Page 99 of my dissertation offers only a half-page of writing. The top half contains a screenshot from YouTube of the original soundtrack (OST) for the Hum TV drama Aitebaar (trust) seen below. The page is near the conclusion of the (very long) first chapter, “Drama ascendancy: genealogies and dominance of remediated televisuality.”
The page nevertheless sheds light on an important example in the chapter and a jumping off point for considering the wider dissertation. The chapter that traces connections between print culture, television, and online video distribution in Muslim South Asian media economies. It theorizes ‘ascendancy’ in relation to interlocutors’ framing of their media traditions, lineages, and transmission as well as their labour in the context of ascendant.
The dissertation examines how the digitalizing of broadcast media such as networks’ simulcasting of shows on YouTube, the use of platform analytics, and Big Data audience measurement techniques have shifted the industry’s perceptions of its audience. Through a multi-sited and multimodal ethnographic approach based in Karachi, diasporic communities, and online, the dissertation argues that processes of audience appraisal, feedback, and the segmentation of viewership have not only generated new logics of economization, but also that these cannot be appreciated without contending with the industry’s representation of religiosity.
Screenshot of the Aitebaar OST on YouTube, approximately one year after being uploaded (accessed 7 February 2023)
Aitebaar is one of the drama sets where I spent time getting to know crews, production practices, and rhythms of creative spaces. I first encountered the OST at the headquarters of a major production house, just off Karachi’s commercial center along I.I. Chundrigar Rd. that was doubling as a set on that day. After filming, I went with the cast to a small office to view the completed OST before it was uploaded to YouTube. The OST reflects different ways that dramas extend far beyond the TV series alone, how these extensions generate the dramas’ intermedial power, and the mediatization of their religious vernaculars.
On p. 99, I highlight how lines such as the refrain that is superimposed on the video, meri wafa pe tujh ko, aitebaar na raha, (translates to “My faithfulness/devotion is no longer trusted by you”), contains multiple meanings. This devotion indexes both plot-specific romantic elements as well as metaphysical ones. Such heteroglossia is common in the verses of qawwali and other Urdu poetics. These are appeals to genealogies of musical practice and poetics that feature as central elements for the marketing and consumption of these televisual productions.
Montpellier, Elliot. 2023. “Mediatizing Islam: the digital turn and the promotion of piety in a Pakistani culture industry.” Ph.D. diss., Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Hyemin Lee: Your book, Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau, offers an insightful exploration of the anthropological question of how senses of cultural belonging and identity are rooted in languages. You provided critical insights into this profound question by meticulously examining the language socialization trajectories of Amdo Tibetan children.
Hyemin Lee: Your book, Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau, offers an insightful exploration of the anthropological question of how senses of cultural belonging and identity are rooted in languages. You provided critical insights into this profound question by meticulously examining the language socialization trajectories of Amdo Tibetan children.
Could you tell us about your research trajectory that culminated in writing this book? Specifically, I am interested in what “Amdo, Tibet” means to you and your studies as a research site and a place that holds meanings. What makes Amdo uniquely significant for conducting ethnographic research on childhood, language shift, and language socialization/acquisition?
Shannon Ward: Amdo is a borderland region characterized by long histories of migration and cultural flows that have contributed to evolving forms of language contact. While it sits at the easternmost end of Tibet, it also exemplifies the complex forms of movement that variously characterize “Tibet” as a cultural and linguistic region, an occupied country, and a diasporic homeland.
I first came to know Amdo as an undergraduate student in 2011, when I completed a senior thesis project with Tibetan women living in exile in Dharamsala, India. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the pre-eminent figure in Tibetan Buddhism and played a central role in establishing a sovereign Tibetan government-in-exile seated in Dharamsala. Although today, rural-to-urban migration arguably represents the most common pattern of geographic movement in the region, from the 1980s until 2008, many Tibetans arriving in exile in India came from Amdo. Back in 2011, most of the interlocutors who shared with me their journeys of traversing the Himalayas to reach the schools and monasteries supported by His Holiness the Dalai Lama were born and raised in Amdo. My experiences of learning to speak Tibetan alongside these interlocutors sparked my fascination with diversity within Tibet. Their reminiscences and hopes for return, either to visit their families upon acquiring valid travel documents or to see Tibet repatriated as an independent nation, motivated me to continue to learn about this region.
During my graduate studies, I was able to study the language and history of Amdo more thoroughly. The current 14th Dalai Lama’s migration from Amdo to Lhasa as a young child exemplifies the ways that Buddhist practices and governance have unified the Tibetan plateau, especially since the 7th century. The particular local histories of migrations within Amdo, such as that of the focal family described in Chapter 1, illuminate how place-based belonging is reproduced through language variation. The centrality of place in constituting linguistic differentiation, both in the Tibetan exile community and within Amdo itself, is an enduring pattern that I continue to encounter in my research and that frames this book.
Amdo is an important site for conducting ethnography with children, because children are at the forefront of change—both cultural and linguistic. Overlapping local histories of migration and language contact in Amdo provide us with a unique lens to examine how the creative forms of linguistic change that children enact also draw on longer-term cultural and linguistic histories that adults often overlook. For example, as charted in Chapter 1 and the Conclusion, I argue that even when children shift from speaking their native Amdo Tibetan to Mandarin, they are drawing on cultural logics that associate language variation with place-based belonging. The meanings of places within Amdo, and of Amdo as a place within Tibet, are co-constituted through children’s language acquisition and socialization.
Hyemin Lee: You discuss your methodologies on fieldwork and writing through the concept of “Ethnographic Narrative” (xxii). Could you elaborate more on this approach, particularly what you intend to convey to readers through it?
Shannon Ward: I conceived of ethnographic narrative as a way to balance the need to convey linguistic details, while also thickly describing my subjective experiences of participant observation and preserving the confidentiality of participants. As a linguistic anthropologist, my fieldwork involves playing with children and actively participating in their conversations, and also meticulously transcribing and analyzing their talk. Both participant observation and careful transcription represent important pieces of the ethnographic record, an approach developed by Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin as an essential facet of the practice of language socialization research. As I demonstrate in the section “Narrative and Transcription Conventions,” transcription is not a transparent process of reproducing content from recordings to written form, but instead entails complex choices about how to interpret the literal and intended meanings of language, as well as the broader cultural meanings of the practices enacted through language. For example, during transcription sessions, adults referred to Amdo Tibetan sentence-final particles as having “no meaning” (36). Through participant observation, I also encountered adults who described these particles as “Chinese” when they were spoken by children (50). These interpretations of children’s grammar show how children are being identified as agents of language shift.
In my writing, I used two primary strategies of narration to achieve this balance between linguistic detail and thick description. First, I depicted transcripts as dialogues, with annotations in an appendix. With this technique, I hope that readers can appreciate both the unfolding social actions in the dialogues and the grammatical details of talk. Second, I created composite scenes and characters to support the narrative arch of the ethnography and to ensure confidentiality. While the decision to include composites has complex ethical implications, I felt it was necessary to demonstrate the significance of Amdo kinship structures without providing details that could identify individual participants. Ultimately, I aimed for composites to communicate the meaning of “real cultural events” (Clifford 1986, 98) that lead us to a broader understanding of processes of language socialization. That is, composites allow ethnographic narrative to highlight the most significant patterns of language use, which I derived through the analysis of fieldnotes and transcripts.
Hyemin Lee: I noticed that your book is in a dialogue with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) and his concept of colonial alienation. Could you explain how you came to integrate Thiong’o into your book? What do you see as the most critical dynamics and consequences of language shift in Xining, as they relate to “colonial alienation”?
Shannon Ward: I can thank Sonia Das for introducing me to this foundational work, which describes language is used in institutions that perpetuate colonial domination. I was inspired by this work because of its significance to understanding language and power, as well as its focus on childhood. While Ngũgĩ writes retrospectively about his childhood, I was curious as to how we could analyze colonial alienation during children’s everyday experiences.
In the context of Tibet, I see two primary dynamics of colonial alienation, which contribute to language shift to Mandarin in Xining. The first is education policy, which provides for bilingual education only in rural areas officially designated as autonomous counties or prefectures. In addition, shifting policies continuously redefine the scope of bilingual education, sometimes emphasizing the acquisition of Mandarin over Tibetan. Education policies in Tibet are similar to those that Ngũgĩ describes, because the acquisition of the dominant language through education outside of the village homeland is necessary for socio-economic mobility.
The second dynamic is the rise of a standard language ideology that privileges monolingualism. Tibet is a region with a deep history of multilingualism, but the politicization of language as a marker of political belonging has meant that children are encouraged to choose to speak a single language. As demonstrated in the ethnographic scenes in chapter 4, this ideology is re-instantiated in everyday interactions that shame children for their intuitive language practices, such as code-mixing, and discursively identify urban children as Mandarin speakers. I argue that the rise of a standard language ideology is linked to colonial alienation through colonial tools, such as censuses and schools, that associate ethnic groups with single written languages.
Hyemin Lee: Chapter 5 offers an insightful exploration of the possibilities of “urban belonging” (139) facilitated by the literacy activity “I Read.” Do you see literacy activities like “I Read” as a potential alternative practice (in contrast to (traditional) Tibetan language activism) for promoting ethnolinguistic diversity and inclusion, both within and beyond Tibetan contexts?
Shannon Ward: Chapter 5 is directly inspired by theories of the sequential unfolding of co-operative action, developed through the work of Chuck and Candy Goodwin. In “I Read,” parents and children created space for multilingualism through their conversations, which I feel is essential for the vitality of minoritized languages more generally. In my understanding, the parents conceived of this activity primarily to facilitate children’s social connections rather than as a form of language instruction. This framing allowed children’s creative uses of language to emerge more freely.
I feel that providing structured activity settings informed by goals for inclusion can promote ethnolinguistic diversity beyond Tibet. In Amdo, as in many settings, individual parents seemed to take primary responsibility for facilitating these activities. Community-based projects such as “I Read” represent a powerful form of activism, and they can also be supported by institutionalized programs. In my new research with children in Canada, for example, I found that government funding supports free preschool programs, such as Strong Start in British Columbia, to encourage new immigrant parents who speak diverse languages to engage in structured play together. Such programs support the efforts of local communities to facilitate inclusion.
However, communities facing language shift may also develop programs for explicit instruction in their language. In a society dominated by formal education and the commodification of language, this approach can elevate the status of minoritized languages. I think these different forms of language activism—overt efforts for language instruction versus community-based programs not explicitly focused on language—demonstrate the dynamic tension between language standardization as a form of reclaiming language and belonging, but also a potential contributing factor to the loss of internal linguistic diversity within communities. An approach to language activism that incorporates both forms of programming might be most effective for sustaining young children’s multilingualism.
Hyemin Lee: A key strength of your book lies in its contribution to language activism and language rights by representing and advocating for the voices of young children in minoritized language communities. What do you see as the broader implication of your book? How do you envision this book making its own ethical pathways to Tibetan language advocacy within academia and beyond?
Shannon Ward: The broader implication of this book is that children know much more than adults may recognize. In relation to language advocacy, this book has the potential to center the significance of everyday talk and young children’s social relationships in efforts to sustain linguistic diversity. For academics, it calls on us to bring critical perspectives on childhood into the study of language revitalization and language shift. For communities working to reverse language shift, it suggests the importance of including young children in language planning efforts.
Haeeun Shin: Could you share about your intellectual trajectory of Millennial North Korea? What triggered you to have an interest in North Koreans’ digital culture? How does this brand-new book relate to your previous works?
Suk-Young Kim: Millennial North Korea is a sequel to my first book, Illusive Utopia, which is a half a century history of North Korean state-produced propaganda performances. Encompassing a wide range of media such as live theater films or recorded live performances, and visual culture is so crucial for understanding theatrical strategy as operating principles of North Korean society. I accomplished an important historical overview of the cultural history of North Korea for half a century, from the post-war period, or 1948, to 2000 towards the end of the Kim Jong Il era.
There have been so much seismic transformations taking place in Korea in the past two decades. So I wanted to write a sequel that updates the current state of the society, the widening gap between the state and the people, and various economic classes emerging, especially in regards to accessibility to new media technology. Millennial North Korea is a sequel to Illusive Utopia.
Additionally, between 2010, when Illusive Utopia was published, and 2018 when I started writing this new book, I was heavily immersed in researching K-pop and youth digital culture. I thought Hallyu does not stop at DMZ. While I was writing very directly about South Korean pop culture, I had a parallel thought that this is also impacting North Korea.
In particular, I focused on the youth culture, which is deeply embedded in the sense of mobility and breaking away from legacy media. The cell phone is a key player in this and is the main star of the book among all other electronic devices. While other forms of media such as films and TV require a sense of community, cell phones allow you to consume mobile digital culture in a very private setting. Also, people take their media anywhere they want through cell phones. I latched onto this idea when I wrote K-pop Live, which came out in 2018, and I’m somewhat influenced by that vision when I think of North Koreans as well. As cell phone comes in, North Korean youth have an easier time accessing forbidden media and consuming it. The act of consuming forbidden media with mobile devices confirms the individual assertion of a subject that declares resistance against state directives.
Haeeun Shin: Could you say a little about the North Korean Millennials whom your book addresses?
Suk-Young Kim: I clearly say that North Korean millennials are defined by their performative identity. It’s a multifaceted identitarian construct. It is not something that is just defined by your gender or your age. It is not the biological construct by any means, millennials, but it’s that performative identity.
One big part of it is curiosity – intellectual, cultural, or economic curiosity about reality outside of this failed state system – and daringness to explore. That is a very key word for me. In North Korea, it requires tremendous courage and rebellion to watch something from South Korea. It does come from your intention of wanting to know and wanting to take the risk outside of this draconian surveillance state system. So, curiosity and daringness are very important identitarian layers of who North Korean millennials are, at least the ones that I addressed in my book.
The second layer is tech savviness. If you want to have a glimpse of the outside world, you have to have some platform or some media to have a glimpse and explore. A lot of it is their exposure, and accessibility to technology, especially cell phones.
The last one I consider together is their economic status because having smartphones costs you money. Of course, cell phones are widespread in North Korea but I mean it’s not for everyone. According to the latest data before COVID, roughly one out of four had cell phones nowadays, which means not everyone has cell phones like in South Korea or elsewhere. It does claim a certain economic status.
To recap, it is the kind of performative identitarian construct that prioritizes the subjects, courage, willingness, and daringness to take risks and explore. Secondarily, to enable that, you need to have access to technology and you have to have certain economic means. They are North Korean millennials that I addressed in my book.
Haeeun Shin: The idea of reactive creativity is essential in your book. What messages do you want to convey to readers about the relationship between North Korean millennials and the state using this concept?
Suk-Young Kim: I made a claim that North Koreans are not just passive victims of a repressive regime, but they are very smart, creative, and resourceful. How does that manifest in their lives? That’s when the concepts of reactive creativity and the hidden script come in.
First, I point out that creativity is not just a domain of liberal Western society. In academia, especially, in anthropology and sociology, there’s a lot of resurging discourse around creativity and creative economy, which is in large part related to the rising tech industry in Silicon Valley and major cities. In those studies, an alternate kind of political system is never their consideration. I think that is wrong because people even living under unimaginable circumstances, human rights infringement, and economic hardship, also exercise creativity. That’s why I put reactive creativity as a modifier to specify the specific conditions of North Korea.
By reactive, I don’t necessarily mean passivity or negativity. Reactive means that they can react in response to this constant oppression, but they can act upon it by walking on a very tricky terrain while dodging the surveillance system. They can still communicate and express the degree of their self-expression, their place in the world, and their ways of living and realizing their dreams without being detected to the point of self-annihilation. Hidden scripts and all kinds of coded language that I described in the book are crucial ways of living this dual life of being a compliant political subject or performing it in daily life, while also realizing to a very limited and reactive degree, their sense of desire to know more, beyond what is fed by the regime. It’s a very dualistic, ambivalent way of living.
Haeeun Shin: I enjoyed reading how you highlight the uniqueness of North Korean millennials’ digital culture with the concept of blockchain and platforms. Could you elaborate further on your choice to use these two concepts to comprehend millennial North Korea?
Suk-Young Kim: In today’s world, everyone uses platforms and blockchain as an important concept. I strategically use those buzzwords to show the reversal of how we normally understand it and what that word could mean in a case like North Korea.
Platforms, in a way, create new digital tribes who fall deeply into their rabbit hole. People who get to stick to one platform, go deep with it and stick with that community, are likely to have narrow-mindedness, which I think is a huge irony in today’s technologized world. In North Korea, platforms don’t emerge online, which is the number one difference. Also, while Western platform society tends to make your vision very narrow, in North Korea, it’s somewhat similar, but the platforms are to expand your vision rather than narrow it, which is the second difference.
When we think of blockchain, transparency is a key idea. There is a transparent ledger so we know how funding, like Bitcoin, was transmitted without revealing the identity of the participant. In North Korea, when hidden media circulates, they also have to go through that transmission. But again, in North Korea, it’s all offline, person-to-person transmission, not a transparently recorded ledger that people can trace online. In this circumstance, transparency in blockchain, in the North Korean sense, is not something similar to what you normally see in how blockchain works in our society. Transparency in North Korean blockchain transactions means credibility and trust. You have to trust the person to whom you’re giving this forbidden media and the person who is giving it to you. When that transaction chain somehow is revealed, then all of the participants can face grave consequences. I cite some of those instances in my book. So it’s a very different idea of blockchain, but some principles are retained in North Korean case.
Haeeun Shin: In anthropology conducting research on North Korea has been challenging due to restricted access for visits. Can you provide any advice or suggestions for people conducting research on North Korea without visiting?
Suk-Young Kim: We can research North Korea far from it. I think my discipline of performance studies is the right place as it specializes in the performance of memory and trauma and the strategy of narrating the story. What people tell you for a reason, whether that is subconscious or a construction of yourself through your narration that comes into play, and how they present themselves is a valid subject of research.
In this context, it’s very valuable to speak to resettlers who have more freedom to narrate and construct their stories. They still deal with a lot of degrees of limitations as to what they want to say and what they can say, but they have a much higher degree of freedom compared to the degree that they dealt with draconian surveillance in North Korea.
Number one advice: We have to be honest about our limitations that the stories we’re going to hear come from a certain perspective. It doesn’t represent the entirety of the possibilities in North Korea.
Number two, when people narrate their past, as much as they want to be factual and reality- based stories that they want to share, we should understand that memory is largely made of imagination. It’s never a pure recalling of the past but made of some virtual dimension. Through imagination of what the past was, sometimes what they narrate is filtered in. Also, you have to be fully aware that many resettlers are traumatized by leaving the country, which we seldom experienced. So when you want to cite something, you have to double-check to decide whether to quote or not. If you were interviewing one subject over a sustainable time and there’s a very sensitive subject you want to verify again, ask the person, but in a slightly different format. Also, cross-check across two different subjects. Ask another interviewee and if they confirm the same fact, then you feel confident quoting it.
Lastly, as an ending remark, I want to say that I am very humbled to be the person who is a channel through which my interviewees can speak and voice themselves. I hope I did some justice to their lives and stories. I think that’s the role I play as an author of this book.
Diego Arispe-Bazán: The argument of the book hinges on the concepts of communicative care and convivencia (living together). How did you identify these phenomena ethnographically, and how have they helped you conceptualize your research?
Lynette Arnold: Living Together Across Borders explores how members of transnational families find ways to convivir (live together) despite sustained cross-border separation. Convivencia is central to how people in rural El Salvador understand relationships. Families, co-workers, classmates, and even entire villages, dedicate significant effort to set aside times and spaces for convivencia. Sometimes these are large convivios (gatherings) or other events to mark specific holidays (Mother’s Day, Easter Week, the annual community anniversary, and so on), but they can also take the form of more everyday rituals such as visiting together and sharing meals. When I interviewed members of transnational families, both in El Salvador and the United States, many mentioned that they missed the ways they used to convivir with loved ones. But at the same time, from participating in these transnational networks, I knew that families were still finding ways to convivir despite borders and that language was central to these efforts. In talking on the phone to relatives in both countries, I noticed regular moments of convivencia as we reminisced about the past, laughed at jokes or the antics of our children, congratulated or comforted one another, and imagined the future.
My research aimed to trace this cross-border convivencia more closely. I collaborated with two extended families to gather recordings of their transnational phone calls. When I started to analyze the recordings, it became clear to me that their communicative labor was most accurately characterized in terms of care. I understand care as a practice for sustaining life and wellbeing. The book argues that language is crucial to care, not only because it facilitates practical and material care (like sending gifts or remittances), but also because it can itself enact care, forging and maintaining the relational bedrock that is the foundation of all care. At the same time, people use language to make sense of care, specifying which actions, enacted by whom, in which contexts, count as care. With the term communicative care, I bring together these different relationships into a single framework which suggests that language facilitates, enacts, and signifies care. The book demonstrates that this approach sheds light on how transnational families live together across borders through language.
Diego Arispe-Bazán: Against the adage of “actions speak louder than words” your book demonstrates that talk is social action. This is most clear in your analysis of family as a process, (re)created through interactions of care. How would you say your work extends linguistic anthropology and anthropology writ large’s theorizations of kinship?
Lynette Arnold: As your question suggests, my approach to kinship in this book is deeply informed by scholarship that understands family as something that is actively produced, rather than as a pre-given biological structure. I am thinking here of feminist work on reproductive labor that highlights the work of family life and also queer scholarship on chosen family, which has challenged a presumptive biological basis for kinship. In addition, anthropological work on practices of kinwork and relatedness have also deeply informed my thinking.
My contribution to this scholarship is to show that language, in the form of everyday conversations within the family, is absolutely crucial to the way that family is done. For those who face seemingly permanent separation from their loved ones, often without the possibility of visits, language is a central resource through which they continually work to constitute themselves as family.
My long-term research over several years allowed me to see how families used language to sustain themselves over time. In-the-moment uses of language became ways of maintaining family through individual life-course transitions and across generations. The book includes the story of two brothers, who lived in El Salvador when I began my research but who later migrated. Learning how to use language in new ways—for instance, responding to remittance requests—was part of how they began to live into being migrant members of the family. In another example, young children were taught to send greetings to migrant kin they had never met, socializing them into cross-border family life and their place in it. Interestingly, the children of migrants didn’t receive this same socialization, with profound implications for how transnational families will be maintained across generations.
As it makes family, language thus shapes the individual life-course while also producing particular family configurations that include some and exclude others. This is particularly clear when families are not together in the same place, but I would argue that language is relevant for the production of kinship no matter the context.
Diego Arispe-Bazán: I am very interested in your explanation of how nationalism, as moral impetus, gets laminated onto relationships of care within interactions between transnational family members. Have you ever noticed a breakdown or a rejection of nationalism’s assumptions during your research?
Lynette Arnold: The first chapter of the book looks at 30 years of state-endorsed discourses about migration in El Salvador. I show that in the face of shifting geopolitical conditions, these discourses consistently mobilize heteropatriarchal ideas of family care to call migrants to different nation building projects—whether rebuilding the nation after the civil war, sustaining the national economy through remittances, or becoming “working ambassadors” who represent the upstanding Salvadoran national character in the face of racist discourses in the US that target Central Americans. Regardless of the project, the call to migrants is to embody being good citizens by caring for their nation as they would for their family.
These discourses profoundly shape how transnational family members interact with one another. For instance, the expectation that migrants must be economic providers for the family was deeply embedded in normative ideas about how certain forms of communication should unfold: who should say what, to whom, and when. Nevertheless, families did not interpret family providing as a nationalist project. In fact, migrants instead often signified their care as motivated by intergenerational reciprocity, as a way of ‘paying back’ the care their parents had provided to them. So at the level of signification there was some resistance to the state-endorsed merging of family provision with participation in the nation. But this was also enacted in practice through the many ways that migrant relatives engaged in non-economic forms of care. Looking closely at these phone calls revealed so much emotional and relational care, and I was particularly struck by the ways that male migrants communicatively cared for their male relatives. I suggest in the book that these everyday practices of communicative care are a form of subtle contestation of nationalist projects that would co-opt family care to its own ends.
Diego Arispe-Bazán: In chapters 4 and 5 you describe practices of dialogism between transnational family members in building proximity. Can you say more about how gender roles affected this linguistic/discursive phenomenon?
Lynette Arnold: In both of these chapters, I present a close analysis of communicative practices that happen regularly in transnational conversations.Chapter 4 shows how family members develop new genres for managing remittance requests, in which non-migrant relatives used complaints to elicit particular kinds of responses from their migrant kin. In remittance negotiations, family members generally adhere to genre conventions regardless of their gender or that of their interlocutor: what shapes how people engage in these interactions more strongly is whether they are migrants or non-migrants.
The relevance of migration also manifests in the collaborative reminiscing I analyze in Chapter 5, though here the focus is on dialogism in the form of syntax, where interlocutors take up and recycle one another’s phrasing in order to build interactional alignments. While I cannot make conclusive statements about gender given the general underrepresentation of women migrants among my participants, gender did seem to matter for this collaborative remembering practice. People seemed more likely to engage in these joint reminiscences with same-gender interlocutors. Remembering together enacts affective and relational carework, so this may perhaps explain the same-gender preference.
Ultimately, these chapters show that men do engage in relational and emotional care, contra to discourses that cast them only as economic providers. This disjuncture between gender ideologies and practices is perhaps not surprising, but reveals the importance of looking closely at how gender is enacted through language, not just how gender roles are described. Of course, gender ideologies do continue to matter. My book shows that care within transnational families is inequitably distributed. Chapter 2 describes how intergenerational care—including communicative labor—is organized in ways that often assign the most thankless and onerous care work to women. But women sometimes used this communicative care work to claim greater space in family decision-making processes. Thus, specific practices of communicative care can be analyzed to gain greater insight into how gendered ideologies and practices coincide and also where there are disjunctures that might provide leverage for change.
Diego Arispe-Bazán: Ethnographic intimacy as both concept and experience comes through in your project. How would you say you feature this in the book, both as ethnographer and writer? Would you say there is something particular about intimacy in the ethnographic context for linguistic anthropologists, given that our focus is specifically upon language and communication?
Lynette Arnold: I love this question so much! Thank you for asking it!
The research on which this book is based was quite intimate, most obviously because of its focus on everyday family conversations. But it is also deeply personal to me because it was to some extent motivated by my struggles to navigate my own very different experience of family separation. I write about this in the preface, and doing so was certainly an exercise in vulnerability, which I think is a crucial for building intimacy. The research was also based on close relationships with many of the participants whom I have known for over two decades now. We have supported each other through many life challenges, and within these ongoing relationships, my research was incorporated as part of families’ cross-border care endeavors.
All of these experiences and relationships are part of the voice of this book, of why I wrote it as I did and why I am present in the book in the ways that I am. The book aims to be deeply humanizing: not eliding the immense challenges that transnational families face but also honoring the creative ways that they navigate seemingly insurmountable obstacles. In an era of intense anti-immigrant sentiment that often targets Central Americans and criminalizes family ties, the close relationships I had with participants motivated a certain kind of focus and storytelling. I worked hard to make the book accessible to readers outside of linguistic anthropology, and also created a teaching guide which includes key terms and discussion questions for each chapter.
As to the question about disciplinary intimacies in ethnographic work within the field, I hesitate to make any blanket statements, because linguistic anthropologists approach their work in different ways, with a range of motivations and relationships. But I do think that the methods used in ethnographic studies of language and communication can open the door to intimacy. Recording interactions in whatever setting brings us into people’s lives in profound ways. So I’d say our disciplinary orientation can be an invitation to intimacy. Whether we choose to accept this invitation is up to us, but from this research, I can’t imagine any other way to do this work!
Daniel Krugman: This book is clearly a cumulation of thinking throughout your career arriving at a generative and fruitful apex. When was the first moment incommunicability as an analytic became clear to you and you knew it had to be developed further?
Charles Briggs: I am interested to learn that Incommunicable provides you with a sense of continuity and linearity in my work. Indeed, it does return to issues that have engaged me for years. However, viewing it from the inside, I have a strong feeling of discontinuity, of rupture. Embodying how much I enjoy arguing with myself, questioning and disrupting points at which my thinking has come to rest, I see Incommunicable as disavowing or at least significantly reorienting much of my work during the past fifteen years.
I had become convinced that an enduring chasm between research on language/communication and health/medicine ran cover for ways that fundamental conceptions underlying research in both areas were deeply—and problematically—entwined. Like the sense of dis-ease with existing scholarship that prompted Dick Bauman and I to spend over a decade writing Voices of Modernity, I felt a profound sense of discomfort, but was unable to pinpoint its source, much less see a way out. My impatience was at least as centered on my own thinking as on the work of anyone else. I would have liked to bring this project together earlier, but I was not ready.
An initial point of reorientation came in reading new biographical and historical work on a figure who has held me reluctantly transfixed for decades, John Locke. These sources enabled me to dig deeper into his writing about medicine, his medical practice, and his collaboration with leading physician Thomas Syndenham. Neatly covering up his medical work in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and constructing language and science as “separate provinces of knowledge” helped Locke create the boundary between these topics that persists in both scholarship and practice. Two insights helped push my thinking here. One was that Locke’s medical work structured his account of language as an anxious nosology of communicative pathologies, just as his empiricist, atheoretical, observational approach to language helped shape his medical practice. Second, this deep imbrication was augmented by a common racializing logic that disembodied language and universalized bodies, even as white, European, male, elite, adult, non-disabled bodies were projected as privileged subjects of language and medicine.
The work of Hortense Spillers and Savannah Shange further engendered a rupture and reorientation. Shange suggested that “Black girl flesh spills forth in excess of the discourses that seek to locate it, to know it, to translate its ‘noncommunicability’” (2019: 96). I was struck by the way she and Audra Simpson (2014) analyzed how racialized individuals and populations used ethnographic refusal in challenging demands that they gain the status of liberal subjects by assimilating white logics. Shange’s trenchant analysis of how the violence of racialization entails a priori judgments of what I came to call incommunicability helped me realize that constructions of communicability were deeply enmeshed with white supremacy, racism, and colonialism, even when they were used to critique linguistic racial projects. Grasping these imbrications prompted me to face how my own preoccupation with communicability was rooted in white privilege.
Daniel Krugman: The dynamic relationship between communicability, incommunicability, and biocommunicability is central to your project. Can you give a brief overview of these three ideas and what you hope readers take away about how they interact with each other?
Charles Briggs: I fashioned the term communicability in 2005, bringing together medical notions of how pathogens travel infectiously between organisms and how semiotic forms purportedly move between people, media, and genres and achieve intelligibility. I use it not to refer to seemingly objective cartographies but to cultural (or ideological) models. I was drawn to how health professionals project this relationship as inverse in pandemics: the more health communication moves in prescribed ways, the less viruses or bacteria should circulate. Communicability crystalizes Locke’s semiotic regime for making signs perfectly mobile, moving across people and contexts while retaining meaning and transparency. The term also captured the negative side of Locke’s program, labeling semiotic processes that do not purportedly achieve communicable perfection as pathological, stigmatizing those associated with them as not fully human. It captured how linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguistics, linguists, and others critically analyzed how perceived forms of linguistic difference provided bases for naturalizing categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nation, and disability.
In biomedicine, communicability confers legitimacy on particular discursive forms and processes, casting others as irrational or ignorant. Hallin and I referred to this process of joining biomedical and communicative hegemony as biocommunicability (Briggs and Hallin 2016). I have been particularly concerned with how biocommunicability constructs health inequities as resulting from the projected communicative failures of patients and populations. Hallin and I also analyzed biomediatization, how media logics, practices, and institutions became imbricated with those of biomedicine, as evident, for example, in health journalism, pharmaceutical advertising, and digital health.
These concepts are limited by how they leave communicability as an analytic prime. Starting with incommunicability reoriented my work in three ways. First, it suggested that incommunicability is not an inherent feature of defective subjects but is produced by regimes of communicability, even as the stigma of incommunicability banishes people from the status of modern, rational, liberal subjects. Second, Shange’s and Simpson’s work documented how subjects stigmatized as incommunicable can inhabit incommunicability, thereby refusing communicability’s positioning as the primordial grounds for defining and evaluating subjects. Finally, incommunicability becomes the foundational analytic, displacing communicability. Rather than positing a binary between the two, I reposition communicability within incommunicability, thereby dislodging communicability from ideological dominance.
Daniel Krugman: Coming to anthropology from public health myself, I know how important it is for global public health professionals to be given practical actions. In the book, you talk about “incommunicability free zones” and building toward a “post- incommunicable world.” Briefly, what do these concepts mean, and how can public health professionals begin to create these realities in their work?
Charles Briggs: I think it would be useful to approach this question through the book’s analysis of the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic. Despite dedicated efforts by health professionals and avalanches of media attention, the outcome was catastrophic, leaving health communication utterly broke. Nearly half of the U.S. population rejects anything health officials say; even people who embraced guidelines now tune out much proffered advice. Beyond COVID-19, although health inequities have formed a major focus of research and policy formulation, they seem more entrenched than ever. I thus think that a large dose of humility is in order.
One of the central conclusions of the book is that failing to grapple with the synergistic effects of health and communicative inequities results in policies and practices—even progressive and community-based ones—that produce incommunicability. If you treat your interlocutors—whether individuals, small groups, or mediatized populations—as having nothing to contribute to addressing the problems that they experience intimately, building trust and connection seems unlikely. An alternative is to take health/communicative design problems seriously. Ask: does this poster, website, presentation, or media presentation create unequal, hierarchically-defined roles? Does it implicitly enhance my power and authority at the expense of my projected audience? Does it inadvertently stereotype or even stigmatize the people it is designed to benefit? I draw on grassroots and social movement efforts and the impressive work of critical health communication scholar Mohan Dutta (2010) in exploring how heterogeneous registers, forms of knowledge, and practices can be brought into horizontally-organized dialogues. Given how the presuppositions and routinized forms of knowledge production associated with academic disciplines and professional specializations often limit creativity and real change, collaborations between clinicians, public health professionals, linguistic and medical anthropologists, and members of populations facing acute health inequities are needed to disrupt the weight of received perspectives and practices.
Daniel Krugman: As a central aim of this book is bridging Linguistic/Medical Anthropology, what do you see as the future of this growing subfield and what role do you hope Incommunicable will play in it?
Charles Briggs: One of the problems with disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries is how they foster reifying canons and genealogies. Beyond the issue of reproducing racialized and other hierarchies and mechanisms of exclusion, this process also draws attention away from work that crosses and challenges such divides. I have tried to highlight some examples here. Fanon analysis of how colonial physicians stigmatized colonized patients by using an imaginary language to construct them as incommunicable provides a driving force behind the book. Incommunicable also highlights a growing and quite exciting body of scholarship published during the past decade and a half that works fruitfully between linguistic and medical anthropology.
My interest has never been in simply combining two existing subfields of anthropology. Digging deeply into linguistic and medical anthropology rather affords opportunities to excavate entrenched presuppositions and explore the constraints and problematic reifications hidden in fundamental concepts and modes of inquiry. One goal in writing Incommunicable was to demonstrate the potential of boundary-crossing work to exert transformative effects on linguistic anthropology—even for researchers who have not previously explored health-related topics—and on medical anthropology—even for scholars who have not previously seen how language-centered work might produce new horizons. I believe that this emerging research agenda could become a model for helping to break down other entrenched borders between modes of anthropological research.
A limiting factor—which I have seen up close on many occasions—is how departmental tracks promote the recruitment of graduate students and faculty hires in keeping with bounded subdisciplinary interests. The result is often excluding candidates whose goal is to work between subdisciplines. Even when openness exists, it is not easy for graduate students to find models for navigating the relatively uncharted waters that separate subdisciplinary islands. My hope is that the initial philosophical chapters, the focus on “doctor-patient interaction” research and global public health communication, and the extended example I offer of the COVID-19 pandemic might spark conversations in graduate seminars and as early-career researchers design their own projects. I am convinced that critical syntheses of language- and health-centered perspectives can deepen and broaden ethnographic inquiry and augment analytic acuity. My hope is that Incommunicable will further catalyze this rising body of research and demonstrate its value for medical and linguistic anthropology and other fields.
References Cited:
Briggs, Charles L. and Daniel C. Hallin. 2016. Making Health Public: How News Coverage is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life. London: Routledge.
Dutta, Mohan Jyoti. 2010. The Critical Cultural Turn in Health Communication: Reflexivity, Solidarity, and Praxis. Health Communication 25(6-7):534-539.
Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Maryam Amiri: The role of story-telling in your study seemed very interesting to me. What was the significance of the founding story in the transnational articulation of multiple localities and in creation of difference?
Maria Rosa Garrido Sardà: Put simply, storytelling keeps the Emmaus transnational movement going. The well-known origins story narrates the first encounter between Abbé Pierre, a French parliamentarian who chose an alternative lifestyle, and Georges Legay, a released prisoner who had failed to commit suicide, which led to the creation of the first Emmaus community as a new reason to live. Their common goal with Lucie Coutaz (a third female founder that is often erased) was to provide shelter for homeless people and families and to campaign for housing rights in France. Today, Abbé Pierre (Henri Grouès, 1912-2007) is still a major icon in Francophone Europe as exemplified by an ambitious biopic that premiered at the Cannes Festival, two new biographies (Lunel 2023, Doudet 2022) and a 2024 campaign to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Abbé’s radio appeal for solidarity organised by Emmaus Switzerland.
In every community I have visited there were semiotic representations of Abbé Pierre as an index towards this origins story. In the book, I argue that the retelling and reenactment of the founding story across spaces and over time is the glue that holds the movement together. These common storytelling practices align the local communities with the broader transnational imaginary of unknown others. Well-established members retell the founding story to socialise newcomers and to perform one’s own story as companions who found new reasons to live in Emmaus. All in all, situated storytelling constructs a collective identity across linguistic and national borders at a particular sociohistorical juncture. Besides (re)creating sameness through intertextuality, the retelling of the origins story is also an act of differentation, relocalisation and change. In other words, these retellings are never mere repetitions because they are embedded in the lived experiences, interdiscursive histories and sociopolitical goals of each local community. During my fieldwork, the Emmaus UK motto was “a bed and a reason to get out of it” as an intertextual chain of finding new reasons to live in the founding story, but the London staff used it to justify voluntary work in the cooperative as neoliberal activation of passive (homeless) populations, who only get “a bed” in day shelters and “a reason to get out of bed” in Emmaus volunteering.
Maryam Amiri: Can you tell us a bit about your intellectual trajectory and the motivation behind the research and writing of this book? What triggered your interest in the issue and where did you start? Also, how are your other books and research in dialogue with Community, Solidarity and Multilingualism in a Transnational Social Movement?
Maria Rosa Garrido Sardà: I was trained in critical ethnographic sociolinguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and I wrote my PhD thesis proposal during a research stay at the University of Chicago, where I learned more about North American linguistic anthropology. This research project grew organically out of my MA thesis about a residential project for homeless migrants that brought me in contact with the Emmaus transnational movement for the first time. In 2008, I was invited to have lunch with the community (which is, coincidentally, the opening of my book) and I couldn’t help but wonder what united people from different linguistic, cultural, religious and class backgrounds around that table. In addition, the community responsables (primus inter pares in a live-in community) lent me a 1955 black and white film about the origins of the movement in French. These triggered my interest in the shared imaginary and the multilingual articulation among local Emmaus communities located in various sociolinguistic, political and historical contexts. As preliminary fieldwork, I visited the first Emmaus community in the outskirts of Paris and I looked into the social movement. In Chicago, I later conceptualised this articulation through the lens of transnationalism and imagined communities.
I initially decided to write a book because I felt frustrated about the space limitations in research articles that only presented slices of my sociolinguistic ethnography. Although any ethnography is necessarily partial and situated, the book format allowed me to tell the story moving from the historical origins, main foundational texts and ideological trends of the movement to the sociolinguistic account of the two focal communities in London and Barcelona and finally providing an outlook to the future. My interest in solidarity movements and the links with the humanitarian industry shaped my postdoctoral research on multilingualism and mobility of delegates in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), headquartered in Geneva (Switzerland). At the moment, Miguel Pérez-Milans and I are working on an edited volume on the sociolinguistic (re)imaginations of the future in grassroots movements that picks up on the closing of my book on utopia as both an unreachable horizon and a motor for social change.
Maryam Amiri:What was your methodology and research design for ethnographically investigating transnational communication? What was your critical lens? What challenges did you face and how did you manage to deal with them?
Maria Rosa Garrido Sardà: This book is mainly based on a multi-sited ethnography of two local communities: a primary site in the Barcelona province (Catalonia) and a secondary site in the Greater London area (England). This was a year-long ethnography in the linguistic anthropological tradition during which I joined the communities as a participant-observer in activities including furniture/clothes collection and second-hand store work, housework, meetings with other organisations, internal assemblies, communal meals and celebrations. In terms of data, I wrote daily fieldnotes, audio recorded assemblies, collected textual material, took photographs, and interviewed over 30 people. Inspired by Monica Heller, I was interested in the role of language, discourse and narrative in the construction of social difference and social inequality and the material consequences for specific people and communities in the movement.
The challenges that have stuck with me were access negotiation and navigating research ethics with the local participants. Emmaus Barcelona had an assembly discussion to collectively decide if I could carry out my study, which they agreed to because the ethnographic methodology was close to their preference for first-hand experience (such as getting to know Emmaus during lunchtime shows). Meanwhile, access to Emmaus London involved identifying and interacting with various staff members who made a top-down decision. This translated into sometimes difficult bottom-up negotiations with companions (the term used in the movement to designate residents in a live-in community) in the different spaces, which entailed explaining my research goals and methods in plain language. Another major challenge in Barcelona was reconciling university contractual ethics involving individual procedures (notably signing consent forms) and a social system based on trust in the community, in which I was a friend of the house. In addition, assemblies posed a major challenge because it would have been extremely disruptive to obtain signed informed consent from over 20 people for every single recording. As a compromise, the community wrote a collective letter to authorise me to record every assembly, but I was still allowed to ask for oral permission to record before each assembly and all participants signed a single consent form valid for all assemblies.
Maryam Amiri: In your work, you give us a historical overview of the Emmaus movement, how it developed, and how it spread across borders to then analyze the discursive and linguistic practices of two Emmaus communities in Barcelona and London. How do you think studying the history of such transnational social movements contributes to understanding their contemporary contexts and practices and the effects of those practices in creating or solving social inequalities?
Maria Rosa Garrido Sardà: My longue durée ethnography, involving visits, interviews and occasional field observations over a decade, fuelled a longstanding interest in the history of the Emmaus movement. In 2019, I embarked on a historiographic project in the French Archives Nationales du Monde du Travail with a two-fold objective. Adopting a historicising lens allowed me to make sense of local forms of social action in my ethnography as constitutive of broader institutional, historical, sociopolitical and economic processes over time. This opens a window onto processes of social difference, for instance the categories and boundaries that were created in the movement, and ultimately, processes of social stratification in a center/periphery logic. First, I wanted to trace the situated production, translation and uptake of fundamental texts (for example, the Universal Manifesto of the Emmaus movement, 1969) in relation to major turning points since the movement’s foundation in 1949. This provided an illuminating account of the transnational expansion and internal diversification of the movement. For example, Simon’s “Les Chiffonniers d’Emmaüs” (1954), in which he narrates the lived experiences of early companions, was translated into 14 languages and it inspired multiple generations of activists in the early period, some of whom I met during fieldwork.
The second goal was to trace the antecedents, genesis and trajectories of the two focal communities, each representing a different ideological trend and historical period in the broader movement. Emmaus Barcelona was firmly located in a Progressive Catholic tradition in Catalonia and had strong links with Liberationist Christianity in Latin America. This faith tradition within Emmaus combined sociopolitical struggle, a collective lifestyle and an anti-capitalist (later alter-globalist) ethos. As an illustrative example, the Barcelona community welcomed undocumented people and campaigned for their rights in the city. Emmaus London was constituted as an English charity that largely erased the movement’s Catholic origins and the transnational founding story. Its mission was vested in the Protestant Work Ethic and sought to re-activate formerly homeless people for labour and social re-insertion. Contrary to Emmaus Barcelona, all companions needed to have legal status in the UK in accordance with charity regulations. As a result, the vast majority of companions were British and English-speaking at a time when many Eastern European people were sleeping rough in London.
Maryam Amiri: Can you elaborate on the role of language ideologies and tensions of language in shaping the members’ participation and their negotiation of power relations? How did your findings challenge the expectations of multilingualism in social movements?
Maria Rosa Garrido Sardà: In terms of power relations, it is important to understand the centrality of France as the cradle and international center of the Emmaus movement. As far as I know, this is one of the few social movements that relies on French as a primary lingua franca. Both communities in my ethnography were peripheral with respect to the symbolic center but they positioned themselves differently. Since the early 1990s, Emmaus UK has expanded into the second largest national federation (after France) and it mainly focuses on business expansion in Britain, which translated into Emmaus London’s tenuous links with France and the broader international movement. Emmaus Barcelona is the only community in Catalonia and it does not form part of a large federation, privileging a cross-border network of altermondialiste Liberationist Emmaus communities. This community has had a historical connection with France and Abbé Pierre since the local leader’s participation in work camps in the 1970s. Both communities backgrounded language and multilingualism through the use of English as a lingua franca in London and by not problematising a lack of shared language in favour of the welcome principle in Barcelona.
The discursive appropriations of the transnational Emmaus movement in the Barcelona and London sites will help us understand the different orientations towards communication with transnational members and towards multilingualism in their daily interaction. Emmaus London was characterised by an English-speaking norm that was implicit for new companions for the sake of social integration but was made explicit for three French interns during my fieldwork. Most of the community’s connections were with London-based charities and Emmaus groups in the UK. Their infrequent contact with the transnational movement in France relied on ad-hoc French translators. In this sociolinguistic regime, the few English-speaking companions who wanted to visit other communities in Europe looked for what they considered English-friendly ones in the Netherlands or Germany. On the other hand, Emmaus Barcelona was a Catalan-Spanish bilingual community and the welcome of transnational migrants mobilised some members’ French and English resources. As for transnational communication with other Emmaus activists, Emmaus Barcelona members valued shared communitarian lifestyle and willingness to communicate over language convergence. They would mix Romance languages and resort to their knowledge of Spanish and for some, French to communicate across borders.
To go back to your question about the unexpected findings on multilingualism, this study warns us against assuming a homogeneous dominance of English as a lingua franca in social movements. Contrary to my initial expectations, French remains the main lingua franca in the movement despite the official use of English and Spanish in Emmaus International and in certain networks of the movement. For this research project, I had to improve my French competences to read the literature on Emmaus, to access the archives and to interview some key players. Without it, I don’t think I would have been able to write this book. Another finding that I would like to further explore in the future is whether altermondialiste movements may offer different linguistic constellations and linguistic eclecticism to communicate across borders as I have documented in the Barcelona group’s networks.
Bob Offer-Westort: Going Tactile is such an exciting book: It’s a unique read in a number of ways, many of which are interrelated. In the book you walk us through a history of the development of Protactile—a DeafBlind language and way of being that’s come about in Seattle over the past couple decades. Very few linguistic anthropologists get to work with language emergence in this way, or to deal with language in a tactile modality. I wonder if you might talk a little bit about that juncture in the term Protactile itself, with all the different things it denotes: a perspective on engaging environmental affordances, a form of personhood, a language, a social movement. What it is that’s anterior to Protactility temporally, phenomenologically, in terms of personhood, in terms of code?
Terra Edwards: That’s easy, Bob! Anything outside of contact space.
“Contact space” is a theoretical construct that first appeared in print in a 2018 article called, “PT Principles” (PT = protactile). The article was written by two DeafBlind intellectuals, teachers, and political leaders, aj granda and Jelica Nuccio. It contains a unified theory of living and communicating the protactile way, including 7 principles, several sub-principles, and explicit statements regarding the relationship between them. The first principle, from which all others follow is, “any time space is used, make sure it is contact space, not air space.” (p. 4). At first, I thought “contact space” was like “articulatory space” in linguistics—the space within which linguistic signs are articulated. And it is that. But it’s also what protactile people live in. The way I’ve come to think about it is that, whether it is at the level of linguistic structure or something much larger, contact space is the thing that sets the parameters of intelligibility in protactile settings. The best way I can explain my understanding of contact space is to tell you about some recent experiences in it (both of which are discussed in the book).
Last summer, I was visiting a protactile training center run by a DeafBlind woman I call Adrijana. I hadn’t been there in a while and the last time I tried to keep up with a protactile conversation, I was having difficulty with basic things like what time we would meet back up for lunch, what our schedule would be for the week, and who we were talking about. That’s why I went to the training center. I wanted to get caught up on new vocabulary. When I got there, I asked Adrijana to teach me some new words. She told me to put on a blindfold. That was a pattern. People would ask, “How do you say…” and she would tell them to pay attention to their environment. When Adrijana first told me to put on a blindfold, I wasn’t sure how to behave. I took hesitant steps around the house with my arms extended straight out in front of me. Adrijana pushed my arms down and said, “Zombie”. She told me that my feet would tell me when to extend an arm. I knew it was customary to take your shoes off in protactile settings, but I hadn’t fully grasped what that affords. Adrijana showed me that my feet (separated from the environment only by my thin socks), pick up all kinds of information. Standing in the kitchen on the smooth cool floor, she turned my hand so my palm was facing down. The hand stood for (represented) my foot. From underneath, she slid her palm slowly past mine, creating a sensation that resembled the feeling of my foot on the kitchen floor. Then we moved into the living room and this time she mimicked the feeling of carpet on my down-turned palm by making a scratching motion with her fingertips. Crossing over the threshold from the kitchen to the living room, she guided my attention to where the two textures met underfoot and showed me how it gave us the clue we needed to reach out our hands. Together, we followed the smooth edges of the kitchen counter to the dry wooden door frame, to the puffy warm couch, and we sat down. Once seated, she explained that now, we were in “contact space”. Me walking around as if there was nothing meaningful beneath our feet was anterior to Protactile, in part because the environment was not legible to me and to Adrijana in ways that corresponded, and in part because I was not legible in that environment as a person (I could only be a zombie), and the two are related. Contact space sets the parameters of intelligibility.
Bob Offer-Westort: One of the really striking things in reading this book is the contrast between experiential loss (or collapse) and experiential discovery in your accounts of people’s growing blindness and their coming into Protactile ways of being in the world. As we follow people undergoing these shifts, we find ourselves thinking through fragments of experience that are rare in ethnographies: The accessibility or inaccessibility of moisture on a window, what can be smelled from a dog’s mouth, the feeling of the floor through one’s socks… Like many of the people in this book, you too are learning how to be Protactile. In our fieldwork, many of us have to learn more directed modes of attunement, but in your case—as a sighted, hearing person—you were dealing with actually having different sensory access to the environment from your interlocutors. What is this kind of fieldwork like?
Terra Edwards: It wasn’t foregrounded in this book, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about sensory access, and despite its utility, I’ve come to the conclusion that the idea falls off right where the world starts. I just published an article in Anthropological Theory called The Medium of Intersubjectivity. The main question that article addresses is: “What are we in when we’re together?” If you think about it as sensory access, then maybe we’re feeling rather than seeing, or touching rather than looking, but you can’t be in that. Over the years, I have been taught by protactile people not just to feel, but to work with others toward an understanding of how the environment speaks to us, moment to moment. The senses are part of that, I guess, but the more important thing is listening for signs that tell you how to act and to act in ways that count as signs to others. What you realize when you do that is that there is a whole world full of chatter telling you where you can go and what you can do. When you start cashing in on that, one thing leads to another, like a day in your week, or an hour in your day. To me, that’s different from sensory access, and it’s an open question how different it is from what other anthropologists do.
Bob Offer-Westort: The major theoretical touchstones in this book seem to me to be the work of theory-making undertaken by Protactile leaders on the one hand, and Paul Kockelman’s residential reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time on the other. Could you tell us a little bit about how these theoretical efforts come together in the book and your thinking?
Terra Edwards: Going Tactile is part of a larger project about the existential and environmental foundations of language emergence. This book focuses on the existential and my second book (which I plan to co-author with Diane Brentari) will focus on the environmental foundations. Both very much center on semiotics in a broad sense, but you can’t get at the existential without re-thinking readings of Peirce that have become canonical in our field. Paul has offered us that—a re-thinking of Peirce via Heidegger that makes a very useful distinction between residing in the world and representing the world, and breaks the former down into a tractable set of interrelated concepts that can actually be removed from the philosophy and applied, anthropologically, at the level of interaction and language-use. In the introduction to Going Tactile, for example, I draw on this framework to understand a series of events that unfolded one afternoon when I was with Adrijana and Sam, who is hearing and sighted. I wrote the following in my fieldnotes afterwards:
A couple of days ago, we were all at Adrijana’s house and Sam said, “There are beautiful white flowers all over your back yard.” And Adrijana said, “They’re weeds”. And Sam said, “Come on.”, and the three of us walked together to the back yard. We padded across the porch, which was hot, down the steps, and into the dry, cool grass. The yard was filled with white flowers. Sam and Adrijana pulled one of the flowers out of the ground, and it came with a whole complicated root system. Adrijana felt the roots and said “Weed.” Sam directed Adrijana’s attention to the flower—the part that had been visible to her from above. The flower was silky soft and cone-shaped. Inside, there was a delicate, yellow stamen. Adrijana felt the flower. Then she cupped Sam’s jaw loosely in her palms, fingers angled out, forming a cone. She tilted the cone, with Sam’s head inside, toward the sun, and said as if she were the flower, “I’m innocent.”
Adrijana was arguing that our eyes deceived us. The flowers looked innocent, but their roots were ruining her lawn. In expressing her argument this way, she was inviting us into a way of interpreting the environment, which was grounded in a protactile way of being.
If I cupped your jaw in my palms right now, Bob, and I turned your face slowly toward the hot afternoon sun, you would probablyfeel exactly like a disingenuous flower. If I’m right, and you did, then more has transpired than just talking about a flower. That interaction leads us into an environment where beautiful white flowers don’t fool anyone. This is where being in the world and representing the world come together, and that, to me, is at the heart of protactile theory. The further you get into “contact space”, the more likely you are to talk about the world in ways that correspond across those living in (and visiting) contact space. A self-reinforcing loop starts to form. The people I spend most of my time with in the field are big fans of Paul’s work. In fact, one of them texted me a while back and told me that they were starting a club called “KFC”. What does that stand for? “Kockelman Fan Club”. The reason they like his work, I think, is that it introduces a vocabulary that articulates to, elaborates, challenges, and otherwise interacts with their own conceptual vocabularies in productive ways. I’m part of that conversation and this book is a contribution to it.
Bob Offer-Westort: There’s decidedly a politics to the book: You’ve designed it without diagrams, tables, or footnotes to avoid creating a description of DeafBlind worlds for which an interpreter would need to provide access to DeafBlind readers. You also follow DeafBlind political activism in state government. But perhaps the most central political thread through the book is a politics of environment situated at the limits of language: We see this very clearly in your sixth chapter, on the design of DeafBlind space at Gallaudet University, but I think it’s present in everyday approaches to environment throughout. I would love to read more about how you’re thinking about this.
Terra Edwards: Why do we represent the world? One reason is to obtain resources through established social and political processes. We stake a claim, make our case, and so-on. The recent history of the Seattle DeafBlind community highlights the fact that when we engage in those processes, we tend to reproduce or reinforce ways of being in the world that are taken for granted by those in power. It feels a little like a trap: You have to be what you are to them in order to get what they have. The protactile movement broke out of that by uncovering environments that were not controlled by sighted people or their norms. That created a reprieve, where new environments could be discovered. Claims about the world, what was true, what was right, and what was needed emerged from those efforts, not the other way around. But once those environments were discovered, they had to be protected, defended, and justified. There is a politics that emerges out of situations like that, which are not aimed at getting what they have, but at protecting what is, and always has been, yours. Throughout the book, I am trying to trace a form of politics that doesn’t try to replace one construct with another, change standards that cannot be conformed to, or enter spaces that were designed to exclude, but instead, aims to create, maintain, and protect the possibility of existence. Given that goal, my attention was drawn away from explicit mentions of language as such, talk about identity, or other things that often become targets of political discourse, and toward things that might seem to fall outside of the realm of politics, like how one person directs another from the kitchen to the living room, or debates about whether a plant is a flower or a weed. If I was going to sum it up, I would say that the environment is what we exist in and what we move through. When it breaks down, we sometimes struggle to exist, and there are forms of politics that operate within that struggle that we, as anthropologists, are well equipped to study.
Bob Offer-Westort: I would guess that one of the things that’s exciting about studying an emerging language is that things are in comparatively rapid flux. This book is the product in part of your dissertation fieldwork as well as some post-dissertation work at Gallaudet. It’s now been a few years since the latest fieldwork in this book. What is changing now?
Terra Edwards: You’re going to have to read my second book to get an answer to this question, Bob.
Bob Offer-Westort: The semiotic perspective that you employ in this book opens up questions that aren’t yet standard fare in linguistic anthropology. I don’t want to ask for a programmatic statement or a prescription, but I’d love to read your thoughts about how linguistic anthropology and other disciplines might take up this mode of engaging semiosis more broadly. What is the work or mode of work that you’d really like to see?
Terra: Edwards: I’m not sure I have an idea of what I’d like to see (I love being surprised), but I do think there are some important conversations to be had about the limits of language. When DeafBlind people in Seattle were becoming blind, the visual world they once knew collapsed. Historically speaking, the first collective response to that problem was to obtain resources from the state to pay for sighted interpreters who were trained to substitute descriptions of the world for the world. Thinking carefully about those attempts, I learned that there is a limit to what language can do when the world is falling apart. Broadly speaking, in moments of crisis, rupture, and collapse, one might find that talk about the world is no longer a reliable way of gaining access to, intervening in, or otherwise affecting change in the world. For example, if you were one of the people who spent most of your time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, you may have felt at some point that digital representations of social life were exhausting their capacity to substitute for social life. That is what I talk about in Going Tactile as a “sign of collapse.” You can’t perceive collapse directly, so you look for signs. Maybe you realize one day that statements are no longer treated as true or false, or maybe arguments for rights and resources carry no weight. Maybe your attempts to spin things only drive you deeper into the problems you’re trying to escape. Maybe you realize that no one out there is coming to help, so there really is nothing more to say. Problems like these are all rooted in a terminal imbalance between residence and representation. Unfortunately, I think this issue will become ubiquitous in the years to come, and it would be well worth our time as linguistic anthropologists to find ways of thinking about it.
Drew Kerr: On one reading, you’ve offered a fresh take on the exclusionary Hindu nationalist project of perpetual crisis re/creating an internal enemy in India, which we might highlight a special animation to this crisis in 1992 with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, cemented as a model in the 2002 events of the Gujarat pogrom in your book, and now, as of January 22, 2024, in a way consecrated with the building of the Ram Mandir over the site of the destroyed Babri Masjid. You challenge us to not take these events — and major events like them across the globe — as finished and to not take them as simply destructive. Simultaneously, your work broadly challenges the idea and hope of witnessing in spaces of violence. I’m curious if you could explain the tensions you knead out between destruction and composure, and how violence forces us to rethink that relationship?
Moyukh Chatterjee: Thanks, Drew, for your question, which goes to the heart of the book and its ambition. The mise-en-scene of political violence, especially what is called communal violence and riots in South Asia, may be quite familiar to many readers and scholars – burned shops, cycles, cars, dead bodies, police marches. This violence is often categorized as religious violence and ethnic conflict, which is not very helpful at all since it assumes the violence can then be somehow sequestered within the boundaries of something called Hinduism and Islam which exists outside the secular apparatus of the courts, police, law, and elections.
But the dead bodies on the streets and the burned down shops and houses only show the destructive force of collective violence on lives and spaces. And as you mentioned, what do we do with an explicitly exclusionary project that also aims to create new forms of belonging and inclusion? What do we do when riots and pogroms are only act one, stage one, like the case of Gujarat 2002, when anti-Muslim pogroms became the launchpad for a new form of public, muscular Hinduism, a new form of majoritarian governance, and a new kind of wounded and triumphant Hindu self. In such contexts, I have suggested that composition rather than exposure may be more helpful. Since composition moves away from the framing of political violence as an event that is supposedly finished or as always ensconced within the framework of victim/perpetrator or even as something that is always already under erasure. In this way, my book builds on the work of a range of political anthropologists – Veena Das, Jonathan Spencer, Daniel Hoffman, Val Daniel, Pradeep Jeganathan – to name just a few who come to mind, who have explored this tension between the destructive and the productive in tracking the afterlives of political violence in different contexts.
In other words, composition is the answer to the problem of framing an object that does not end with the horror and brutality of subjection and humiliation, (and here I am thinking of the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten writing about racism) but continues to animate new spaces (courtroom and police station) and new forms of rule. (new laws or the use of old laws for new purposes). In a related but also different way, this helps us see the question of violence anew, not within the binary of violence/peace as if violence against minorities is an aberration or breakdown of democracy, but ask what kind of social and political relationships sublimate, organize, transform, and interrupt violence against minorities within liberal democracies.
Drew Kerr: A few different types of dialectics — for example, norm and ideology, erasure and exposure, witness and victim, majority and minority — come into being through violences that ultimately give flesh to the categories and roles of Hindu and Muslim. You clearly show us, though, none of these categories are ever fully self-evident or stable in concept for the researcher or in practice for the residents in 2002 and present-day Gujarat. I find this incredibly hopeful (thank you!) to think, write, and live beyond false and fixed dichotomies on one hand, as well as quite insidious, which, I think, plays a larger compositional role in the book and the events described. Can you tell us more about the logics of such an “impossible dialectic” (Agamben 2000) and how they showed up in, and comprised, your research?
Moyukh Chatterjee: Because I was working with paralegals and human rights activists, the dialectics you mention above, especially binaries like Hindu/Muslim, victim/perpetrator, acquittal/conviction framed my fieldwork (in almost overwhelming way) and it was a major challenge for me to not be fully absorbed or determined by them. Put another way, it seemed to me that the project of Hindu supremacy aimed to create an environment, an ethos, a background, where what you call false dichotomies appear self-evident, even experiential. So, I remember one Muslim witness telling me outside the courtroom that it was foolish to expect justice from the courts because they were Hindus. So beyond the breakdown of the law, the courts were doing something else, they were joining the wider political and social climate in Gujarat to declare to Muslims that they were outsiders, eternal outsiders.
Another example. During the pogrom in Gujarat, my interlocutors told me, it was a time when it did not matter what kind of Muslim you were – rich or poor, Shia or Sunni, apartment resident or slum dweller, judge or beggar – you were reduced to being a Muslim, and all the richness of other categories or all the differences of caste, language, sect, and region that mark the heterogeneity of Hindu/Muslim falls away. I think your question raises the larger context of social pluralism which is the norm (rather than the dichotomies) in India.
Speaking of binaries, the binary between impunity/rule of law and law/illegal also melts away when you observe the performance of trials and justice. So one day in Ahmedabad, almost a decade after the pogrom, you (Muslim witness) find yourself in front of the judge, and your neighbor is an accused, and you have to identify him as such, but the informal setting of the courtroom, or more specifically the lower courts in India, means that the accused can approach you, often in front of the NGO workers and paralegals, and ask you to forget the case, or reconcile, or otherwise intimidate you. Anthropology can reveal in such moments the human rights and statist fantasy of legal punishment, a fantasy often shared by activists, that one can move outside the social into a sanitized world of the legal.
Drew Kerr: Semiotics or signs don’t play an explicit role in the argument of the book; however, you do draw on the language of meaning-making, composing, and producing what is rendered as legible, licit, and legitimate (Das 1995) — what I might frame in one word as significant. On my read, I find the work your argument is doing to be very beneficial for also thinking through regimes of language, the entanglement of social forces and speech acts, and the interplay between political ideologies and human capacities of sign-use. I’d love to hear more about your choices, then, in composing the book’s theoretical arc, as well as composing yourself methodologically during your research.
Moyukh Chatterjee: An attention to semiotics, signs, and what you can call significance has been an integral part of my training in literature and anthropology. As a student of English literature in Delhi, I read Barthes and later in graduate school in Emory, I gravitated towards a group (or should I call them a cult?) of scholars and students who were very influenced by Deconstruction. But as an anthropologist, I felt uneasy dressing up my fieldwork in the language of deconstruction; it would mean that my fieldwork or stories would be to prove/disprove theoretical tendencies found within canonical texts by Foucault/Derrida or someone else. Nonetheless, I was deeply impressed with the readings that were offered in those classes – readings that deconstructed texts and performed incredible acts of interpretation!
So while composing the theoretical arc of the book, I thought maybe it will be a good idea to take some of the most familiar objects that frame political violence – witness, archive, trial, the unspeakable – and recast them, or attempt to recast them. To be frank, I am not sure I succeeded in doing all this in one book. And it was easier to show the limits of exposure than to compose violence. In terms of composition, I build on the literature on critique and post-critique. Composition builds on the limits of critique identified by literary scholars, for whom it is primarily a way of reading texts, which in my case becomes a way of reading violence.
And I use it in terms of assembling a heterogeneous set of actors and affects, indebted to Latour’s concept of compositionism as well.
And the question of language is quite an important part of what I have in mind with composition. And of course, there is a long tradition of attention to language in studies of violence. Unlike exposure which is perhaps indifferent to the object, and assumes that the language of exposure per se is not important (after all it is exposure that is the point) I think composition puts the question of significance at the center; it is, to paraphrase the novelist Coetzee, to wrest control from regimes of significance connected to the state/major. At the same time, I think the question of what lies beyond language, or semiotic regimes is also important; the affective charge of far-right Hindu supremacy and its performativity is a key aspect of its success. For instance, on encountering a violent image or procession, a compositional approach will ask, what are the publics formed by such images and rituals, how do actors insert themselves into its circulation and proliferation, and in that sense, make it political. I find these questions are difficult to ask within the exposure model.
Drew Kerr: Legal documents, on the other hand, do play a central role in Composing Violence and the lives of your interlocutors. Nusrat Chowdhury (2019) in Bangladesh, Akhil Gupta (2012) in North India, and Matthew Hull (2008) in Pakistan have similarly shown how other types of official documents take on lives well beyond what we might evaluate as bureaucratic failures or democratic inefficiencies, demonstrating how documents themselves become affectively charged in particular milieux. You join this conversation with a special emphasis on the human actors involved in and with the document-type of the First Information Report (FIR). Ostensibly a legal and bureaucratic tool promising legibility and due legal process, the FIR, you illustrate, actually accomplishes something quite different. Can you help us understand the FIR as a medium – in the sense of something that “makes society imaginable and intelligible to itself”(Mazzarella 2004) – and the media ecology within which it circulates?
Moyukh Chatterjee: Your question takes me back to graduate school. At the time I was writing my dissertation, some of these exciting new books had come out, and I remember that I was excited to witness the documents/paperwork turn in anthropology; in fact I almost made it the heart of the dissertation, but my advisor helped me to see the larger picture. In line with my interest in language and archives (which was also because of Subaltern Studies), I gravitated towards the power of police acts of interpretation and reporting. I was excited to find that police reports break out of context (what Derrida called iterability and Veena Das has a wonderful essay that uses this idea called the Signature of the State) and circulate in newspaper reports as public information. In fact, this discovery made me realize the extremely limited vocabulary used to describe religious violence in India and its genre-like quality that allowed violence to work like myth. This goes back to your question about the role of the FIR in making certain forms of violence against minorities intelligible as religious fervor and not state-sanctioned pogroms. David Nugent, a wonderful anthropologist of the state and also a member of my dissertation committee, would ask me pointedly, “why are the police recording the violence in the first place?” And as I describe in the book, even the blank FIRs in the archive, the blankness does political work by creating a certain time-space of violence. Overall I was struck by how a dry, technical document like the police’s first information report becomes the key ingredient of newspaper reports (and this must be based on relationships between crime reporters and police officers) that allow what Gyan Pandey has called the colonial master narrative of the communal riot to circulate as what is labeled news. And here, rather than expose the falsity and bias of the FIR (important work accomplished by activists and scholars soon after the violence) I got interested in its power to inscribe a wounded majority and a treacherous minority. In this sense, legal documents get charged by Hindu nationalist politics and are also constitutive of a milieu that produces the Muslim as outsider, communal, and destructive of the national community.
Drew Kerr: Where would you locate this book in relation to the category of the minor you develop throughout your argument? I’m curious for whatever that question might spark for you, but I’m particularly imagining a capacious archive — and the idea of the archive — that houses media about and of violences rendered as communal and religiously divisive in India.
Moyukh Chatterjee: This is such a wonderful question. I wish I could have developed the idea of the minor more expansively in my book. The minor and the minority as a concept, as you know, belongs to a long history, and I have learned from and continue to learn from the work of Talal Asad, Amir Mufti, Qadri Ismail, Ajay Skaria, Gyan Pandey, Faisal Devji, Chulani Kodikara to name only a few people who come to mind. As a concept I wanted to give a sense of the making of the minor and the minority, not simply as numerical categories, but as what does not circulate as the norm or model; that which interrupts the major or can unravel the major; and finally as a binary that is framed and re-framed within the institutional apparatuses and technologies of democracy., including the courtroom and police archive. As David Scott has argued, democracy seems to lock us into thinking that there is only the possibility of minority rule or majority rule, and if the minority position is a position without sovereignty, then part of the fantasy of right-wing movements like Hindu nationalism is to create a permanent majority and minority within a democracy. This has been framed in an earlier classical literature, as “the tyranny of the majority” (Tocqueville). But in terms of my ethnography, I have tried to work out a minor reading of violence, which is not a search for what is hidden or repressed, but what is on the surface of documents, technologies, and practices (like repetition and aggregation) and helps us understand the making of the major, and its artifice. In the book, it takes the form of the minor event, the minor characters who are often overlooked in the mise-en-scene of violence.
Your idea of a capacious archive to document and tell this story of violence is really wonderful. I think it would take the idea of composition seriously to imagine such an archive outside the limits of conventional archival thinking. By which I mean non-narrative and non-chronological ways of representing anti-minority violence or what has been called religious violence. I have been very influenced by artistic work on violence, and perhaps, composition is my way of bringing some of that sensibility into scholarly work. In my fieldsite, I have been speaking to artists and curators, more recently, and thinking with them, this question of the archive. Would it be to map the soundscapes and visual field of this violence or to move away from the archive altogether, and think about how the minor – for instance Muslims and Dalits and Tribals – imagine a life inside and outside Hindu supremacy? When I was growing up in Delhi, this work was done by an organization called SAHMAT. They would create such counter-archives and use art to counter communalism and I think it would be great to reimagine a similar project in our times. Perhaps I will be lucky enough to be part of a project like that in the future.
Thank you so much, Drew, for your questions and patience throughout. I really enjoyed our conversation.
References
Giorgio Agamben. 2000. The Remnants of Auschwitz. (New York: Zone Books).
Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury. 2019. Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh. (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Veena Das. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
Akhil Gupta. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press).
Matthew Hull. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. (Berkeley: University of California Press).
William Mazzarella. 2004. “Culture, Globalization, Mediation,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33, no. 1: 346.
Katrien Pype: In this book you not only aim to describe the online culture wars from what might be called an anti-woke perspective. You also want to tackle causality, and especially media effects. You argue that anthropologists eschew this question because it seems too linear. To that end you formulate a plural paradigm whereby one can identify multiple causes for a particular effect. How does a scholar identify the relevant interactions among multiple causes? In other words, how does one know that it is the combination of a particular set of, say, events, texts, voices, and experiences that co-produces worlds? And how can lurking from afar allow us to study these causal constellations?
John Postill: When Routledge asked me to write a media/digital anthropology book I faced a dilemma, as I had two very different ideas in mind. The first idea was a book about the social effects of media practices based on a previous essay I had written. The second was a study of the online culture wars in the Anglosphere, more precisely of colourful anti-woke figures like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Tucker Carlson. A friend of mine, the digital culture scholar Edgar Gómez Cruz, suggested I combine the two ideas, and that’s what I did. In the book I invite media researchers, including media anthropologists, to overcome their aversion to media effects, with the anti-woke world as my case study. So the reader is getting two books for the price of one!
As soon as I started drafting the first meaty chapter (Chapter 5) I realised that I couldn’t write only about media practices and their worldmaking effects. I also had to consider the effects of other media things, for instance, media events, dramas, and texts – what I call ‘the causal life of things.’ So I shifted from a media practice paradigm to a plural (media) paradigm. In Chapter 5, I examine a 2017 protest against Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist accused of racism at Evergreen State College, in Washington. I found that emailing was the most causally significant media practice during the early stages of this Turnerian drama, while social media and TV practices had a greater impact later. How did I know this? Because the participants themselves focused on these practices, and this was corroborated by other materials I collected. Reconstructing the protests allowed me to identify the unique sets of media practices, actions, and texts that shaped their evolution at each stage of the social drama.
Studying this American recent event from Australia was not very different, I imagine, from doing social historical research. Rather than a conventional ethnographic study based on participant observation, this book comes from an open-source investigation that relied on online archival materials of recent events. It is still ethnographic, I would argue, because it is driven by participants’ own priorities and schemas rather than my own.
Katien Pype: How did you decide on the four major events you studied in the book, namely Trump’s electoral victory, the Covid-19 pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and the war in Ukraine?
John Postill: When I looked back the other day at my book proposal, which I submitted more than two years ago, I was shocked to find that of the five events I said I would cover I ended up covering only one, the just mentioned Evergreen protests (linked to Trump’s shock 2016 election). The rest emerged in the process of drafting the book. I decided I needed four or five formative events to tell the short story of the anti-woke resistance. Eventually I dropped the Capitol attack of January 2021 because I didn’t have much on it.
Most of my research and writing decisions are intuitive. I don’t have any set criteria other than doing whatever feels right based on the materials to hand and whether I think they might shed light on problem X – here, the mediated making of the anti-woke world. In short, I chose those events because they mattered to my research subjects and because I had rich empirical materials on them.
The events are arranged chronologically, but analytically they work best in two discontinuous pairings (Evergreen and Floyd; Covid and Ukraine). Thus, in the anti-woke imaginary the Evergreen protests presaged the Floyd riots, while the schism between Covid conspiracists v consensualists was reinforced by the Ukraine war. In other words, those anti-wokes who favoured the scientific consensus on the pandemic also favoured the West’s consensus on the need to support Ukraine.
Katrien Pype: You write about culture wars. Can you explain where, as a social anthropologist with a training in the UK, where the focus is on the social, you have come to study culture, and what is culture here? One could argue that we are dealing with culturalism – then the question is: is the culture concept itself used by your interlocutors? Do you think the digital produces its own culture(s)?
John Postill: Unlike my previous offline or hybrid research in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Spain, I see this work as a form of parasocial anthropology in that I followed my research subjects online, without interacting with them. That said, I was keenly interested in the anti-woke social field and how leading anti-wokes related to one another as well as to their fans and foes, so the social is still very much in the mix.
In the book I don’t go into whether these are actually wars about culture. My focus is rather on leading culture warriors – I use this as a folk notion – and three of the key issues (racism, Covid and Ukraine) they have fought over in recent years. I haven’t tracked the use of the term culture by my research subjects but if someone did, they would probably find it in the ubiquitous term cancel culture as well as in connection to their perceived need to protect Western culture/civilisation from so-called woke multiculturalism. In the book I make the point that the culture wars are language wars (over preferred pronouns, hate speech, the word woman, and so on) but I don’t relate this to a broader discussion about culture or culturalism. More research needed!
Does the digital realm produce its own culture(s)? Well, in the anti-woke case, digital practices like tweeting, YouTubing, or podcasting, alongside other digital things, certainly helped to create an anti-woke subculture led by prominent personalities like Peterson and company. But we can never assume digital purity – the analogical is always present, too – nor should we neglect older media like radio or television rooted in the pre-digital age.
Katrien Pype: You regularly mention that influential voices do not remain within an online filter bubble, but that their texts/opinions/theories circulate ‘right across the hybrid media system’ (p. 69). This leads to two interrelated sets of sub-questions: (a) How can we see the boundaries between the woke and anti-woke movements online? What are these boundaries? What kind of boundary making is performed? (b) Is this because they are constantly looking for confrontations (and thus transgressing the boundaries)? And/or are these people constantly associating online (à la Latour) with their opponents?
John Postill: Content creators are world creators. I didn’t look at boundary maintenance, but the key strategy seems to be mutual avoidance. It is rare for social justice advocates (aka ‘wokes’) and their enemies to interact in public. Instead, they both engage with content, especially videos or texts in which their foes appear to embarrass themselves. There are no clear boundaries, but in the culture wars most commentators fall into one or another camp. It is not hard to tell which camp because the images and tropes are so familiar by now. In this sense, they each inhabit their own bubble, yet these bubbles rely for their maintenance on a regular supply of enemy content.
The key point is that we all live in what Andrew Chadwick calls hybrid media systems – even culture warriors whose main outlets are, say, podcasting and Twitter (aka X). By this term, Chadwick means systems in with old and new media interact in complex, non-teleological ways. To reiterate, we can’t disregard radio, television, or printed books. Indeed, some of the most formative moments in the anti-woke collective memory were precisely rare public clashes on television with woke figures, for instance, Jordan Peterson’s famous interview with Cathy Newman on Britain’s Channel 4 which became the subject of countless memes mocking the journalist.
Katrien Pype: You describe how the online wars can lead to meltdowns and to forced reorientations in careers, and other symptoms of cancel culture. What is your own positionality related to this split? Obviously, as your research consisted mostly of remote ethnography and lurking ethnography, your interlocutors didn’t force you to take a stance, as often ethnographers who are following a conflict must do. How do you think readers will position you? And is there any risk of this book being dragged into the conflict?
John Postill: I hope most readers will position me as a serious scholar with a keen interest in the anti-woke scene who is trying to convey this enthusiasm in writing while sticking to the evidence. I also hope they will see me as someone who wants to further the ethnographic study of causality.
Of course, authors have no control over what people make of their books. There is the chance that someone could try to drag this book into the culture wars – and me with it. That would be unfortunate, as I have no desire to become a culture warrior. Besides, I wouldn’t be any good at it. I may grumble about neoliberal academia (don’t we all), but I’m still happy to be a scholar.
Acknowledgements
Several of these questions have been formulated by the students of the course “Anthropology and Social Media” at KU Leuven University. On February 28 2024, John Postill participated in a “meet the author” session in that course, convened by Katrien Pype. She therefore wants to thank her students for their close reading of The Anthropology of Digital Practices, and their engaged discussion with the author.
Patrick Eisenlohr: Moral Atmospheres is not just a rich portrait of the freewheeling mediascapes of a Lahore marketplace, it is also a fascinating exploration of sensory and moral engagement with media among its traders and customers. What originally motivated you to embark on this project?
Timothy Cooper: Initially, I went to Lahore to study the circulation of Pakistani films. This was 2017 and I was new to anthropology, having previously studied experimental film and artists’ moving image media. I was interested in the image, its materiality, how celluloid ages, and how digital files glitch. I had also been working in curation and was writing for contemporary art publications. The big thing back then was the archival turn. Born out of postcolonial material and visual culture studies, this was concerned with the storage, retrieval, and possible restitution of knowledge and collective memory. I had first lived in Lahore in 2012-2013 in a professional capacity and, having previously known little about Pakistan, came to engage my new surroundings through these previous interests. If I remember correctly, my journey went from exposure to Pashto-language film music to Pashto Pakistani films, and from there onto Urdu and Punjabi-language Lollywood films made in Lahore’s studios (as Pashto films were also). This was a whole film industry, once one of the largest in the world, that I knew nothing about, but one with no national film archive, and with barely one or two books written about it. I began to look in film and electronics markets like Lahore’s Hall Road and found a dizzyingly quantity of Lollywood films of varying age, quality, and provenance. I was fascinated by how and why these films survived into the present. I was equally attracted to their visual palimpsest, overlaid with the names, companies, and logos of those who reproduced, retrieved, and appropriated them. In the economic model of this trade, celluloid films were sold to large marketplace traders for a lump sum to convert to VHS or VCD. These traders would then sell them on to smaller traders at varying price points; high for master-copies free of watermarks; low for copies watermarked with the larger traders’ logos. Unsurprisingly, the latter category quickly became fair game, a free resource for small one- or two-man traders to reproduce without owning the master-copy. Piracy didn’t seem a salient category here. But the absence of the moralizing underbelly of intellectual property discourse didn’t mean that there wasn’t a deep and pervasive concern with morality among the people who kept Pakistani films in circulation. Something else was going on, something that seemed to lie between the materiality of the media these traders moved and the various forces – religious, urban, inter-personal, technological – that shaped their ethical lives. So, I went back between 2017 and 2020 to learn what.
Patrick Eisenlohr: In the book, you describe how traders felt compelled to follow public demand in their business strategies, which they took to be an impersonal, difficult-to-locate force. On the other hand, you show how they also saw themselves as moral regulators of the public sphere. In South Asian media studies, there has been a lot of emphasis on the role of piracy and informality bypassing formal and legal regulation, so it is especially interesting to find a serious preoccupation with regulation elsewhere, in the traders’ ethical judgements of their own acquisitions and sales. Could you say a bit more about the role of traders in regulating the world of Pakistani film and other media, and what that tells us about South Asian public spheres more broadly?
Timothy Cooper: Among Hall Road film traders, public demand is a political sensibility. There is a rich body of literature – Aasim Sajjad Akhtar’s work springs immediately to mind or the legal activism of Asma Jahangir – on the lasting impact of post-secular movements in Pakistan’s 1970s and 1980s. These movements and the legal changes they brokered, brought into public life the possibility that women, minorities, or secular entertainment could offend or endanger Islam. This is paired with the notion, central to the election strategies of major political parties, that the united awaam – the people or public – should be taken as moral exemplars. In mercantile Lahore, middle-class traders and their unions and associations are important sources of votes and are often keen to leverage their unique position to further the aims of their particular Islamic movement or school of thought. The common sense that seems to guide the notion of public demand is a sensory domain bracketed on all sides by an acute awareness of how one is being perceived as a Muslim mediator of film, music, and other kinds of media. The logic is that while everything is up for grabs on Hall Road – everything can be retrieved and little is out of bounds – the existing repertoire of what is in circulation is shaped by what people want. These wants and needs are expected to have been filtered through the moral sensibilities and ethical lives of the awaam. Media traders are the final interface in this chain. Their priority is not to be seen as (only) traders in sexually suggestive films or pornography or media pertaining to an Islamic movement or denomination beyond their own. So, the transactions that take place between customer and trader are both events removed from the web of public demand and its interface. These are moments when one person takes stock of another and curates the transaction accordingly. What does the idea of traders as regulator tell us about South Asian public spheres? That if the idea of a public continues to offer itself up as an idealized democratic image of impactful agency, it becomes meaningful through figural and diffuse, rather than only discursive, flows. In South Asia, public spheres can also be spaces of mutual sensing born of the understanding that the affects that find surface and the objects that give them form can be illusory, particularly when this mutual sensing comes to exceed or fall out of step with the institutions that once authorized them.
Patrick Eisenlohr: The notion of atmospheres is central to your book. In European philosophy, from which this notion has spread into a range of other academic fields, including anthropology, atmospheres are less about subjectivity, let alone interior feelings, but are above all taken to be aesthetic and multisensory forces spreading in space. In your view, how can atmospheres as material and motional phenomena also be moral? And how did atmospheres become central to your research, how were you led to them as a tool to make sense of a Lahore marketplace?
Timothy Cooper: Other than when it refers to the biophysical, the way the Hindustani term mahaul (a term I translate as atmosphere) is used is almost always morally situated. It is both the effect and means with which one is affected. While usually a judgement that refers to negative influences, mahaul is moral because one defines values, behaviours, and attitudes in relation to it, even in normative inversion. When an atmosphere isn’t negatively defined, its identification can acknowledge its effects are ephemeral, thus inviting all at hand to sustain it, as this also furthers the well-being or dignity of those affected. In the book I describemahaul as a container for values, but I also describe it as mutually entangled with another important concept, thresholds. In my ethnography, what I call a threshold refers to the sense of magnitude that precedes a moral judgement. This is both an emic term – from the everyday use of the Islamic theological term hadd (plural: hudood) meaning the social location of divine boundaries – and my own descriptor. When you have a public sphere saturated with concerns about moral performance, about what is seen to be right and what external markers might help you see through the opacity of other people’s intentions, that’s when you get people talking about atmosphere in moral terms. These moral atmospheres allow allyship or means of exclusion. Atmospheres can also coexist and intersect, leading to unexpected or awkward alliances that can explain things that seem contradictory or hypocritical. An example of this is the paradox that the book revolves around; film traders who find film morally impermissible.
Atmospheres became central to this research because all my interlocutors talked about mahaul,and my main interlocutor told me that I wouldn’t be able to understand how film or media moves in Pakistan without coming to grips with the notion. In the back of my mind, I also must have thought it was a salient term of analysis for the things I was interested in: film, sound, and moving-image media. People had been writing about the atmosphere of film since the earliest days of cinematography, in the coming together of light, the bodies of strangers in a confined space, real and imagined movement, and the intermittence between sound and silence. When I realized this was going to be important, I looked beyond atmosphere as a purely aesthetic category. For mahaul, I looked to Nida Kirmani’s work, and for atmosphere to your own. Your book Sounding Islamhad been published while I was in the field and it proved very influential for me, as had your work on the dialectic of mediation and immediacy before I went to the field.
Patrick Eisenlohr: One of the many things I really like about your book is how it juxtaposes your interlocutors’ analytic of mahaul (atmosphere) with the notion of atmospheres current in academic theorizing, which mostly derives from German neo-phenomenology. Your book shows plenty of resonance but also some difference between these two conceptualizations of atmosphere. In other words, you do not follow the increasingly criticized but still common approach to frame an ethnography with a concept taken from European or North American philosophy or social theory, and “apply” it somewhere the world. Uses of the related notion of affect as derived from Spinoza’s affectus via Deleuze are one standard example for this tendency. Against the background of Moral Atmospheres, is there also a chance to at least partially invert the flow of theory and abstraction?
Timothy Cooper: As with the others, thank you such a generous and perceptive question. The possibility of, as you say, inverting the flow of abstraction, is what initially drew me towards anthropology from my background in contemporary art, film, and media studies. The kind of social theory you mention is great to think with but should always be taken as one set of ideas among others, rather than a master key that unlocks the vastness of human difference. What I found illuminating about atmosphere was how the two differing trajectories in German neo-phenomenology seem to follow the two differing strands of the anthropology of ethics. Do we locate atmosphere in human agency and reflection, or in the ambient, embodied, or transcendent forces that affect us? As in the anthropology of ethics, looking to the intellectual lives of our interlocutors and their situated analytics of atmosphere widens the frame of how we might understand the environmental and the affective. It also helps us take forward an interesting recent turn in contemporary media studies and the environmental humanities that argues that biophysical forms can store, transmit, and transform information. It also helps us take the current dialogue between anthropology and theology in a new direction. By taking atmosphere as one of the key analytics for discussing public morality and ethical life, my interlocutors held true to a core tenet of Islamic metaphysics. That is, that the environment provides a constellation of signs that not only provide proof for the miracle of creation, but encourage interpretation, reflection, and speculation.
Patrick Eisenlohr: In the chapter on the circulation of Shi‘i media in the month of Muharram, mahaul also emerges as central to some of your interlocutors’ religious experiences and engagements. Could you say more about the potential of mahaul/atmosphere for an anthropology of religion, especially when it comes to media practices and entanglements?
Timothy Cooper: The chapter you mention marked the epiphanic halfway point in my ethnography where everything changed, where what I thought I knew before going to the field was overturned, and a new way of looking at the matter at hand took root. I met the founder of one of the country’s first Islamic videography firms, whose recordings I’d seen circulate on Hall Road. This videographer told me that what his customers find so special about his recordings are the ways they capture his community’s mahaul, that word I was hearing all the time on Hall Road. He told, me “Liveness has an atmosphere of its own”, explaining that the unedited aesthetics, sudden zooms, and visual noise captured more of the community’s passion and piety, their commitment to public disclosure and openness to being seen. Rather than being a term of critique that denigrates and excludes, liveness makes atmosphere open to anyone willing to be moved by the sufferings of early Islamic martyrs.
When delineated by media practices and concepts, atmosphere allows religious communities to be entangled in space and feeling, while the issues that divide them remain unprovoked by its impermanence. Since completing Moral Atmospheres my research has turned entirety towards Pakistani Shi‘ism, where I study the liveness of Shi‘i commemorations of death. This is rooted firmly in the anthropology of religion because what atmosphere and liveness do here is provide theological precepts with a surge of magnitude that lends renewed significance to existing rituals and commemorations. I think that the analytic of atmosphere could play an interesting role in both theologically-engaged anthropology and religious environmentalism, particularly as these domains come together around topics like divine sovereignty, guardianship and stewardship, and apocalyptic thinking.
