political process of fixing belief and the struggles over whose voice and experience are counted as real and recognized. We hope this is a useful lens for analyzing truth claims in other places as well.
Politics and power are also two twin terms we rethink in the book. We are inspired by Bakhtin’s centripetal and centrifugal forces of language in culture, which we think of as two co-existing and opposing forms of agency. Power is a cohesive centripetal force. Things like discipline, control, modeling, conventionalization and exemplarity compel and pull people together. We suggest that power is always anticipatory to ways in which this cohesion can be challenged and disrupted. This disruption comes from transgression. Politics is the centrifugal force – the acts of transgression and disruption that challenge social boundaries and the status quo. There is no guarantee of balance between them; authoritarian rule can emerge (as we have witnessed both in Chile and Venezuela but also now here in the U.S.), but so can radical change. This framework allows ethnographers to analyze the constant tension between forces of cohesion and forces of disruption in broad social contexts.
Finally, the idea of stance-making itself was key. At the beginning, it was puzzling to us. We knew what we wanted to say but were uncertain about what to call it. Stance taking and footing were appealing concepts but the idea of subjects positioning themselves in front of a fixed object was unsatisfactory. Social actors make themselves through these positions but also create others and the objects they pay attention to. We were uncertain what to call a process in which not just the object of attention or the subject emerged, but where relationship and perspective building was also the point. We wanted to emphasize the dialogical and dialectical relationship between self and object (including other selves). This was a meaning making process not just a matter of positioning. There was also no obvious straight named concept neither in Spanish nor Japanese that we could resort to for this, but we knew of breadmaking and as a noun in English, so stancemaking captured the idea for us of a process of worldmaking. Stancemaking produces a subjectivity (understood as a point of view in the world) that has consequences for the world and for others we share it with.
Tony Webster: There are number of striking and moving bits of ethnography in this book, and for me, one of the more moving parts of the book, is the discussion about the distinction between intimacy and cherishing of Rapa Nui; first I think many of us who have worked in such situations can appreciate this distinction, but secondly, and this is a testament to Miki’s work, one also sees this distinction unfolding in time. I wonder if you could say something, first about this distinction, and then, secondly, something about the value of long-term ethnographic research.
Miki Makihara: That distinction is really at the emotional and intellectual core of the book, and it was something I only came to grasp through long-term ethnographic research. It was challenging to express and make sense of the complex nature of what we call language cherishing and its relationship to what scholars such as Sapir, and you, have theorized about feelingful attachment to language. When I first arrived in Rapa Nui, the dominant academic narrative was one of survival and imminent language death. The historical trauma was undeniable – the devastating slave raids, epidemics, European missionization, and Chilean colonization in the 19th century had left deep scars. But the language I encountered didn’t feel like it was disappearing. It felt intensely alive, repeatedly reconstructing itself. On the streets and in homes, I heard this fluid, dynamic, multilingual talk. Rapa Nui sociality was vibrant, open, and creative, spilling over any neat linguistic boundaries the school textbooks and dictionaries suggested. There was profound dissonance between the tragic story of vanishing voices and the resilient, lively community I was living with.
What I witnessed over thirty years was not a simple loss, but a profound transformation, especially in the community’s relationship with their language. On the one hand, I did see a clear sign of language shift and decline in what we call intimacy — that effortless, everyday, fluency that comes from being immersed in a language from birth. Children were growing up speaking Spanish, and a generational gap was growing. But at the same time, I witnessed the powerful rise of what we call cherishing. This is a more conscious, deliberate, and deeply political act of valuing the language as a sacred symbol of genealogical continuity. I saw this cherishing in so many forms: in the painstaking work of elders such as Nico Haoa, who formed a language restructuration committee and meticulously documented and purified the ancestral language. I saw it in the fierce, tireless advocacy of young teachers such as Viki Haoa and Hiralia Tuki, who battled the ministry of education to allow them to teach the Rapa Nui language in the school. I saw it in children who had spoken mostly Spanish at home growing into young adults, coming back from higher education on the Continent, to become fierce public advocates for Rapa Nui, demanding Rapa Nui be taught at schools. And I saw it with young parents, themselves not so fluent speakers, struggling to reclaim their language (re)learning it anew right alongside their own children.
These forms of cherishing became somewhat at odds with the liveliness and diversity of multilingual speech as they seem to lead the development of consciousness about language boundaries and policing. This leads to a painful paradox that we saw activists grapple with constantly: people love their language so fiercely that they feel unworthy of speaking it imperfectly. This explains why they demand government support for the language in schools, yet remain puzzled as to why families don’t enforce it at home. Most children learn to respect and love the Rapa Nui language, but they find it incredibly difficult to reclaim that effortless intimacy with it. Understanding this complex emotional landscape—this mix of commitment, joy, and frustration—was only possible by accompanying the community for decades, watching children grow into activists and witnessing their tireless work of cultural reconstruction firsthand.
Both: Cherishing and intimacy occupy overlapping but distinct places in our theorization of stancemaking. Miki’s experience of Rapa Nui sociality and Juan’s experience of Warao relationship with the Venezuelan state have taught us that a sense of attachment with linguistic form can be something complicated. Intimacy is better understood as a sense of closeness with the linguistic forms that speakers feel as their own and around which a sense of identity and closeness to other speakers can be generated. This sense of closeness and attachment is a product of a process of socialization that can make speakers feel at home in their own language by closing the gap between speakers and the linguistic forms they use. But what happens if respecting and loving one’s language actually produces insecurity and a gap between the speaker and the correct, pure and beloved linguistic form? These are situations in which speakers get to appreciate and name linguistic forms with which they are affectively invested but also have a sense of distance from them. Cherishing then is a form of attachment defined by a certain distance. We feel that the work of closing the dissonance between intimacy and cherishing is central to the challenges we find in the preservation and revitalization of indigenous languages everywhere.
Josh Reno: I just finished your book a week ago, and I feel like it is still happening to me. It is so good at exploring anxious, uncertain moments before there’s a sense of shared understanding. It could have been called “There was only now” (p 51), which is one of many lines that I loved. The only now has been the subject of intense phenomenological scrutiny, of course, but I feel like you found a way to recreate the “ache of [social] action” again and again with each chapter, to paraphrase Loïc Wacquant. How did you approach this problem of the only now? Would you agree that the only now is hard to capture anthropologically, or perhaps capture at all?
Danilyn Rutherford: I would absolutely agree that the only now is hard to capture anthropologically and maybe at all. That’s a really great question. I think there are three ways to answer it.
One way is through my training as an anthropologist. My dissertation chair was Jim Siegel. I read Derrida before I read any anthropologist other than Clifford Geertz. I had read The Religion of Java while I was living in Java; that was before I came to Cornell. Jim’s work is really difficult to paraphrase or turn into a soundbite. But one of the things that has struck me in Jim’s thinking, particularly in his book Naming the Witch, is the way that social relations begin with an incursion from outside. This was Jim’s way of thinking about the gift. The gift by definition is something you don’t deserve or expect. And yet it sets in motion a response that can, under certain conditions, be the precondition for creating a social relationship with another person. This view is consistent with the Derridean critique of presence. For Jim, following Derrida, the only now could only ever be a shock, a shock that has not yet been domesticated and turned into something that we think we can understand. So there’s that whole line of theoretical stuff that I’ve always found really interesting. As a little kid, I was always asking, “How do things work? Where do they come from?” I’ve always had a tendency to ask these kinds of questions.
But then there is this second factor, something I try to capture in the book, which is the difference between who I was before my husband died and who I am now. I wrote about Craig’s death as a moment when someone with clear expectations about how her life was going to unfold suddenly had those expectations blown out of the water. The story I’d been telling myself about my future was gone. On the one hand, I try to describe the horror and terror of that—and it was a terrible period of life. But other things came out of that experience that have stuck with me. One of them is the realization that you absolutely don’t know what’s going to happen from one second to the next. That realization brings with it a certain grace. You start asking yourself why you’re getting up in the morning. Why are you in this world? If you can’t be present in this current moment, what’s the point?
Craig’s death transformed the way I thought about teaching. It transformed the way I thought about my relationships with people. I’m a poodle owner. For poodles, there’s the pack, and then there’s the rest of the world. Poodles bark at the rest of the world. I was not really a barker—I’ve always been pretty well behaved. But I definitely had this sense that my Craig and the children were my pack, that they were my source of support. One of the things that happened with Craig’s death was that I embraced the relationships I had always had around me, with students, colleagues, friends, and a lot of other people who really helped me through this difficult time. The desire to be present in current moment came out of this very personal experience, and it put me in a position to be present with Millie and to recognize, and to narrate to myself, the importance of that as part of what it is to be with her in the world.
So there’s the anthropological, and there’s the life experience. And then there’s Millie. “For Millie, there’s only now.” I wrote this, but it’s not totally fair. I think what happens with Millie, as far as I can tell, has to do with how temporality unfolds for her, which involves a level of attunement and awareness that’s far beyond mine. She is very interested in patterns. She has very keen hearing. No one listens to music the way Millie does. In music, the present moment is never completely the present moment. Listening to music involves anticipating what will come next and retaining what’s just happened. Millie loves listening to my partner play the electric guitar. There are particular chord changes that she really loves. They’re a little bit surprising, but they also kind of make sense. That sort of experience is something she totally digs. And if you want to be with her, she will teach you how to dig it too. That kind of only now, for me, has been more than just an antidote to careerism. Careerism pretty much got thrashed out of me by Craig’s death. Being with Millie has helped me think in a deeper way about sensory experiences, experiences of time and space that we spend a lot of time passing over because we’re so narrative in the way we think ourselves and about our lives. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
Joshua Reno: That makes total sense! And I love that response. And you’ve reminded me to go back and dig up Naming the Witch, because I just picked up a volume on Witch Studies that came out this year. I’m enjoying it a lot, and I’d forgotten about the Siegel book. So, thank you.
Danilyn Rutherford: The Siegel book is quite bold, but I think it’s interesting. It’s connected to what in a sense this book is doing. Siegel wants to make the argument that there is something outside of what we call culture. There’s something beyond society that gives rise to society or bursts it apart. As a sociocultural anthropologist, I’m drawn to that kind of bold thinking. Without wanting to be universalizing or impose my answers on anyone, I’m drawn to those kinds of problems.
Joshua Reno: In that response, you’ve talked about knowing things about yourself and also knowing what your tendencies are, knowing what your history is with the thoughts you enjoy thinking and the problems that attract your interest going way back. There is a sense in which, even more than Millie, because you’re the narrator, we’re following you, your experience, and your voice throughout the book. Would you agree that your book has as much to say, therefore, about memory as about disability? I think it does, and that’s because you are digging through decades of your life, and that kind of complicated present of the only now is shown to be more than just what’s immediately available. It is also at work in how the past and future live uncomfortably in each of us. Perhaps most poignant, at least for me, is the dream you had. You don’t say that it was a dream about running into Craig. Actually, the way you put it is that you had a dream about running into a memory of Craig. So there’s a memory of Craig at O’Hare that you had, and you had a dream of that memory. Which is an interesting way of putting it. You get lost in some of these memories. You dwell in them like they’re happening still. The cross country one with all the things you’re imagining could have gone wrong. You’re imagining that everything is terrible, even though things turned out fine. And so then the question is, is that the beautiful mystery? Are you also a beautiful mystery to yourself in the process of writing this book and uncovering these memories? Memories that you re-remembered in the process of writing this book?
Danilyn Rutherford: That’s really a great question. I’m a mystery; not sure how beautiful that one is! But the short answer is, yes, I think that’s absolutely the case.
I’m going to veer a bit into form and the history of this particular book. When Millie was in early intervention, I had this idea that I wanted to write about Millie. I was fascinated by the whole What to ExpectWhen You’re Expecting phenomenon. I was a reluctant mother. I was not someone who grew up thinking that I wanted to be a mother; I got talked into it. So I was like, “Wow, what? Nothing is happening as I expected!” Then I moved to Santa Cruz, and on a lark I went to a workshop for parents of disabled people with a writing instructor, Laura Davis, who had us do something called “writing practice.” I loved it, and I started taking classes with her. I started generating a lot of material. In writing practice, you don’t outline or think ahead; you just write as vividly as you can about whatever is closest to your mind.
Then I started taking a feedback class with memoir writers. Memoir writers think a lot about this problem of memory and writing and the unreliability of memory. I think Freud talks about this—just because something didn’t happen doesn’t mean it doesn’t have force. It can be not true, but real. This sense of how memory works through you is something I tried to capture in this book. At the same time, there is this idea of flashbulb memory. When dramatic things happen in your life, those moments get imprinted for you. Maybe they’re constructed; all memory is constructed. But they are recalled vividly once you make yourself write in a way that isn’t experience-distant description but actually gets into the positionality of that character, that past self. Stuff comes back.
For the whole period around Craig’s death, including that dream, I have very vivid memories, some of which made it into the book, some of which didn’t. Because that’s the other side of the question. Beautiful Mystery is very much constructed. It’s a book, right? I had these writing practice pieces, which were out of my life, but then I also had ethnographic materials. I did a really good job of recording and videotaping interviews. I had transcriptions. Word-for-word transcriptions that I would bring into a chapter. Well, word-per-word transcriptions don’t make for good reading. You know? You have to edit interviews for them to actually make sense. So there’s that play of narration, of what you can recover, and what you can’t.
Then there’s the whole question of Millie’s memory. That was at the front of my mind throughout that entire early period, and kind of still is. The mystery of memory, it’s really something. And also the patchiness of memory. There are people I will never forget, people I hung out with the first time I lived in Indonesia. There are other people, American friends who contact me, and I can’t, for the life of me, put my finger on how we know each other. But I have to believe them when they say we do. It’s always kind of embarrassing. Certain things are really vivid. Certain things are not. There’s also the way the past is present in the present, the future is present in the present, there are all those moments when we’re in other places while we’re operating in the world. That’s absolutely part of my experience, and I imagine it’s part of a lot of people’s experience. I’m glad I capture that, because it is an important aspect of human experience.
The other thing I’ll say is that I’ve been thinking a lot about aging and what happens when you get older and time really speeds up. How memory works for me now. It’s not at all even. That’s the other thing that’s mysterious about memory. Your experience of time passing is very uneven. Your experience of the length of an interval is very uneven. Any writer who tries to work from memory is going to discover all of this really quickly.
Joshua Reno: I suspect this book covers the largest time span of any book you’ve written.
Jennifer Chacon: You note in the book that when immigrant residents want to avail themselves of various forms of relief from the threat of deportation (or, to be more legally precise, removal), they often have to establish their own exceptionality, demonstrating why they are deserving of legal relief that is not more widely available. Could you explain how people document their eligibility for exceptional relief, and also about how they resist the narratives of exceptionality, even as they leverage them for legal relief?
Susan Coutin: Depending on the form of relief they are seeking, immigrant residents may need to show that they are qualifying relatives of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, their deportation would cause an exceptional hardship, they were victims of crime and collaborated in the investigation, they have a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin, they immigrated to the US as children and were educated here, or the number of years that they have been in the United States. To do so, they gather records such as marriage and birth certificates, family photos and correspondence, medical records, letters, police reports, country conditions information, school transcripts, immigration-related documents, check stubs, bank statements, rental contracts, receipts, and more. Ironically, as they demonstrate their exceptionality, they are also making themselves socially visible in ways that convey ordinariness: they have relatives, work, study, make purchases, rent homes, go to the doctor. Demonstrating ordinariness resists narratives of exceptionality, claiming that their lives have intrinsic value.
Jennifer Chacon: You spent a lot of time observing lawyers engaging in legal craft – the processes by which lawyers try to mediate between the immigrant and the state. You describe situations where documentation is simultaneously a necessary element of claims for relief and a potential detriment to those claims. What did you learn about how lawyers navigate this mediating role? Are there any notable differences between the ways that attorneys describe their role and what you observed in the course of your study?
Susan Coutin: Lawyers’ and other service providers’ mediating role was complex! I learned that they sometimes discovered forms of eligibility of which their clients were unaware. A striking example was an appointment at which a paralegal reviewed an undocumented Salvadoran client’s expired work permit, asked if they had applied for asylum during the 1990s, and announced that the client was potentially eligible to apply for residency. From a code on the expired permit, the service provider knew that the client had applied for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the early 1990s, a requirement for the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. This client left with the hope of becoming a lawful permanent resident! More often, attorneys had to deliver the devastating news that clients were ineligible to apply for anything or were even barred from future admission. And most commonly, attorneys and service providers’ mediating role consisted of assessing documents’ evidentiary value and identifying discrepancies in their records that had to be corrected or explained as their cases moved forward. Service providers typically referred to their roles by the type of case or the specific task performed, such as a screening appointment or a TPS renewal. I termed providers’ work legal craft because of the expertise involved in reviewing records, completing forms, taking declarations, and assembling applications.
Jennifer Chacon:This book captures some of the ways that undocumented immigrant residents think about justice, and about what an ethical and humane system of law would look like. What are these alternative visions of justice? And what did you learn about how lawyers navigate the legal world that is while being mindful of the legal world their clients envision?
Susan Coutin: Those who were seeking status in the United States, whether for themselves or their family members, longed for a world in which laws and policies would enable families to be together, opportunities to regularize one’s status would be plentiful and affordable, people would not be subjected to illegalization or criminalization, those with temporary protection would be awarded permanent status, and immigrant residents would be treated with dignity and respect. The lawyers, paralegals, clerks, and volunteers who I shadowed at the nonprofit delivered services in ways that prefigured this vision of what law could be. They expressed empathy for their clients, listening to their concerns. When service providers had to ask questions that might be perceived as invasive or accusatory, such as about clients’ criminal histories, providers often apologized, stressing that they were merely translating questions on the forms. Service providers were deeply committed to empowering their clients with legal knowledge, so they took the time to explain the laws and processes that they were implementing. Providers also sought to reduce the administrative burden of applying for legal status. To that end, they charged low fees, assisted clients in obtaining documentation, and put in long hours doing much of the paperwork themselves. My research and volunteer work in the nonprofit gave me a glimpse of what the U.S. immigration system could be like if such practices were adopted by US officials: law could be a form of support for people who were compelled to move for family or because of harm or risk.
Jennifer Chacon:What would you want anthropologists who study documents to take away from your book?
Susan Coutin: There are so many things! Perhaps most fundamentally, my book demonstrates that documents are active rather than inert. They take on new meanings depending on how they are used. For example, a school transcript that originally served as a record of academic work or a bank statement that focuses on financial transactions can become a “presence document” that is included in an immigration case to demonstrate that a particular person was in the United States over a specified period. When documents are redeployed in this fashion, their other possible meanings do not simply disappear, rather, documents potentially exceed the use to which they are put. Thus, a transcript or bank statement submitted as a presence document also conveys the ordinariness of the applicant’s life, potentially reinforcing the notion that they are de facto members of the US polity. Documents also have an archival quality: a collection of documents may have layers in that records of past events bring these forward in time, and assembling documents in a particular order conveys implicit narratives.
The book also suggests that the relationship between documents and that to which they refer is complex. A birth certificate provides evidence of a birth, but of course is not actually the birth itself. The birth as an event lies outside of the documentary record, even as the birth certificate makes a birth legally cognizable. David Dery refers to such legal representations as “papereality,” noting that in bureaucracies, papereality can take priority over the events, people, and objects to which papers refer. This power to construct social realities makes papers especially useful for immigrant residents who may hope that the papers – receipts, check stubs, correspondence – generated by their lives in the United States establish that they belong here and are deserving of status.
Further, in the book, I highlight ways that immigrant residents who face a high administrative burden exhibit agency by documenting back to the state through the papers that they accumulate and the claims that they file. Instead of waiting to see how they will be “inscribed” within government bureaucracies, as Sarah Horton and Josiah Heyman put it in their volume, Paper Trails, immigrant residents take on what I called an anticipatory administrative burden, gathering the documentation that they hope to someday be eligible to submit. Immigrant residents gain documentary expertise by virtue of living in the United States and being asked for their papers, therefore they, like attorneys and paralegals, practice legal craft in preparing immigration cases.
The image on the book’s cover conveys the creativity involved in making something of one’s papers. The cover art is a reproduction of Fidencio Fifield-Perez’s piece, “Dacament #7.” The artist used a USCIS envelope as a canvas for painting a plant. To me, this beautiful artwork conveys the notion that papers can be brought to life, and that those to whom papers refer can transform their meanings.
Lastly, the book suggests that it is important for anthropologists to pay attention to the technical and material side of documents. It matters whether forms are completed online or by hand, if they generate a bar code (which means that answers that are corrected by hand, using white out, won’t change the bar code), what makes documents look official or unofficial, how stamps, seals, and signatures are used and interpreted, and what sort of paper they appear on. Documents also have aesthetic features. One attorney told me that the many creases in a love letter that her client was submitting added to its authenticity: the client had seemingly repeatedly folded and refolded this letter, suggesting that it was important. Silences within documents also matter. What is not stated? How large are blanks on forms? What is off rather than on the record? These are all questions for anthropologists who study documents to consider.
Jennifer Chacon: Finally, the book offers some important lessons for those who study immigration law and policy. You describe your own work not as a passive recounting, but as its own form of “documenting back” to the state. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this, and say a bit about how you understand the obligations of scholars doing this work?
Susan Coutin: Ethnography can be a form of accompaniment and a means of witnessing. Accompaniment refers to working alongside people who face precarity, exclusion, marginalization, persecution and other forms of injustice. Witnessing, then, consists of documenting these experiences. Volunteering in the legal services department of a nonprofit and shadowing service providers positioned me among legal advocates who were practicing legal craft with and on behalf of immigrant residents seeking legal status. I documented these experiences by writing fieldnotes, doing interviews, and producing ethnographic accounts. I describe my approach to research as not only an ethnography of law but also a paralegal ethnography in that my own role during research was akin to a paralegal who performs legal tasks under an attorneys’ supervision. My book documents the ways that immigrant residents are impacted by US immigration law, the legal craft practiced by service providers, and the visions of a more just future articulated by those seeking legal status and their allies. By producing accounts that deepen understandings and are grounded in respectful and empathetic relationships with interlocutors, scholars who engage in accompaniment and witnessing can contribute to the sorts of transformational imaginings that promote social justice.
Kristina Jacobsen: Your book takes up two longstanding interests of anthropology: Indigeneity and modernity. Did you originally set out to study these topics or did they emerge through your research process? How is your book pushing beyond current thinking in anthropology on these two age-old topics?
Catherine Rhodes I did not set out to study Indigeneity and modernity specifically; these emerged as topics in my research. I originally set out to study whether there was a linguistic relativity effect from teaching linguistics about the Maya (Yucatec) language in the Maya language. Linguistic relativity refers to the idea that language, culture, and thought are in a mutually informing relationship; loosely, it is the study of how language and its use influences behavior, including thought. This led me to discover that there were more than the two widely known registers of Maya—the so-called purified version (jach maaya) and the so-called mixed version (xe’ek’ maaya)—and that Maya linguistics is not just an academic project but also a political project.
I was also beginning to see how this academic-political project depended upon modern ideas about who and what count as Maya. Depending upon the scale or interlocutor, Maya-ness was sometimes construed as Indigenous; at other times it was not. Maya-as-Indigenous is a useful frame when people want to engage in projects that have a broad-scale of recognizability, particularly within the Mexican neoliberal nation-state. I was finding that, the widely circulating stereotypes about who and what count as Maya typically associate “real,” “true,” or “authentic” ‘Maya’ (language, culture, or practices) with the past and critique present people and their practices as supposedly mixed or inauthentic versions of some past ideal. This often leads people to tap into and mobilize those widely circulating stereotypes to achieve recognition, particularly in institutionalized spaces, like government grant programs or state universities. Yet, I was observing how some students and faculty in the undergraduate program at the university where I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork were doing something different. They were rejecting the dichotomies that modern thinking presented: past=authentic; present=corrupted. Instead, they were affirming their own and others’ contemporary practices as Maya; how they speak today, how they dress, and the activities they engage in (for example, doing linguistics) were being affirmed as Maya. The logics they were using refused to engage modern thinking, which assumed a rupture with the past and choosing between being Maya and being modern.
It was through these alternative logics—what I call ‘demodern’ logics—that I saw how modernity was part of how Maya was made and how Maya as this recognizable category of Indigeneity within Mexico (and beyond) was part of the neoliberal logics of the nation-state: Inclusion without representation (following Deloria). Understanding the logics of Maya-ness as modern also required me to engage with colonial theory for, as many critical Latin Americanist thinkers (such as Dussel, Kusch, Fals Borda, Gonzales Casanova, Ribeiro, Escobar, Mignolo, Quijano, and Walsh) argue, modernity’s onset lies in the colonization of what is now the Americas, not in the Enlightenment as is popularly thought. Thus, modernity and coloniality are intertwined and co-constitutive. If this is true, as I believe it is, then decolonial projects that proceed under modern logics are destined to fail. Thus, I propose demodernity as the counterpart to decoloniality. Taking language politics projects—like creating dictionaries or writing or interpreting standards—as an example, these are premised upon modern ideas about the Maya language. But this modern version of the language is not what people use in their daily activities; thus, it contributes to the idea that they do not really speak or know the language. When, instead, vernacular language and other practices are taken seriously as Maya without their authenticity coming into question, then it changes who can engage in a range of activities. It is this shift—away from institutional lip service (or worse, purist language policies and practices that actively drive language disuse) and toward affirming and institutionalizing vernacular practices—in which my interlocutors are engaged and which I show is part of what is essential to a future for Maya people, language, and their practices.
Kristina Jacobsen: You are an interdisciplinary scholar, and your book engages interdisciplinary scholarship. Tell me about why you chose to engage the literatures you draw from in the book and what you hope to contribute by drawing them into conversation with one another.
Catherine Rhodes: Yes, I am a semiotic and linguistic anthropologist and an anthropologist of education; I consider myself firmly rooted in both anthropology and education, hence my decision to study an educational context ethnographically. In order to conceptualize much less to conduct my field research, I needed to have a firm foundation in sociocultural and linguistic anthropologies and the anthropology of education, knowledge of the history of the Yucatan Peninsula and also how the Peninsula relates to Maya peoples and their histories in other parts of Mesoamerica, historical and contemporary scholarship on the Maya language and its speakers and their practices, as well as an understanding of learning theories and pedagogical approaches in the context of higher education, which is where I was primarily conducting participant observations. I also needed to speak Spanish (Yucatecan) and Maya (Yucatec) and to understand linguistics, given that my study was sited in an undergraduate program in linguistics. This was all very well, but as I was reanalyzing my data in the writing of this book, I found the need to also engage modernity theory, which as I mention above, led me to (de)colonial theory and the relationship of both to the idea of Indigeneity in the Americas.
Much of the scholarship in Native American and Critical Indigenous Studies carefully details how coloniality and modernity are intertwined and how both make the category Indigenous. This also necessitated engagement with literature on neoliberalism and nation-states as well as with how Folklore Studies engages ideas about authenticity. I used linguistic anthropology as a guiding lens through this diverse literature because it provides me with a framework for understanding language use as a form of social action in the world; as something we do, not something we have. It also provides me with the concept of language ideologies, which refers to the relationship between people’s ideas about language, its practice, and its users and observable examples of these in the world; language ideologies link these and through interpretive and evaluative judgments. Language ideologies helped me to show how linguistics specifically and academia more broadly are necessarily political projects and what the stakes are for my interlocutors who are engaged in doing academics in Maya. I believe that it was precisely engaging this interdisciplinary scholarship that allowed me to theorize demodernity as the counterpart to decoloniality and to understand how the work in which my interlocutors are engaged is producing this new theoretical perspective in praxis (that is, the wedding of theory and practice). It also allowed me to see how some Maya scholars in Guatemala have been using demodern logics for decades, but they had never been framed as such.
By bringing these diverse literatures and ethnographic/geographic contexts into conversation, I hope to show the value in thinking across geopolitical regions and languages in our scholarly engagement as well as in interdisciplinary ways, for this opens the door to pushing our thinking past the logics in which we were trained and typically operate and toward new logics that create room for conceptualizing the world differently. This is so important, I believe, because what is at stake under modernity/coloniality for Indigenous people (not all of whom would use this word) is precisely the present and possible future.
Kristina Jacobsen: Your book takes up the concepts of time, space, and scale, key analytics in linguistic anthropology. You argue that the project your interlocutors are engaged in—centering their Maya-ness in the present—is not a utopian project. You also argue that it is one that hinges upon its ability to be “scaled up.” Tells us more about how you think this scaling-up might happen, why it is not a utopian project, and what consequences both have for your interlocutors.
Catherine Rhodes: The demodern project in which my interlocutors are engaged is taking place primarily in one undergraduate program in one university on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Of course, some of my interlocutors are trying to spread their demodern thinking beyond this undergraduate program, such as in their binational collaboration with Guatemalan scholars or in the language workshops they offer for schoolteachers in the Yucatan State’s capital, Mérida. For example, the proposal that people be called máasewáal (‘Indian, peasant’, from Nahuatl) instead of Maya circulates beyond the campus already. The question is, can the demodern logics that students and faculty are employing—affirming vernacular practices in the present—begin to circulate more widely as well? So far, we do not have good evidence of such projects being institutionalized beyond this one undergraduate program. I am part of a binational, multidisciplinary project team that is trying to create a dictionary that is developed using demodern logics. It would document the breadth of variation—not prescribe a norm—and provide examples from use in daily life. Once funded, we hope this project will be part of scaling up these new logics of understanding the Maya language, which, of course, we hope will also have effects on how people understand Maya language speakers. We hope the project will influence widespread ideologies about what counts as the Maya language and who count as Maya speakers and foster increased use, in all its variation. By scaling up, I am following Carr and Lempert (2016) in the idea that scaling is something that one does and that scales do not exist a priori (Wortham 2012); instead, resources are construed as of a scale through a process of scaling. I understand scaling to be a shift in indexical order (Rhodes and Leiter n.d.). This refers to the process whereby a sign can become (re)contextualized, thus shifting the social-organizational context within which the sign points to its object. Scaling up considers whether resources used to construe some social phenomenon as meaningful can circulate more widely and hold that same kind of meaning for a greater number of people across different contextualizations.
My colleagues and I do not describe the slow scaling up of demodern logics about the Maya language, Maya people or their practices as a utopian project precisely because demodern logics attempt to obviate the kinds of modern ruptures that utopianism engages. For example, scholars like Joanne Rappaport, in her discussion of the intercultural project in which her Nasa collaborators are engaged, or Arturo Escobar (2007), in his discussion of the “political desire” reflected in his Afro-Columbian intellectual-activist interlocutors’ alternative modernities, express a “utopian imagination” not, as Escobar points out, “a statement about the real, present or future” (206). Instead, my interlocutors are trying to center the here-and-now; to make a statement about the real present, and the kind of future that could make possible. Here, I am thinking with Jessica Hurley’s (2020) work. She describes how apocalypse, as a narrative device, “negates both the future and the present’s claim upon the future” (29). Apocalypse creates a rupture between the present (and any claims on the future) and the past; in this way, it is modern. The counterpoint to utopia—dystopia—“see[s] the future evolving unavoidably from the worst conditions of the present” (Hurley 2020, 30). “Instead, apocalyptic present‑ing ‘imagine[s] a present that neither abandons the past nor is determined by it’” (Hurley 2020, 30 in Rhodes 2025, 50). This creates the possibility for stepping outside of a path in which “…pasts are defined by destruction and…futures promise to perpetuate that destruction” (Hurley 2020, 30; see also Kolopenuk 2020; Povinelli 2011; Sam Colop 1996).
Kristina Jacobsen: You have a decades-long relationship learning and speaking Spanish as a second language and have also studied Maya for many years. Can you talk about your felt experience of speaking Spanish, and then of speaking Maya? Do they feel different in your body and in your mouth? How does speaking English, Spanish, and Maya feed into your affective approaches to the research we read about in your book?
Catherine Rhodes: It is in fact my relationship with speaking Spanish that led me to graduate school in linguistic anthropology. Since becoming a Spanish speaker—at age 16—I had a persistent feeling that I was someone else when I spoke English or Spanish. My experience of the world was different and led me to want to understand why. My novice search on this topic eventually led me to the theory of linguistic relativity and to John Lucy’s work and to the field of linguistic anthropology. When I found linguistic anthropology, I felt that I had found something that I had been looking for for a long time. I applied to graduate programs and was fortunate enough to work with John in developing a project that addressed some issues raised under the paradigm of linguistic relativity. John and Suzanne Gaskins were also my first Maya language teachers, and they helped me explore the possibilities of conducting research on the Yucatan Peninsula.
When I arrived in Yucatan, I not only had the opportunity to use Maya in daily life, but I was also immersed in Yucatecan Spanish, so my Spanish-language learning continued. Today, my experience with Spanish is full bilingualism with English; it is difficult for me to disentangle these languages in my lived and academic practice—and in fact I am actively working to further entangle them in my teaching in two new bilingual binational linguistic anthropology courses I am developing (more on that below). There were times when I was conducting active fieldwork that I could do all my daily activities in Maya. Once I was on a bus and some French speakers were on the bus. They got off in a small town where I was making a bus transfer. I approached them to say hi and they stared, befuddled. In my head, I had been speaking to them in French (my third language before Maya), but, apparently, I had been speaking to them in Maya. Maya had boxed French out of the way as my third strongest language, and any time I actually produced French, it was riddled with Maya discourse markers. Unfortunately, I am not able to speak Maya on a daily basis now, so my speaking skills are rusty. What is interesting when I speak Maya or Spanish, however, is how my speaking body is read in the world. In Spanish I am so often heard with my interlocutor’s “eyes”—despite speaking Spanish like a Yucateca, I don’t always look the part, so me and my Spanish are often located elsewhere. (For example, as a tall, blonde woman, I’m often asked if I am Spanish or Argentine even though my accent sounds nothing like an accent from these places.) In Maya, my interlocutors so often forgive or ignore my intermediate skills, given that so few foreigners speak Maya. This has led my language use to be read as more expert than that of speakers who have grown up speaking the language, with the consequences of devaluing their everyday speech and, by extension, this can contribute to devaluing those speakers. So much work is done in these different ideological positionings of the speaking body, which is something I attend to in my work and life.
Kristina Jacobsen: How does this project contribute to taking you where you plan to go next?
Catherine Rhodes: This project takes me to two new projects, both of which I have alluded to above.
The first is a dictionary of the Maya language. Currently there are no dictionaries of Maya. There are many books called “dictionaries,” but they are just glossaries that provide word-for-word equivalents in other languages (for example., Spanish, English, French, and so on). My colleagues and I are applying for funding to create a dictionary in Maya that provides definitions in Maya of the Maya-language terms it contains, and which has a Maya-language meta-structure (that is, terms for organizing the dictionary, for classifying parts of speech, and so on). The dictionary will be freely available on the Internet, and it will include sociodemographic and linguistic ideological data about users and use. It will also include audio recordings of examples of use. We plan to collect data in all three Mexican states on the Yucatan Peninsula—Campeche, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo—and in previously un- or under-documented micro-regions of these three states. Further, we will develop software for collecting the data for the dictionary and then turning those data into the public-facing dictionary. We will then create a public-facing presentation of our data collection, analysis, and dictionary production process and the open-source software we developed for the project and make these freely available on the web. We will also present on this work in a range of contexts throughout the Americas to share the work and make it available to other language communities to support their own work in creating dictionaries in their languages.
The second project is the creation of linguistic anthropology courses and an introductory book in Spanish. Under a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship during the 2024-2025 academic year, I produced the Spanish-language first-edition of Laura Ahearn’s Living Language, which we are now co-authoring,and pilot tested it in the classroom at a university in Yucatan State. Laura and I are co-authoring the forthcoming fourth edition of Living Language in English as well. We will then have the book and my undergraduate course design in both English and Spanish, which I will use to teach the undergraduate course Language and Culture, on an ongoing basis as a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) course between my home university, the University of New Mexico, and collaborative partner in Mexico, the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY), on an ongoing basis. Students will be able to engage the course in English or Spanish or to translanguage between these languages. They will work together on binational projects that employ core concepts in linguistic anthropology. This is a mission-driven project for me as a UNM faculty member, given that New Mexico has the highest percentage per capita of Spanish-speakers of any U.S. state, that UNM is a Hispanic serving institution, and that Spanish-speaking and Hispanic enrollments are growing in academia in the U.S. For students at the UADY, the course provides then with the opportunity to engage their English-language skills on anthropological theory and projects, and it provides access to training in linguistic anthropology in Spanish. Linguistic anthropology is a U.S. phenomenon that has been increasingly growing beyond the U.S.—as we discussed in 2025 at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Conference in Chicago and at the American Association of Applied Linguistics meeting in Denver. There is great interest in linguistic anthropology in Latin America and Mexico specifically, but faculty are trained in cultural anthropology or linguistics, given that no programs exist in Spanish for training linguistic anthropologists. This course and the new graduate seminar I am developing under the same format, will provide entry points into the literature and practice of linguistic anthropology for Spanish speakers and contribute to training the next generation of scholars who can build programs in linguistic anthropology and develop this field beyond the United States.
Max Conrad: You argue that Catholicism as a religion facilitates heteroglossia and is ultimately shaped – formed and reformed – by dialogue, particularly the words and actions of laypeople. The divide in how Mainstream and Charismatic Catholics view religious authority seems to mirror other differences you outline in the book, such as hymns: catechistic, narrative, and expository versus felt, expressive, and affective. When did you first realize heteroglossia would be an important concept?
Eric Hoenes del Pinal: There are two answers to that. The first time I realized it was important was in a linguistic anthropology graduate seminar with Kit Woolard (my dissertation chair), who showed us how linguistic anthropologists had taken up Mikail Bakhtin’s ideas about heteroglossia as a way to think through the social dimensions of linguistic variation. Bakhtin, for the uninitiated, was writing about how Russian novels work. He proposed that in a good novel each character’s voice is distinct, reflecting their unique personal biographies; and the novel as a whole comes from the dialogues that emerge between them. The concept of heteroglossia thus allows us to think with both unity and diversity of language at the same time.
That idea stuck with me, but it wasn’t necessarily something I had thought to extend past my analysis of strictly linguistic phenomena like codeswitching; and it didn’t really occur to me that I could extend the model to all the communicative behaviors that index social differentiation until much later. That happened when I was wandering the labyrinthine halls of the Washington DC Marriott at a AAA meeting (and feeling kind of bad about my various scholarly failures). It suddenly struck me that heteroglossia could serve as the lynchpin for explaining the complex social relations that I had observed in the Catholic parish I call San Felipe in the book. I had been struggling for several years to figure out how to write a book that was, if not exactly groundbreaking, at least different enough from my dissertation to be worth the effort. So, I went back to Bakhtin and set myself the task of seeing if I could adapt his ideas about novels to thinking about Catholicism in Guatemala. Once I figured out how to do that, I felt it left me with a good way to talk about Catholicism in a non-reductionistic, non-normative way that highlighted the creative potential that the parishioners I got to know in Guatemala feel their religion offers them.
Max Conrad: At first glance, the dichotomy appears to be that Q’eqchi’ indexes Maya identity, Mainstream Catholicism and the local, while Spanish is associated with Charismatic Catholicism and a global sense of universality. Yet, you describe this fascinating moment of juxtaposition in Chapter 4 where the Charismatics enthusiastically request the Mass in Q’eqchi’. Trends in the anthropology of Christianity seem to oscillate between localized and globalized conceptions of Christianity. Bakhtin is a major theoretical influence via the concept of heteroglossia, though you also talk about how chronotopes inform your writing. I’m curious how you see chronotopes organizing the spatiotemporal conditions for Q’eqchi’- Maya Catholics in San Felipe or Guatemala as a whole – what kind of stories are made possible under these conditions? How do Q’eqchi’ and Spanish complicate or expand the local and the global?
Eric Hoenes del Pinal: That episode you mention obviously made a great impression on me because it seemed so unexpected at first. But really, who hasn’t changed their behavior to try to meet someone else’s expectations? And who hasn’t had that sort of thing go awry at least once? Father Augustine had his expectations of what the Charismatics wanted, and the Charismatics had their expectations of what Father Augustine wanted, and both their expectations were tied to various discourses about how linguistic codes index certain kinds of identities. But things went sideways because their expectations didn’t quite line up like they thought they would. Nevertheless, the mass happened and served its immediate purpose, and I think people were generally satisfied with it even if it also led to some grumbling after the fact. It wanted to include that episode in the book, because as the situation unfolds you start to realize that the meanings attached to the codes are much more flexible than you might at first expect and subject to multiple interpretation. I think of the Bakhtinian terms I used in my analysis — voicing is the most useful one here, because the conflict in the parish seemed to largely come from how members of each camp use language and music to give voice to their identities as Catholics and how members of the other camp perceived and interpreted those voicings. You could say that what went awry here, though, was that each party adopted a voice other than the one that their dialogic partner expected to hear. What meanings the various parties brought to that encounter (and the fact it happened at all) were contingent on the specific time and place that all of us were inhabiting at the time, which is really what the idea of the chronotope alerts us to.
An African Catholic priest and Guatemalan-born, US-based anthropologist walk into a chapel in the highlands where a couple of hundred Q’eqchi’-Mayas are singing … It’s a heck of set-up and there are myriad stories that could have come from it, each of them informed by the multiple overlapping histories that somehow got us all there. Those histories are both global and local, and I think everyone present there that day understood that, even if they might have also taken different stances toward the meaning of those terms.
Christianity, but maybe Catholicism especially, contributed to that whole story by the various ways that it posits its simultaneous imaginaries of the global and local that people could tap into.
Max Conrad: In your conclusion you mention that, upon returning a decade later, glossolalia – exceedingly rare in your initial fieldwork – had become more manifest among the Charismatics of Sa’xreb’e. Similarly, you mention that the parish as a whole had undergone a kind of pentecostalization. How do you interpret what appears to be a drift towards one side of the divide?
Eric Hoenes del Pinal: We ethnographers typically experience their field sites for just a year or two, and what we observe thus necessarily bound to a specific time and place. So, all ethnographies are chronotopic by definition, even if that is sometimes elided in our writing. I think it’s important that we acknowledge that our observations are neither timeless nor universal, but rather contingent and contextual. We should also always be cognizant that life goes on after we’ve left the field. Things change and what we observe is neither how things have always been, nor how they shall henceforth always be.
There was like a seven-year gap there where I didn’t go to Cobán and wasn’t really in touch with anyone from San Felipe. Back in the mid-2000s the people I knew didn’t have email addresses (most still don’t) and social media wasn’t really a thing yet (and people have certainly taken that up much more readily). So, I really had no sense of what was going on in the parish. When I finally went back, which was to attend my cousins’ quinceañera and not for research purposes, I expected Cobán to be at once familiar and different, because that’s how like life works, but I wasn’t sure exactly how it would be so.
When I left after my main period of fieldwork, it looked like the Charismatics were on the verge of separating themselves from the parish, but, as it turned out, they didn’t. That was in part because of a Diocesan project that was built on certain aesthetic choices and practical commitments that were appealing to the Charismatics allowed for a rapprochement between them and the majority (but by no means all) of the Mainstream Catholics. But again, it also led to some new division and debates, just as every new turn in Catholicism seems to have. My conclusion then wasn’t necessarily that a kind of pentecostalization was happening, but rather that whatever was happening was a further opportunity for people to create and express new senses of self in relation to it. I think that had I not seen that change over time, I might not have gone back to see if I could use the Bakhtinian ideas could be used to theorize Catholicism.
Max Conrad: You also mention in the conclusion that the vigorous internal debates around communicative practices and markers of difference had been supplanted by questions of how to be an “engaged” Catholic within a broader non-Catholic public. How did these debates lay the groundwork for these new concerns about engagement and interaction with non-Catholics? Is the language debate still relevant with these new emphases?
Eric Hoenes del Pinal: Those new pentecostalized aesthetics that the Diocese introduced as part of its campaign to be more publicly engaged shifted what the terms of debate were in the parish. By adopting that program (Las santas misiónes populares) the Diocese was trying to address the wider issue of the Catholic Church’s diminishing foothold in the Guatemalan public sphere. I’m not sure how cognizant the people in the Diocesan office were of what was happening at the parish level between the Mainstream and Charismatic Catholics, but they did know that if Las santas misiones was going to work, it was going to need Q’eqchi’-Mayas to be a big part of it. Several people from the parish’s lay leadership threw themselves into the project wholeheartedly, and they found real purpose in it and a strong motivation to work towards its goals. Those lay leaders did a great job of promoting Las santas misiones in the parish, and a lot more people found they really liked the idea that they were lay missionaries for the Church. Others, though, didn’t, and resisted the projecton the grounds that they felt it didn’t adequately reflect the values of their distinctly Q’eqchi’-Maya spirituality. Part of the problem for them was linguistic, but because much of Las santas misiones was done in Q’eqchi’ as a practical matter, other communicative practices like norms of bodily comportment, expected dress codes, and the forms that public rituals took became the discursive focus of what people liked and disliked about this turn within the Church.
Last year when I was in Cobán, the Diocese was celebrating the tenth anniversary of Las santas msisiones, and I saw that it has faded into the background of the day-to-day practice of Catholicism. There was certainly a lot less fervor about its activities and a lot less discourse about it than what I had seen when I first reconnected with people in San Felipe parish. Of course, that just means that other questions and concerns have become prominent in how people negotiate the meaning of being Catholic and Q’eqchi’.
Max Conrad: Guarded by Two Jaguars combines much-needed inquiries into language, Christianity, and indigeneity with important takeaways for each. How has this research shaped you as a scholar, and what is the next direction for you?
Eric Hoenes del Pinal: By the time I went to grad school, I knew that I wanted to do my research in Cobán, which is where my father’s side of the family was from and a place that I had visited often. I knew that my grandfather had spoken Q’eqchi’, and thought it was a shame that none of his children or grandchildren had learned the language. In grad school I developed a greater interest in the politics of language (which was also no doubt shaped by my own experiences as a native Spanish speaking migrant to the USA), and I more or less ended up picking a church as a field site because it was a space where some of the issues those issues were happening but hadn’t really been written about in the Guatemalan context. I was very fortunate to be at a university with some very smart people who were thinking about Christianity from an anthropological perspective, so it made sense to bring all these strands together. But ultimately, if my scholarship in this book is focused on how discourses about language, Christianity and indigeneity intersect it’s because those interconnections were and continue to be important to the people I got to know in Cobán.
In terms of what’s next, I just wrapped up some fieldwork last year for my current book project about how Q’eqchi’-Maya people are thinking about and experiencing climate change. This new project is a lot less about language, but in a lot of ways it is still focused on communication. The main thing I’m looking at is how Q’eqchi’-Maya people relate to what we Occidentals call the natural environment, and much of that happens through the medium of ritual, so to some extent the project is about how human and other-than-human beings communicate with each other. Writing about that material is giving me a chance to think about some new things in what I think are novel ways. Hopefully, it’ll turn into something cool.
Rachel Apone:Thank you for this creative, rich, and thought-provoking book! The book offers a fascinating argument about the history of Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and speaks to foundational issues in linguistic anthropology such as language ideologies and their relationship to power. But it also weaves together so many other themes and issues, making the book of interest to anyone studying infrastructure, bureaucracies, decolonization, temporality, or imagination. Can you first tell us a little bit about how this project developed? What were your motivating questions? How did those questions develop or shift as you did the archival research? What did the archival research process look like?
Courtney Handman: Thank you for these questions! Yes, a couple of times I hint at the fact that the final form of this book ended up being a bit of a surprise based on where I started with it. Initially, I was thinking this was going to be a book about why Tok Pisin has become the dominant language in Papua New Guinea over the 20th and early 21st centuries while being so intensely disliked by speakers and non-speakers alike. At the same time, I was working on questions of religious infrastructure among the colonial Lutheran missions, and how their intense focus on creating so many supposedly secular transportation networks was related to their more self-consciously religious goals. Initially, I was thinking of these as somewhat disconnected projects, but at a certain point it became clear that the way that people in colonial Papua New Guinea were talking about “the language problem” (the fact that there are many hundreds of languages spoken) overlapped with the way that they were talking about problems of moving around an incredibly mountainous place and unifying people into some larger social form (a synod, a colony, eventually a nation).
As you were hinting at in your question, the archives organized the final shape of the research too. When I went to the Australian national archives to look at the way that the colonial administration handled Tok Pisin, I started to see how many of those files were in response to the demands of the United Nations Trusteeship Council, which had oversight powers of Australia’s administration of the Territory of New Guinea, including their 1953 demand that Australia eradicate Tok Pisin. I had been hearing about this demand since the moment I first became interested in Tok Pisin’s history back when I was in college, and I was excited to finally dig into this part of Papua New Guinea’s history. The Trusteeship Council is not well-known now, but in the years after World War II it played an important role in decolonization. As I talk about in the second half of the book, its more anti-colonial delegates helped to create a kind of top-down project of bureaucratic decolonization that contrasts sharply with the more common imagination of decolonization as a bottom-up process of national struggle by colonized peoples. As I was working through these files, I started to see that even the most vocally anti-colonial delegations on the Trusteeship Council who wanted to hurry the Territory of New Guinea towards independence were thinking about Papua New Guinea in ways that mirrored the colonial and missionary discourses I had already seen: there were too many mountains and too many languages for Papua New Guinea to really be modern, and something needed to be done — to Tok Pisin, to English, to the aviation networks, to the road networks, and so on — to fix this circulatory problem.
So the book eventually took shape around the issue of what was allowing for all of these repetitions of the same problems: under what conditions do languages seem to be just like roads? Under what conditions do both colonizers and those demanding decolonization see this equivalence? In that sense, this became a book that wasn’t about languages on their own or infrastructures on their own, but about the imaginaries and material forms of circulation that organized these different channels.
Rachel Apone:As I already hinted at, one exciting aspect of this book was that it brings together a range of phenomena into the same frame. In addition to Tok Pisin, the book considers Lutheran radio and aviation networks, plantation labor and ‘telepathy tales’ and bureaucratic information flows during decolonization, just to name a few issues. In the introduction, you tell readers you are focusing on “channels,” which you define as “the institutionally and culturally codified means of enabling communication” (3). Can you tell us a little bit about how channels relate to or depart from other concepts such as “infrastructure” or “media” or “code”? If more (linguistic) anthropologists attend to the cultural formation of channels, do you have a sense of what other questions, insights, and conversations this might open up?
Courtney Handman: I borrow “channels” from Jakobson’s discussion of speech events as involving speaker, addressee, context, code, message, and channel/contact. In that sense I am in conversation with folks like Chip Zuckerman and Shunsuke Nozawa, who have written about phatic (channel-based) functions of language. One of the things that I like about the term is that talking about channels can be somewhat agnostic about the nature of the channel. To talk about “codes” usually means talking about languages as grammatical systems. To talk about “infrastructures” usually means focusing more on technological or socio-technical systems. To talk about “media” usually means talking about mass media. But “channel” doesn’t necessarily have those specific connotations, and I try to use it in a way that can encompass all of them. In doing so, I also try to see the ways that different channels can get conflated or talked about together in various sorts of historical or ethnographic contexts.
Paying attention to channels in this agnostic kind of way will hopefully open up conversations about otherwise less-emphasized aspects of communicative encounters. In linguistic anthropology, we tend to start our analyses of different communicative events after the process of creating a channel is done. We can analyze an interaction because that channel has been mobilized or formed, and people have started talking, or texting, or signing. But by not looking at channel formation, it leaves a lot of the work of how communicative events happen, or how people try to create the contexts for communicative events to happen, by the wayside. Even when issues of channel formation come up, we tend to downplay them. For example, one of the most consequential concepts for linguistic anthropology for the past 20 years or so has come out of Asif Agha’s work on enregisterment. In his analysis of the creation and spread of British Received Pronunciation, he uses Saul Kripke’s concept of the speech chain to talk about the spread of knowledge of RP. Linguistic anthropologists clearly have depended a lot on Agha’s discussions of enregisterment to talk about what people are doing in different speech events. But outside of some work on publics, like Andrew Graan’s idea of ‘discursive engineering,’ there has been less attention paid to the speech chain itself — its formation, its textures, its transformations. In a certain sense, then, I am thinking about channels as a way to look comparatively at how people cultivate and envision the sorts of speech chains they are in.
As I talk about in the introduction, I think of channels as elements of what Lee and LiPuma called cultures of circulation. For them, the primary regimes of circulation are publics and nations, and they focus mostly on the mass media forms that support them. By keeping the concept of regimes of circulation so linked to mass media, though, they end up ignoring other forms of circulation, for example bureaucracy. The kinds of channels I look at in the book are often not broadcast media, but rather the narrowcast (point-to-point) media used to try to link one mission to another or one office to another. And in focusing on channel formation itself I am emphasizing the places and times in which participants feel like channels are unstable, something that has been especially but not exclusively true for colonial contexts.
In terms of broader connections across anthropology, I have always wanted to see more interaction between linguistic anthropology and science and technology studies. Bruno Latour’s early ideas in Science in Action about the recruitment and translation of scientific allies in different controversies have always seemed like one place where that could happen, although elements of Latour’s actor network theory made his idea of translation at times frustratingly minimalist. Paying attention to the semiotic forms of channels and channel construction could be one way to complicate the story of network formation that he tells.
To go back to the book more specifically, when I was first looking at some of the historical materials that I was working with, I kept thinking in terms of the classifications used in the archives: some documents were about language, some were about radios, some were about airplanes, and so on. But it became clear that people who were on the ground in Papua New Guinea during the colonial and decolonizing eras were not keeping these categories very separate. A two-paragraph item in a colonial newspaper would jump between radios, communist infiltration from Indonesia, Tok Pisin, and telepathy; or a line of questioning about a report to the UN Trusteeship Council in New York would move from aviation networks, to the language problems, to English, to the presence or absence of Papua New Guinean demands for self-government. And at some point I realized I needed to pay more attention to how those links were being made. There is always the risk of making a category so general that it loses any analytic purchase, but the openness of ”channels” has been productive for me in thinking about the kinds of overlaps and connections I saw people making in Papua New Guinea.
Rachel Apone:The book is divided into two parts. The first focuses on Lutheran missionaries and other colonial actors and the second part focuses on the UN Trusteeship Council and its role in the decolonization of PNG. This concept of “circulatory primitivity” anchors both sections—you show how both colonial and decolonial actors constructed PNG as a fragmented place where ideas/information, people, and goods do not easily circulate. At a few different points you draw our attention to what might be called erasure–constructing PNG as a place of circulatory primitivity required erasing or ignoring vast exchange networks, the movement of people through kin networks, and so on. Can you thematize or reflect a bit on the relationship between erasure and “circulatory primitivity”? I’m curious why these forms of circulation are erased? Why aren’t colonizers discussing kin and exchange networks as illicit forms of circulation?
Courtney Handman: This is a great question. The historian Tracey Banivanua Mar talks about this dynamic of the visibility and invisibility of movement for the colonial Pacific broadly, and I think it is especially true for Papua New Guinea. On the one hand, there are all these (very incorrect) colonial discourses about the immobility of Papua New Guineans: that they stay within their small worlds, that they are scared to move around because of the threat of violence from other groups, that they are hemmed in by mountains and the lack of any larger lingua franca that could allow for a larger polity to form. On the other hand, there are all these colonial regulations that restricted Papua New Guineans’ movements, which would suggest that there was some recognition that people were highly mobile and needed to be constrained.
So it is not simply that colonizers did or did not recognize the mobility and circulation of Papua New Guineans. They were thinking about circulation in terms of the modernist imaginaries that they were bringing with them, which emphasized the modernizing effects of movement itself. And that meant that, as with any kind of modernist historical imaginary, there had to be a supposedly pre-modern moment against which colonial progress could be tracked. For missionaries, they used the figure of the immobile Papua New Guinean as the before side of a before/after comparison about the effects of Christianization. They used that immobility to distinguish themselves from those they ministered to: mobile missionaries armed with sacred texts travel long distances to give them to immobile people, some of whom themselves come to take up those texts and bring them to yet more distant others.
Given the connection of circulation and modernity, Papua New Guinean modes of circulation became visible mostly when they seemed to interfere with colonial projects. In the contexts that I talk about in this book, that often meant labor contexts. Where people were moving around to avoid getting blackbirded (kidnapped for indentured labor), or were telepathically connecting to others to warn them of the approach of colonizers, then forms of mobility were recognized but seen as illicit. Another moment when Papua New Guinean mobility became visible to colonizers happened when patrol officers complained that people were not present at their registered home village to participate in being counted for a census or for tax collection. At that village level, colonizers and missionaries were clearly aware of kin-based travel and long-distance exchange networks. But this typically was read as simply an annoyance that was ultimately not important and thus erasable, or as more specifically illicit attempts to evade governance that would get registered but registered pejoratively.
Another reason that local forms of mobility were ignored or erased was because these modernist concepts of circulation were so connected to ideas of large-scale polities and forms of mass media, too. To the extent that Papua New Guinean forms of circulation did not produce larger-scale polities like nations or markets or publics, then they could be ignored as irrelevant or castigated as illegitimate.
But your question more broadly points to the ways that as much as circulation was seen as somehow able to produce modernity or modernist forms, each part of colonial and decolonial society had to tell a story about why movement wasn’t doing the kind of work it was imagined to do. If people weren’t becoming modern in the right way, that was because some other kind of circulation would be better. And these conflicts among colonial projects produced all kinds of illegitimate forms of circulation that had to be constrained or regulated. Everyone agreed that the colony needed a lingua franca, for example, but when that turned out to be Tok Pisin rather than English, they argued that Tok Pisin wasn’t producing the right kind of circulation. This constant ability to affirm the importance of circulation while also being critical about any particular form of it is a point that I can say more about.
Rachel Apone: A couple of times in the book, you reference contemporary concerns about misinformation. But, given the historical scope of the book, we never really get a good sense of your take on that issue. Do you think contemporary concerns about misinformation could challenge the modernist imaginary that more flow and mobility is always better? Or do you think that concerns about misinformation are ultimately a recapitulation of modernist concerns about illicit forms of circulation? Do you have a sense of how concerns and discourses about misinformation are playing out in Papua New Guinea?
Courtney Handman: One of the things that I argue throughout the book is that while there was a broad consensus in the modernity of circulation, every colonial or decolonizing actor had a different idea about what the right kind of circulation would be. And these different views of particular circulatory connections and networks were often quite contradictory. Those channels always had to be reworked, remolded, or sometimes removed, always with the assumption that getting the channels right could create the desired social forms. And this dynamic seems to be at work in the way people worry about misinformation now as well.
To answer your question I would first want to emphasize that there is a panic about misinformation because of the still-present sense that more information should produce better outcomes. Even if the liberal sense of wanting to decide the issues within a marketplace of ideas feels antiquated and inadequate to the contemporary moment, fundamental ideas about choice and freedom are organized around circulation-based principles, for example that you need to be made aware of your options in order to choose (something that is enshrined in all of our IRB practices of informed consent). As with concepts of freedom of speech more generally, the assumption is that information should not be withheld.
Then, as with the cases that I was looking at in the book, there is the sense that the problem that needs to be solved has to do with the way information is circulating. In other words, insofar as people have recently attempted to fix the problems of information by trying to fix the way that information circulates — by trying to get us out of our communicative bubbles and silos — they are still participating in a project of circulatory modernity. Clearly there is more that is happening in terms of a shift away from liberal models of speech in places like the US, so even though circulation is not the only perspective for understanding the rise of illiberalism, I think it is a necessary one.
I’m not sure I have enough of a sense of the current dynamics in Papua New Guinea to make substantive claims about the way people are thinking about or handling questions of misinformation there. Fringe theories from the US circulate widely there. On one of my recent trips, I was surprised to realize that a pastor who I had known for a long time was telling me that he had recently been convinced by websites advocating the flat earth theory. In contrast to the many sources of information that are available now and that get debated as being legitimate or not, the colonial era sources of suspicion were relatively few: the fears of encroaching communism or so-called native telepathy, for example. But even if the distinction between the sanctioned as opposed to illicit sources of circulation is less clear, nevertheless my sense is that people are still trying to make that distinction. That is, they are still hoping to solve questions of social forms by reforming circulation.
I actually want to hear your answer to the question of how the problem of misinformation is playing out in contemporary Papua New Guinea, since some of your own work deals so creatively and thoughtfully with these issues. In lieu of being able to do that in this forum, I just want to end by thanking you for all of your fantastic questions and engagement with the book.
Bernard Perley: You mention how radio as a medium introduced new domains for language use, but also as an affirmation of traditional forms of language use. The value of radio is in its ability to broadcast across the region so that time (generational) and space (multi-sited) are chronotopically laminated during the course of the broadcast as an unfolding event. The linguistic forms do double-duty, highlighting difference (language variety) while anchoring solidarity (cultural practices). You close with a discussion of reweaving and remembering as aspects of reanimation and reclamation. Can you discuss how the “re” words (meaning ‘back’ or ‘again’) index “recovery” while pointing toward Kichwa language futures?
Georgia Ennis: One of my goals in the book was to use terms that were locally meaningful to describe processes of language oppression and reclamation for Kichwa speakers in Napo. For instance, language activists in Napo often discussed their work as a form of revalorization, which resonates with how Wesley Leonard has describe reclamation (2012) as a community-directed and oriented praxis.
Many of the many concepts of the book hinge around this process of turning ‘again’ to previous sites of animation, memory, thought, mediation, and value. These are also future-oriented projects. Although their indexicality is often towards the past, and the return of prior systems of knowledge, practices, and ways of interacting, they simultaneously point towards the future. For Peirce (1955, 100), sign relationships included not just the ground between sign-vehicle and object, but also the interpretant. Gal and Irvine (2019, 88) recast these as “conjectures” about the meanings of signs, which depend upon pre-existing knowledge and extend knowledge as we interact with signs. It is in the emergence of conjectures that these re-oriented projects—re-weaving, re-membering, re-animating, re-claiming, re-valorizing—have the potential to generate future meaning and action for language and culture. By bringing signs back into circulation again, they point to possibilities for future engagement with them.
Bernard Perley: You describe in detail the social relations that go into the radio programming and broadcasting of Napo Runa social relationships and cultural practices as a complex ecology of community supported media. You frame the process as remediation; remediation having two aspects (at least). You state that “people are also mediums of transmission” (14). Can you elaborate on how that framing contributes to rethinking the “technologies of remediation” model?
Georgia Ennis: My thinking around remediation brings together linguistic anthropology and media studies. From linguistic anthropology, I combine ideas of linguistic relatively and Peircean semiotics to understand how we apprehend the world. For media scholars Bolter and Grusin, a medium “it is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (1999, 66). The concept of remediation hinges on the embedding of one medium in another medium (McLuhan 1964), which has some overlaps with the focus in linguistic anthropology on decontextualization and recontextualization (Kuipers 1990; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992) .
A common language ideology among English speakers is that face-to-face communication is unmediated in contrast to channels like the radio, which introduce an obvious medium between speakers. However, language and other sign systems do not just label the world but are integral to our interpretations of the content of the world (Sapir 1949 [1933]; Hill and Mannheim 1992). Language and other forms of semiosis are a further site of mediation.
In my framework, people are channels of remediation, who internalize what I think of as the content of other media—be that experience, other people, or their own thoughts. At the most basic level the content people remediate is their qualitative experiences of reality mediated through semiotic systems, which are themselves built from experience. Such qualitative experiences may also be remediated into speech or other sign systems. In our daily lives, we remediate experience through conjectures that build up interpretations of the world. We further remediate experience through multimodal and embodied citations. Like processes of decontextualization and recontextualization, remediation can also generate intertextual gaps or transformations across sites of production. This is one way that I conceive of the semiotics of intergenerational transmission and socialization. Social actors are mediums of transmission across space and time, which allow for further remediations and transformations of the social order.
Bernard Perley: In your introduction, you talk about being a good daughter. One thing you shared was, “I had even tried to learn to weave shigra. I remained clumsy, though, while Serafina and her daughters deftly wove knots they described as “daughters” upon “mother” threads to produce shigra…”. You observe the daily wayusa upina, “was a time when children learned to be Napo Runa and when Napo Runa adults and elders reaffirmed their connections with each other and to the communicative world” (23). Jumping to your chapter on affect, you discuss spicey speech or joking behavior as cultural intimacy and a form of play that often included you. Your analysis of one joking account prompted Serafina’s musings on earthquakes. I am wondering, it seems you acquired deep enough “cultural knowledge and intimacy to be ‘in on’ the joke” (191). Can you describe how you became a reciprocal thread in the Kichwa lifeways—how did the intimacy you achieved contribute to Serafina’s interpretation and musings?
Georgia Ennis: For Serafina—my elder host in the village of Chaupishungo—I was a wakcha, which shaped my research with her. This is like the concept of orphan in English but also includes those who have lost just one parent, as well as spouses who have lost their partners. Serafina and I had both lost our mothers at relatively young ages. This is one of the reasons we became so close, and she came to see me as a daughter—and I also came to see her as a mother. The mornings that I spent by the fire talking with Serafina and listening to the radio with her family were times in which I was socialized into Serafina’s knowledge about how to live a good life through the life stories she chose to share with me.
This was also intimacy that grew through time. Following my first year of fieldwork, Serafina became more intent about sharing her life history and experiences, particularly the privileged traditional and historical knowledge shared among family. Where she had once told me she did remember her elder’s narratives, she began to share them more openly. I am now analyzing some of our conversations about this transition in terms of “narrative refusal”—moments when knowledge is hidden or silenced for inappropriate audiences (see also Simpson 2007). This is also why I write less explicitly about many Kichwa narratives—I was entrusted with them because of specific relationships, relationships that my readers may not have.
My presence, and my emphasis on speaking with Serafina to learn from her, included other family members, who shaped our discussions. Her daughters often joined us and contributed to our conversations. This approach also unintentionally excluded others, who felt that Serafina was not interested in counseling them like this, and who did not awaken early with us. As a graduate student, my job was to engage with Serafina and other elders; I received financial and social support for it, in ways that were almost completely foreclosed to young people in Napo. These were significant ethnographic moments that invited me to recognize how privileged my position was. I sometimes still wonder, did Serafina give me such intimate access because I paid rent to live in her household? Was our relationship as meaningful to her as it was to me? These are questions surrounding anthropological engagement, intimacy, and the ways our positionality informs our research, which are significant to me as a feminist anthropologist (Behar and Gordon 1995). Our ethnographic intimacy emerged from the relationship we forged and the habitus I developed through our time together. Other members of her family have remained important and close interlocuters, even after her death.
Bernard Perley: In chapter 3, you delve into language ideologies and ontologies. On ontologies, you state “an ontological approach emphasizes the subjective assumptions of the nature of language for the people with whom we work and decenters the taken-for-granted assumptions about language of linguists and anthropologists trained within our own epistemic traditions” (126). You describe A New Path program that revalorizes and is responsive to “many of the ontologies and ideological assemblages of language found elsewhere in Napo” (131). Specifically speaking, what are the decentered language ontologies of Kichwa you once took for granted as an anthropologist trained in your epistemic tradition?
Georgia Ennis: I write about several in the book. One I have continued thinking with regards circulation and accessibility of language. Although my training considered ethical issues in language documentation, as well as the limitations of Boasian salvage ethnography (Boas 1889; Rice 2011; Perley 2012), I was also shaped by ontologies of language as a system available to all. Linguistic documentation is often premised on accessible archiving, making language and knowledge available to wider audiences. There is greater acceptance of community protocols in archival projects (Christen 2012), but the creation of open archives remains a goal for many linguists and funders (Ennis and Debenport 2025).
Yet, for my Kichwa interlocuters, language and narrative were significant sources of knowledge and personal power, which they closely guard. When I started my research, I was eager to record traditional stories that I had read in collections of Amazonian narratives. I was often told that people ‘did not know’ or ‘did not remember’ such stories. I also found that my interlocuters like Serafina shared more about these stories as our relationship deepened. Understanding these ontologies drew me into new relationships of responsibility relative to my data, which is actually the significant cultural knowledge of my interlocuters (Ennis et al. 2024).
Just as some activists have adopted models for revitalization based in language standardization conflicting with local ontologies, others, including ANew Path, have turned to broadcast technologies that make knowledge more accessible. This is a site of ontological transformation and debate in Napo. In my recent work, I have developed a greater attitude of refusal (Simpson 2007) out of respect for the knowledge protocols of many of my interlocuters.
Bernard Perley: Your framing of the social entanglements of the Kichwa language as shifting ecologies is a good way to describe the environmental conditions that potentiate mutually influential transformation in diverse ecologies. You also describe the porousness of those ecologies of new media, new generations, and new ideas as a lived reality of contemporary Napo communities. You state in your epilogue, “The introduction of new digital technologies involving such media suggest a more hopeful future, in which language and culture are remembered, rather than forgotten, albeit in new modalities and regimes of value.” (238). This comment struck me for the tension between an implied uncertainty about Kichwa futures and a deus ex machina hope for remediated futures. Can you discuss the tension and how it relates to language reclamation projects in general?
Georgia Ennis: Reclaiming languages is an uncertain prospect, because it often involves not only reconstituting a code but countering the forms of oppression that have reconfigured how and when language is used (Meek 2010). Uncertainty and hope shape the experience of language reclamation. But what is technology’s role in this hopeful future?
Communication technologies can provide a source of emergent vitalities in language reclamation projects. However, I am no techno-optimist, who imagines that technology will “save” a language. As you (2012) have pointed out, archives can create “zombie languages,” disembodied from their speakers and inaccessible to communities. Perhaps we will soon interact with disembodied AI “zombie speakers” of Indigenous languages. Such a future may not be far off, when marketing firms are already using AI to generate “Indigenous” influencers. Gerald Roche has also written that enthusiasm for AI should be tempered, as “underlying economic, social, and political, relationships” shape the possibilities of many communities to interact with such tools (Roche 2024). Simply creating an AI model that can translate between one code and another does not guarantee that tool will be useful to a language community, and it raises larger questions about the transparent commensurability of translation (Mannheim 2015) or community protocols for data sovereignty (Carroll, Duarte, and Max Liboiron 2024). I am skeptical in many ways about remediated futures.
What is significant about media technologies is that they mediate between people (Askew 2002). Media can become focal points for interaction in and around a language, both in production and reception. Such technologies generate new questions and concerns in language reclamation, which should be clarified on a case-by-case basis. Rather than a deus ex machina hope that remediation into new contexts and communicative modalities will “save” languages, media technologies can provide hopeful, potential avenues for further mediation between people.
References:
Askew, Kelly. 2002. “Introduction.” In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, edited by Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk, 1–13. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
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