Jessica Peng: I would like to begin by asking you to reflect upon the trajectory of your scholarship over the years (perhaps, alongside changes that have taken place in Indonesia) and share how it has led you to ask the questions that you do in this book. More specifically, how do you see this book relating to and/or departing from your earlier work?
Joseph Errington: I left college with an interest in generative grammar, then the emerging high theory of Language. But I wanted also to engage with a little-known ‘exotic’ language: Javanese, to which I had casual exposure via the performing arts. A glitch in class scheduling during my first quarter of graduate work at the U. of Chicago gave me an opening to take Michael Silverstein’s still new course on language and culture. Under his mentorship I shifted away from formalist paradigms at the core of linguistics to broader, semiotic issues of form and meaning.
Only towards the end of my 3rd year of graduate classwork did I come to grips with the need, prior to fieldwork, for fulltime language study: Indonesian (with John Wolff at Cornell) and then Javanese (at Gajah Mada University in Indonesia). This kind of lengthy pre-research preparation would likely be impossible now, but served me as a point of a transition from theory to particulars, and a resource for continuing research.
After a year of study in the lively town of Jogjakarta, Java, I moved to Surakarta, a royal polity which had been transformed by nationalist dynamics into a bit of a provincial backwater. Conversations with older (primarily male) members of the town’s old elite often shifted from language and etiquette to the reasons polite Javanese had become a kind of museum curiosity: widely respected, but little known or used. I became impressed by the ways change/variation in everyday talk was a diffuse, intimate, intersubjective dimension of large-scale social change. As a point of convergence between linguistic biography and social history, within and across generations, this became a recurring interest in my later work on Javanese/Indonesian bilingualism, and the kinds of Indonesian described in this book.
Jessica Peng: As is captured by the title, Other Indonesians: Nationalism in an Unnative Language, your book examines speakers of “other-than-standard” Indonesian, a language you suggest ought to be understood as “unnative” (cf. non-native). It is through this vantage point of exploring this overlapping linguistic feature of other-than-standard and unnativeness in provincial towns that you consider how Indonesian enables its speakers to express themselves as members of a national community in pluralistic ways. I wonder if you can explain what you mean when you describe Indonesian as an unnative language. Further, what are the affordances of focusing on those who speak nonstandard varieties of this unnative language to questions of nationalism?
Joe Errington: Native speaker intuition led me to unnative as a term of art before I figured out how English grammar made it more accurate than nonnative. But its peculiarity gives it rhetorical value for signalling the need to bracket ideologies of native speakership that lack fit with the Indonesian case. It had an empirical payoff also for framing fine-grained features of biaccentual usage in chapters 2 and 3. In chapter 4 this accuracy/awkwardness tradeoff played played out in a review of comparative/theoretical approaches to languages-and-nations. I thought about framing these issues in broadly Bakhtinian terms, but finally decided that Schutz’ quasi-Weberian vocabulary helped make social dimensions of the issue clearer.
If nothing else, this usage helps identify some of the less obvious naturalizing effects of linguistic nativeness ground for senses of national belonging.
Jessica Peng: Across your analysis of other-than-standard language use among college students in Kupang (Chapter 2) and Pontianak (Chapter 3), I was struck by the ways in which more socially marginalized members of Indonesian society were found to be more oriented towards the regime of the standard. In Kupang, for example, newcomers to the city speak about the values that people back in their rural hometowns place on standard Indonesian. I loved the example of the young newcomer who reminds herself to “flick her tongue” whenever she returns to Alor as to not bring her putatively bad, urban habits of speech back home. Meanwhile, the ethnic Chinese in Pontianak, as a population that has long been perceived as foreign in Indonesia, predominantly use standard Indonesian. I wonder if you can discuss if and how social marginality figures into people’s orientations to the regime of the standard and reflect upon what these examples might suggest about the senses of national belonging felt by these variably marginalized members of the nation?
Joe Errington: Your query raises a paradox darker than that thematized in the book, one illustrated by the Chinese of Pontianak, described in chapter 3. Some of the most marginalized members of the nation are also those whose use of the national language fits best with the the regime of the standard. Others live in geopolitically peripheral regions, like NTT, and Papua. The overtly racial discrimination against fluent Papuan speakers provides obvious, depressing conclusion that hierarchies of language competence may license but do not serve to weaken hierarchies of phenotype.
Ben Anderson the Indonesianist knew this, and might have referred it to his distinction between nationalism and racism. Peripheral persons may invest themselves in idea(ls) of a nation biographically through their descendants, who can acquire its language natively as an instrument/symbol/claim to membership. But such competences, and quasi-official version of nationalism they presuppose, are vulnerable to racist categories–inherited in Indonesia from the Dutch era–that presuppose eternal essences and threats of contamination.
An upside of this paradox, if there is one, might be Indonesian’s value for overt political mobilization on a subnational basis, as among Dayaks in Kalimantan. Like the original patriots, they deploy standard Indonesian less to eliminate longstanding prejudice than mitigate its effects. But they do so in circumstances of marginalization different from those that oppress other groups.
Jessica Peng: At the end of the book, you offer an exciting, revised perspective of the Indonesian story, suggesting that while the widespread state institutionalization of “good and true Indonesian” (Bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar) during the New Order era “began as a project oriented to the kinds of modernity found in the West,” the project “has had the unintended result of enabling a plurality of Indonesians” (p. 92). You further suggest that this plurality of Indonesian might serve as “a harbinger for other nations’ ongoing linguistic engagements with globalization” (p. 78). I’d love to invite you to say more about what the Indonesian case might teach us about the possibilities of “plural unities,” as well as share how you hope readers (of various kinds and across different contexts) might take up the insights put forth in this book.
Joe Errington: To keep the book brief, and open to a wider audience, I did not develop this comparison with Silverstein’s (2016) notion of logocratic nation-states (prototypically, the US). The absence of such a logocracy, I note in chapter 1, leads some to regard Indonesian as peculiar or perhaps deficient. But it enables also local senses of national belonging.
In post-new Order Indonesia, as in other nations, post-print mediatizations of (national) languages are circulating—being produced and perceived—through multiple voicings, both plural and translocal. In chapter 4 I cite sociolinguistic research in Europe which suggests that these dynamics are eroding print-literate logocracies. But because Indonesia(n) never had this kind of logocracy it might provide a model for other languages which are more overtly plural and less obviously emblematic of shared national identity.
2016 Standards, styles, and signs of the social self. Keynote address, Conference on “Language, Indexicality, and Belonging: Inaugural conference on linguistic anthropology,” Stephen Leonard et al., organizers. Somerville College, University of Oxford, 8 April. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 9(1). https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/anthro/documents/media/jaso9_1_2017_134_164.pdf/.
In our new edited volume Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media (Berghahn Books, 2023) we propose the term “cryptopolitics” to draw attention to the significance of hidden information, double meanings, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages in negotiating power dynamics. Focusing on African societies, the volume brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media to consider public culture, sociality, and power in all its forms, illustrating the analytical potential of cryptopolitics to elucidate intimate relationships, political protest, and economic strategies in the digital age.
What is cryptopolitics?
Cryptopolitics manifests as secrets, hidden knowledge, skeptical interpretations, and conspiracy theories, which are at the heart of social and political life. Secrecy and decoding are deployed to produce boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, and cryptopolitics are therefore intimately entangled with inequality and difference. Cryptopolitics involves managing communication in ways that play off ambiguity and the distinction between concealed and overt information. Secrecy, deception, and ambiguity are not novel, but cryptopolitics brings these kinds of activities into view under a unified conceptual framework that reveals how they are deployed politically. It focuses attention on the workings of the hidden and the deceptive in relations of power – trying to make sense of signs and forms that obscure and shield.
Cryptopolitics in the era of digital media:
Cryptopolitics takes novel forms and has new consequences when it enters society through digital media. While digital media seemed to promise a new age of transparency and open access to information, it has also created new sources of ambiguity and deception. The recent rise in fake news, conspiracy theories, and misinformation draws attention to powerful ambiguities manipulated for political ends. We suggest that political conflicts, elections, revolt, and other flashpoints bring cryptopolitics dramatically to the fore. Furthermore, everyday interactions and interpersonal relationships are also fields for cryptopolitics as people increasingly manage their connections with others through revelation and concealment, especially as they conduct their lives across online worlds. What needs to be hidden from whom, and what gains power or protection from being hidden, depends on the social and political context. We suggest that anthropological and ethnographic perspectives are therefore key to understanding the dynamics of cryptopolitics in any given situation.
New forms of cryptopolitics emerge with digital media—including the veiled, complicit partnerships between states and technology companies that enable surveillance or internet shutdowns in times of elections or other tense political moments, as it happens frequently in Africa and throughout the Global South. A growing number of states rely on telecommunication and technology companies to help limit the circulation of information that threatens their political power. States also seek to use data collected by tech companies for various political ends. In both these efforts the official rationale is often that of what is framed as security, a paramount contemporary domain of cryptopolitics since threats and espionage produce and are produced by secrecy and suspicion.
Why Africa?
This edited volume employs the concept of cryptopolitics as a lens that helps bring into focus a dynamic of power and communication that operates in a wide array of settings. It explores cryptopolitics in diverse African contexts through ethnographic perspectives and in-depth qualitative studies. The authors situate their work at the intersection of cultural anthropology, media studies, and African studies. We contend that ethnographies of African digital cultures provide fertile ground for the exploration of cryptopolitics. Indirectness and the cryptic have been preferred forms of communication in many areas of postcolonial Africa, where citizens often have a long history of distrusting their leaders. Digital media, consumed mostly through smart phones, has rapidly become central to African politics and social life: private companies, humanitarian organizations, religious communities, families and other networks rely on digital technology in one way or another.
Cryptopolitics itself is not a new phenomenon. Discussions about encryption, fake accounts, and disinformation remind us that deliberate confusion, doublespeak, distrust, and deciphering are often part of human interaction and are always embedded in strategies of power. At the same time, we should keep in mind that cryptopolitics is foundational to the digitized world, as technologies amplify the duality of concealment and revelation, and also magnify the scale, scope, and set of stakeholders associated with any particular instance. In our book, we employ the concept of “cryptopolitics” as an analytical space that is fruitful for new investigations in contemporary power configurations. We hope that the chapters of this volume can serve as an inspiration to engage in similar research beyond the African continent.
Digital technologies and social media platforms:
Digital technologies have fostered new surveillance and security measures used by states and private companies. These stockpiles of data are powerful public secrets that are known of yet hidden from citizens: a form of cryptopolitics. The objection of African governments and the U.S. government to the encryption of communications is testimony to the power that rests in information and in data. Struggles over who controls what is known, what can be revealed, by whom and to whom are being waged globally.
Such new power formations lead to new power struggles, as the tensions between the European Union and American platform companies show. They also generate new strategies and tactics of resistance. All over the world, to varying degrees, people engage in new, digital and non-digital practices in efforts to escape repression, whether enacted by the state or other actors of authority.
The chapters of this book use cryptopolitics as a tool to illuminate the underlying discourses of power and powerlessness that are mediated by the novel technologies. Enabling new strategies of concealing and revealing information and intentions, the digital technologies are shown to disrupt and reconfigure people’s communicative practices and lifeworlds. However, the chapters also show that the emerging virtual public sphere that allows people to connect through a variety of new media, should not be seen as always enabling free speech and empowerment, but is shaped by complex interaction between a variety of actors—individual and collective, public and private. We can therefore see how cryptopolitical practices are anchored in local cultures and social norms, but also interlink online and offline, public and intimate socialities.
Our rich empirical cases:
This anthology brings together original research on diverse countries in Africa and diasporas, including Somalia, Eritrea, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Mali, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. All chapters examine the role of emerging digital technologies and platforms in mediating knowledge production. A common theme is the relationship between the state and society with particular attention to conflicts, migration, ethnic rivalries, and authoritarian systems. The chapters demonstrate how political and social practices are always anchored in local sociality, and suggest that the analysis of the role of social media in Africa is often central to understanding the present-day cryptopolitical dynamics between the powerless and powerful.
The rise of digital communicative platforms can be seen as central to contemporary activities of obfuscation and revelation—offering new possibilities for the empowerment of the marginal, but also creating new mechanisms of surveillance and control. The book casts light on the emerging dynamics of digital platforms in Africa that are often characterized by ambivalent implications to power and agency—the ability of individuals to make their own choices and act upon them. Various social media and internet search platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Google, increasingly feature as an arena for construction and negotiation of alternative meanings and strategies of resistance.
Our anthology explores the new digital publics that emerge on diverse global and local social media platforms to question and contest the political legitimacy and narratives of the state. It draws attention to important continuities in political cultures, and the ways long-standing cryptopolitical understandings and practices are adapted to digital media. The chapters of our book provide rich empirical material to illustrate these topics. For example, social media in Burundi draws on the patterns of selective concealing that are part of the cultural repertoire in Burundian politics, while providing citizens with new avenues to combat the machinations and violence of the state. In post-conflict Somalia, the enduring struggles to reify and strategically manipulate otherwise fluid and contextual clan identities have been transferred to the digital world of algorithmic search engines. Communication on Congolese digital platforms is shaped by a locally specific aesthetic of ambiguity that foregrounds socially conditioned modes of concealment and revelation, forming an important strategy for managing personal relationships. New digital technologies of identification aimed at regulating and surveilling migrants in Kenya give rise to new strategies among Somali and Burundi refugees who evade and manipulate the state authorities, while providing them with informal ways to draw on their customary ties of sociality and mutual security. Among Eritreans and the diaspora, the double meanings and ambiguities of humor both mirror and decode the cryptopolitics in the narratives of the authoritarian state and expose these to public scrutiny.
While digital media may render participation in political and economic governance more accessible to the masses, the outcomes remain contested and ambiguous. Thus, for example, digital platforms such as Twitter have disrupted state control over the circulation of information in Kenya and introduced new, participatory practices of engaging with institutional politics. At the same time, digital platforms also entail new opportunities for the state to strengthen its repressive regime. Similarly, the restrictions and freedoms produced by the engagement of the users with Western-owned BigTech platforms that often dominate the digital economy landscape in Africa are also ambivalent and context-dependent. In South Africa and Kenya, for example, WhatsApp-mediated informal savings groups have emerged as an alternative to digital group accounts offered by commercial banks and dedicated FinTech platforms. While they build on vernacular templates of mutuality and allow broader financial access to the masses, they have also given rise to rapidly spreading scams, and data capture by technology companies. Fundraising campaigns increasingly combine WhatsApp with offline contribution networks and mobile payment channels, demonstrating the continued importance of integrating offline and online modes of livelihood management. As the chapters show, digital publics in Africa are thus constituted through multiple materialities and communicative forms, and digital spaces shaped by a variety of actors that include individual users, governments, civil society organizations, diasporas, and increasingly, technology companies and investors.
Cryptopolitics and ethnographic fieldwork:
Cryptopolitics is not only a topic to study in the lifeworlds of our research subjects. Collecting ethnographic data and publishing research involves strategies of exposing, concealing and obscuring as well. As anthropologists, we have sometimes failed to acknowledge the politics of ethnographic research and scholarship, and the local and global power relations that shape our engagement with the people we write about.
Our usage of pseudonyms or the alterations of various idiosyncratic characteristics of local people with whom we interact are also practices of cryptopolitics, of producing layers of meaning, of hiding and obscuring so that our interlocutors or our relationships with them are not harmed. These processes of anthropological research are well-known. Yet, with the ubiquity of social media, practices of data collection, contacting interlocutors, and maintaining relationships with them are constantly being transformed. Scholars increasingly need to reflect on how digitally stored ethnographic material will be protected from risks such as data hacking or theft. Just as citizens are not always fully in control of the data flow of data they consciously produce or inadvertently generate, neither are researchers. All this points to a need for new approaches and perspectives in the discipline that would allow for more balanced disclosures in an environment of mutual dialogue and respect, to replace the old, extractive modes of knowledge-making.
Stefan Helmreich: Your first book, Placing Outer Space, asked not only how place was imagined on and for such off-Earth entities as exoplanets, but also placed such imaginations within the (mostly) American cultural contexts within which they emerged. In In The Land of the Unreal, you again place a technoscientific imagination with respect to a social address. This time the technoscientific object is virtual reality and the place is Los Angeles. Can you get us up to speed on what difference LA makes to the VR that is created there?
Lisa Messeri: Thanks, Stefan. That comparison between the two books is a great place to start. As you point out, in both books I’m interested in the relationship between place and technoscientific endeavors. In the first, I catalogued how scientific elites made place in the cosmos. In this one, I flipped figure and ground and was interested in how place – in the sense of geographic location – shaped technological work. Ethnographically, it was quickly apparent that conversations and development around VR in specific and tech more generally in LA felt different from my prior experiences in Silicon Valley (and spending a decade immersed in MIT’s tech culture). In the book, I therefore attempt to tease out LA’s technological terroir; the features of local geography, history, and expertise that cultivate a different sensibility around tech. Hollywood’s impact on the political economy of LA is of course a driving factor, but so is the longer history of the region’s aerospace and military histories that, as I came to understand, have long been entangled with the entertainment industry. Alongside these different institutional configurations for tech development is also the simple fact of a geographic removal that provided LA’s VR scene space to be something slightly different than San Francisco’s Silicon Valley dominated activities. To be clear, the differences I attribute to place’s influence on tech development and conversations are subtle. They slowly became apparent throughout a year of ethnographic research. On the surface, one could find many connections between VR as it existed in LA and other globally situated hot spots. But teasing out these subtle differences became essential for understanding how particularly claims about VR – for example, that it could supposedly be an empathy machine – came to hold power, both in LA and beyond.
Stefan Helmreich: Anthropologists have taken an interest in virtual realities for a spell now. I think of early speculations in 1990s cyborg anthropology. And then I turn to Tom Boellstorff’s 2008 Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human and Thomas Malaby’s 2011 Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life— which took somewhat opposed approaches, with Boellstorff doing his fieldwork “in” Second Life and Malaby looking at the physical workplace of Linden Labs. I wonder if you might say something about how you think about the relationship — or, even, difference? — between ethnography in virtual reality and ethnography about virtual reality.
Lisa Messeri: When I first began this project (I can offer my NSF proposal as proof!), I imagined I’d be studying the institutions that develop VR, following Malaby, and the sociality of the virtual, following Boellstorff. While such a “mixed reality” project is possible and admirable, it quickly became clear that they require distinct methods and do not necessarily have intuitive points of connection. In the end, I conducted all of my fieldwork IRL and so even though this is an ethnography about virtual reality (and, to some extent, aims at theorizing the virtual) it is not a virtual/digital ethnography. This was partly because the VR experiences whose creation I was documenting were largely cinematic VR rather than social VR; meaning they were experienced individually and not part of a persistent, inhabited virtual world. While I did a lot of VR during my fieldwork, the sociality I was studying as an anthropologist all occurred outside of the headset.
This distinction is really important, as Boellstorff points out in a recent article, “Toward Anthropologies of the Metaverse.” So maybe the metaverse has already peaked and fallen, but the point he is making is that the virtual (be it Second Life or Meta’s Metaverse) is not necessarily something that is only experienceable in virtual reality. When these two are conflated, the field that is taken to be the virtual or the metaverse is prematurely constricted. I agree with this, but the article limits anthropologies of the metaverse (perhaps we will update this to include anthropologies of spatial computing, in light of Apple’s Vision Pro) to be studies of virtual (in headset or not) sociality. Here I would interject and suggest that anthropology’s potential is to create an anthropology of the virtual/metaverse/spatial computing that capaciously includes both ethnography in the virtual and ethnographies about the virtual. Indeed, the conflation Boellstorff points out between the virtual and virtual reality is ethnographically interesting! How might we understand Apple’s and Meta’s insistence that the future they are promising comes in the form of a headset? And how do we understand the communities that form around the promises of such futures (whether they are formed in good faith [to make a quick buck] or not)? We need to study both the makers of technology and the users of technology. Even if this is not a single project for one investigator, they are necessarily complimentary, as Boellstorff and Malaby’s initial work on Second Life demonstrated.
Stefan Helmreich: Your book is keen to look at the work of women innovators in VR, especially in the immediate (and at the time very encouraging) aftermath of #MeToo. You encountered some women who made claims that their work might generate more compassionate technological development — claims that you usefully complicate by directing the reader to feminist work on the multiple and not always straightforward politics that arrive any time notions of care are invoked. Can you tell us what it was like to be in conversation with some of these innovators — in ways that both heard them out and that offered your own feminist STS expertise to the discussion?
Lisa Messeri: My biggest concern at the start of this project was that I knew I would be in conversation with people whose VR projects I might not fully be behind. After all, the impetus for this project was trying to understand how a community comes to believe that their technology can make the world a better place. Given ALL the studies we have about how well-meaning technologists (and technologies) often … do the opposite, I was very aware of my positionality. Therefore, going into the field, my strategy was that for those who would let me be a participant observer, I would take the participation seriously. I was not going to sit back with my notebook and document practices that (unintentionally!) inscribed problematic politics into VR experiences, but I was going to participate – I was going to offer my feminist STS lens as a resource for these teams. A small example was when I was working on a VR experience about a mission to Mars, I was asked to read a preliminary script. It was riddled with references to “colonizing” Mars. I suggested we find other language, noting how that loaded metaphor presupposes certain social (including human-nonhuman) relations. We rewrote the script and that conversation led to a slightly different ethos behind the fictional Mars world that continued to be built out. Anyway, that was an easy enactment of participation.
There were harder situations where projects were admirable – and too far along in their development to change – but I could see potential pitfalls. I still wanted to document these cases, as it was important that I hear the creators out (as you say) and really try to understand the well-meaning intention behind such projects. As my year of fieldwork progressed, and as these relationships became more trusting, I would be able to discuss some of my concerns and never was there a case where these concerns were rejected. And most of the time, these concerns weren’t even a surprise but ones that the innovators themselves had been privately puzzling over.
When it came to writing, I employed several strategies to layer in the critique. Sometimes, my interlocutors would open the door to critique with their own observations. Other times, I made the object of critique not individuals or even projects, but the structures and situations that make potentially harmful VR experiences seem potentially helpful.
Stefan Helmreich: “Unreal” — Can you talk about what this/word concept means from the point of view of your interlocutors? How and where do their uses of the term resonate — and not — with your use of the idea?
Lisa Messeri: The unreal got stuck in my brain really early in fieldwork. I had gone on a studio tour at Paramount and our guide played a clip from the 1961 Jerry Lewis movie The Errand Boy, which began with an arial shot of Los Angeles that slowly zoomed in on Paramount studio. A voiceover narrated, “This is Hollywood. Land of the real and the unreal.” This was in my mind as I began to better understand LA as a city and VR as a technology. The unreal would pop up in weird places. Usually it was a colloquialism, exclaiming that a really cool VR experience was “unreal.” But after fieldwork, I also came across a 2016 marketing report that was tracing the trend of “unrealities.” This trend included escape rooms and astrology and Snapchat filters and meditation retreats and, of course, virtual reality. These things are all appealing not exclusively because of the fantasy they offer, but because that fantasy is experienced in dialogue with a reality that is being pushed against. In the book, I define the unreal as that which “holds in tension an extraordinary rendering of reality with what might be thought of as an everyday reality.” There have always been multiple realties, but the unreal marks moments when such multiplicity demands attention. So, saying a VR experience is “unreal” is from a delight in knowing your body was in the physical world but having an experience that is deeply at odds with those surroundings.
As I was conducting fieldwork in 2018 – right in the middle of the Trump presidency and its explosion of alternative facts – I marked US politics as also unreal, in so far as many liberals struggled to comprehend Trump’s “extraordinary rendering of reality” with how they understood reality. This political reading comes from an intellectual genealogy of theorizing US politics from LA, from Baudrillard and Eco’s hyperreal to Soja’s real-and-imagined thirdspace. To these 20th century theories, I add the 21st century twist of the unreal.
Stefan Helmreich: You write in the book about VR boosters as sometimes eager to pitch their projects as in the service of empathy. And you point us to the fact that the register of empathy can be a way of avoiding questions to do with institutions, the distribution of resources, politics — with things beyond the scale of the sheerly well-meaning individual. The silicon panic of our time is to do with generative AI — and some thinkers, like Sherry Turkle, have kept their eyes on the rise of tools promising artificial intimacy, thinking here about therapy chatbots that promise artificial empathy. What, if anything, do you think recent AI development has done for/to the promises or VR? Is empathy still important? Or are other terms of conversation now surfacing?
Lisa Messeri: When I was doing fieldwork, VR was in frequent conversation with blockchain and AI as a triumvirate that would usher in the future. I mention this to mark that they are part of the same ecology – and draw on many of the same institutions, resources, people, and so on. So in general, much of what I write about in my book is a primer for today’s genAI moment. And the persistence of empathy as a category is a frightening reminder! An October 7, 2023 headline from the Wall Street Journal asked “Can AI do Empathy Even Better than Humans?”
But all the thinking that has been done about VR and empathy gives us a head start on how to think about AI and empathy. Turkle was one of the first thinkers I looked to when getting at the empathy angle. In a chapter in which she responds directly to claims that VR is an empathy machine, she worries that “the feeling of conversation becomes conversation enough.” Denny Profitt, a psychologist at UVA who provided me with my first exposure to VR, observed to me sometime around 2015 that VR empathy experiences were potentially dangerous because they could induce a feeling of false catharsis. In caring deeply, do you forget to actually act in a way that remedies the problem? Or as Nakamura has put it, what is the morality of “feeling good about feeling bad”?
In figuring out how to think about empathy – be it AI- or VR-induced – I have been guided by Atanasoski and Vora’s Surrogate Humanity. They show how technologies that seek to replace or conceal human labor very often replicate dehumanizing logics of race, gender, and colonialism. So, yes, we need to be incredibly wary of VR that promises instant empathy or AI that does empathy better than a human. But, one of the case studies of my book suggests that replacing or concealing human labor isn’t the only strategy for deploying VR (or possibly AI). Should these technologies instead be used to augment human labor, perhaps there are less destructive applications of these tools. In other words, I don’t think there is something inherently bad about attempts to leverage technologies in an effort to help people and situations become better. In fact, I think such pursuits, done genuinely, are admirable! However, social problems will never have exclusively technological solutions and therefore thinking of solutions in which technologies augment – rather than replace – human labor and sociality seems to be a plausible way forward.
And that will be the hopeful note with which I end this Q&A!
Leonie Schulte: Can you describe sounding and how as a conceptual lens it allows us to understand power in contexts of migration and linguistic hybridity?
Kinga Koźmińska: I’m interested in contemporary vernacular-cosmopolitan transformations and how the current communicative environment which enables extended capabilities of action and multi-presence in various sites transforms our relations in transnational space, with a focus on what role language plays in these processes. I study sounded signs in contexts of migration to understand emerging linguistic norms and practices, and to unpack processes through which individuals and groups place themselves in socio-linguistic landscapes. The aim of this book is to draw the reader’s attention to the practices of sounding and listening. I called the book Soundings to confront the reader with multiplicity and the reality that sounds of language do things in the world.
By examining the relationship between research practices, communication and knowledge production, I wanted to add to the debates on group formation processes and examine the ways in which we relate to these multiple others and construe difference at the level of language. Working in the context of migrations between Poland and the United Kingdom since 2012 has coincided in time with the most radical changes in European space and increased politicisation of movement. In my work, I explore how beginning with situated audio and audio-visual recordings may enable us to see how these changes were affecting particular individuals and groups.
I began with a simple premise that in human face-to-face interactions, sounds of language are produced by bodies situated in space and time. This enabled me to focus on how the senses were imbuing timescapes and landscapes with their own memory and understanding of social relations. I investigate how the way we pronounce sounds of language is entangled in particular imaginaries about self-other-time-space relations: while some of us may be moving in universal time, others may portray themselves as evolving in stable timespaces and still others may focus on the here and now. I am interested in unpacking how these different imaginaries may be sounded out and how this may lead to some of our rhythms becoming dominant and others being erased or portrayed as less real.
Beginning with situated performances enables me to observe how we remain positioned while we do the work of sounding and listening. My approach to this project was situated within history of specialist knowledge production, which still has a profound impact on how the world works. This book explores how my act of bringing these different soundings in relation with one another may help us see how semiotics of the voice works today, noting shared themes, but never erasing nuances and contradictions of human experience. By doing so, I hope to push my field forward as we deal with the legacy of our troublesome past in linguistics and anthropology.
Leonie: Your book ties together several research areas, including the anthropology of the senses, to expand upon our knowledge of sociolinguistic listening. Can you speak more to the ways in which we can understand both sounding and listening as embodied practices?
Kinga: I started writing this book in October 2021, finishing in early 2023. The context of its production is important: when we started unlocking ourselves post Covid-19-pandemic, and when we had transformations of sensory experiences that were really impossible to ignore. They had a tremendous impact on people around me and made me rethink some key questions about human communication, language and relationality.
Because of this and my work on a family language project (2017-2019) involving audiovisual recordings, I became engaged in discussions in anthropology of the senses. I saw materiality and sociality of the senses as key for emerging transformations and constellations of power. I was reading about projects examining the role of technology for discourse production, such as in studies of deaf communities. At the same time, I was inspired by Bucholtz and Hall’s (2016) call to move beyond materiality-discourse dichotomy in my field. I decided to combine these bodies of research.
When engaging with some arguments in anthropology of the senses, I wasn’t fully convinced that we can actually say that language/semiotics are no longer modes for encountering the sensual cultural world. If you come from a background where you don’t speak one of the dominant languages as your first language, you immediately see that language is interwoven in modes of experiencing the world, and it is really who you are.
To me, we may try to understand the world only if we take language seriously into account, a proposition influenced by language ideological research stressing that rendering language invisible creates social inequality. I wanted to allow for reconfiguration of how we think about linguistic knowledge in the light of current changes, while not ignoring what we know about how language works. I explore how bodily production and response may work today, how we connect with others, how we occupy and push the limits of normative structures.
As the social and sensory orders continue to be (re)made, I argue for seeing sounding/listening as embodied, always multidimensional, embedded in particular energetics of social relations, never neutral/unmediated. This urges me to see my own practice as operating within a particular culture of listening, hopefully carving a way to use the knowledge we have while remaining open to transformations of concepts and realities so that the world may become more liveable for more of us.
Leonie: What I found particularly exciting about reading your book was the richness and variety of data you present, including a depth of ethnographic detail, which really speaks to the ways in which your work engages so many fields of research. Can you speak more to the methodologies which underlie this book?
Kinga: It is important to note that the methodologies that I bring in dialogue are tightly linked to my trajectory within academia and engagement with different questions and audiences. The reader will quickly see that the book goes back to my PhD data. It is my final take on ideas that I have been sitting with for a long time. I was trying to understand what the focus on the sonic dimension of discourse adds to discussions on emerging transformations in transnational space, how it unpacks how we are mobile and still emplaced, how we are singular but multiple. I explore how the ubiquity of and augmentation in human capabilities may influence linguistic norms and innovation, and how that in turn impacts how we develop categories of normality and weirdness, who’s included, who’s excluded. Importantly, the PhD project was followed by work with variously positioned Polish-speaking migrants in Greater London, where I was interested in multi-party talk and multimodal analysis to see how these families were made, how language was embedded in other embodied phenomena and used together with objects and technologies. This project focused on Polish, Somali and Chinese families in the UK. I worked with audiovisual data from 10 families of different types including Polish-Polish-speaking, mixed heritage, biracial, LGBTQ with history of transracial adoption.
There were important societal and methodological questions emerging from that work. Going back to this first project in 2021, looking at the sonic dimension of discourse, I couldn’t ignore other observations. The methodologies that I bring in dialogue are spread over a long period of time. I operated within various corners of seemingly similar debates, but with quite differently positioned migrants in the UK, and in different periods: pre- and post-Brexit. Beginning with performances of collective memory in a community of movement, the book brings the voices of those others who are often silenced in key societal debates to the fore. The book is my own experimentation to understand what has happened, how this is linked to history, what these methodologies enable us to see, and how that can push us forward. Creating a relation between these bodies of research, I hope, new questions may emerge, perhaps allowing us not to go back to assumptions for past times, but gain a new perspective for new times.
Leonie: Your book offers a very in-depth and longitudinal view of Polish newcomers in the UK, and what has always struck me about your work is how you demonstrate the ways in which processes of belonging, and community formation, but also individual ties to national and local identity and socioeconomic mobility are negotiated linguistically–or rather, how they are sounded out. Can you talk more about the ways in which structures of dominance and marginalisation are unsettled through embodied soundwork?
Kinga: I did something that is rarely done. I decided to explore what may happen if I don’t allow for erasure of minute phonetic detail, but rather follow my participants’ suggestions who at the time were linking features of language to emerging person types in transnational space. I was interested in seeing how my specialist knowledge and tools may be used to shed light on what was going on at that point. Engaged in discussions in theoretical linguistics and anthropology, I decided to examine sound production in detail. To do so, I used discourse analysis and phonetic and statistical software. I wanted to figure out how sound relationships work and are linked to sociocultural dynamics, e.g. social networks or orientation in transnational space. I analysed the emergence of the dominant scale, the use of standardized forms of language and how in transnational space this plays out in a fairly privileged context.
In the final chapter of the book, I put my findings in dialogue with projects focussing on the form of the underheard or silenced, where these uneven language expectations play out with the most intense force, as it was beautifully written, when bodies ‘open themselves up in order to survive and live with others’ (LaBelle 2018: 68). By doing so, I explore how standardisation works in transnational space, what regulatory mechanisms make it work, but also how this underscores that scales are constantly (re)made, with sounds of language acting as scalar connections that make value effects in the world. This illuminates multiple mechanisms that lock us in transnational space, often contributing to experiences of mobility and immobility at the same time. There is no single metric to understand all scenarios of migration. My work is trying to make an intervention with the skills I have to make multiple logics and rhythms our starting point. Trying to critically address my limitations and foregrounding adjustments that must be made, I propose to see sociolinguistic listening as curatorship, hopefully, enabling healing of these multiple publics that I bring in dialogue.
Kristina Nielsen: Call Centers have been the study of multiple linguistic and cultural studies that often focus on the topic of outsourcing labor or the spread of neoliberal values. Your book seems remarkably different in its focus in that it takes place in London and focuses on calling scripts, could you please explain how your book frames call center work in a different light than other scholars who have studied this kind of workplace and why that is so important?
Johanna Woydack: As a global city, London has been a hub, if not the hub, of Europe’s call center industry, making and taking calls worldwide. Call centers support numerous industries, such as financial services, fintech, and the tech industry by relying on highly educated multilingual migrants who, taken together, form a capable workforce. It is not unusual in London call centers to find someone working from the EU or the Commonwealth making calls to places across the globe including the US, Gulf countries, the EU, Asia, South America or New Zealand and doing so in multiple languages. As a result London is an important focus for call center work.
As you mentioned, a lot of the other call center literature focuses on offshore (monolingual) call centers as part of the spread of neoliberal and (neo)colonial values, allowing researchers to highlight topics such as globalization. Typical emphases in the literature are the novelty, exploitation, and exoticness of call centers and offshoring of services from the Global North to South including time-space compression. Although this has been important research, it perhaps paints a misleading picture by downplaying the importance of onshore call centers, which outnumber offshore call centers in terms of employment workforce percentages. By contrast even vibrant and vital Western call center hubs such as Toronto, Dublin or London, sites of incredibly large numbers of call centers, look odd. Yet these centers are integral to the global and local economies and allow us to study globalization, post-fordism, migration and integration, standardization, organizations, surveillance, gender, social class, language learning, and upskilling among other things.
I was fortunate to be able to enter the call center industry as both an employee and researcher thus giving me unusual access for a researcher to daily practices. To my knowledge, there is no other long-term ethnography of a call center. Based on my four years of fieldwork and over one hundred interviews, I found that a call center is a lot more than just a place where people read from scripts and are monitored round the clock and as a result become robotic and deskilled. In fact, I observed that scripts aided second language learning and grounded increasing professional, cultural and linguistic competencies. I focused on scripts because they were not only representative of call centers and their standardization, but linked different levels of the company: corporate management, middle management, and agents. My work is inspired by classic ethnographies of workplaces such as Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent and Donald Roy’s Banana Time, but also Erving Goffman’s books Asylum and Stigma. I applied an innovative methodology combining Dorothy Smith’s ‘institutional ethnography’ with Greg Urban and Michael Silverstein’s ‘transcontextual analysis’. I call this framework ‘institutional transpositional analysis’, a method by which I follow the career of a script to investigate why it is created, changed and performed as it travels through the organization and how different actors contribute to an organization and express their agency. I believe this method can be applied to studying other organizations, not just call centers.
Kristina Nielsen: In this book, you follow the social life of a call center script, how does focusing on following a script’s career rather than a person’s career allow you to tell a story that is not often told about the workplace?
Johanna Woydack: There is a tradition to design research around chains, threads, and trajectories to follow the flow of objects to create multi-sided ethnography. I am thinking, for example, of Sidney Mintz’s and Ulf Hannerz’s work. By following text trajectories, in this case, the social life of a script from its creation to its death, I created an ethnography within an organization that is integrally multi-sided in terms of the corporate hierarchy, employees of diverse backgrounds, and clients around the world. Following a person’s career would not have highlighted this multiplicity. My methods further allowed me to explore what standardization means in the call center. As the call center’s controversial raison d’être, standardization raises questions of agency, surveillance, resistance and compliance by multiple actors from (corporate) management, to team leaders and finally to call agents. Besides that, I was inspired by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban’s seminal book on The Natural History of Discourse, especially Richard Bauman’s chapter on the “Transformation of the Word in the Production of Mexican Festival Drama” which also explores how a script is re-contextualized and re-entextualized, although in a different context.
Kristina Nielsen: Working with corporations while in the field poses its own sets of challenges to fieldwork, could you tell us about your approach to working within a corporate setting?
Johanna Woydack: As many other ethnographers who have done fieldwork in corporations or on factory floors, I was also an employee and gained full access as an insider. I first worked the phones and then was promoted to team leader. One challenge in such research, especially when the agenda is developed outside the corporation, is to gain management approval. I asked management whether they would allow me to do research and interview fellow co-workers while working myself as an employee and they agreed. It was my impression that they appreciated my application of linguistics not only in my own work for the corporation and in my research but also in training and helping co-workers interact on the phone and improve their performances so that corporate targets were met.
Kristina Nielsen: One of the theoretical frameworks you engage with in your book is the notion of standard which has been a mainstay of linguistics but is often looked at as a phenomenon that is resisted from the bottom and controlled from the top. How does your account of standardization show some of the nuances and motivations that might not be clear from previous accounts?
Johanna Woydack: My account of standardization offers insights into types of participants marginalized or overlooked in previous non-ethnographic studies such as middle management and team leaders, not just the agents.
These insights emerged through the mapping of a script’s textual trajectories encompassing the entire organization, and through field notes on the surrounding real life back-stage activities during a script’s career. Campaign managers and team leaders are important figures whose interpretations and actions influence proceedings on the floor. Ethnographic observation allows one to see how they perceive standardization or work with it on a daily basis. Discussion of team leaders or middle managers in previous call center studies has been limited to mention of supervisors who are part of a system, but has not recognized these employees as a significant interest group with the capability to act differently from their line managers.
The trajectories of the script and many of my fieldnotes not only highlight the actual existence of different interest groups within the organization, but also show that in real time all participants (agents, team leaders or middle managers) have agency, for example, when they recontextualize a script in a new context, orally or through hand-written annotations. This is an important form of agency overlooked in most previous studies that draw only on interviews or questionnaires. Ethnographic insights reveal that it is not the sole purpose of a script to regulate activities within the organization. Only corporate management and the client believe a script is static. Participants further down the hierarchy conceptualize a script as part of a textual trajectory and therefore transforming throughout its journey. Changing a script is not an act of resistance but of performative improvement of benefit to the company and its clients, as well as agents. Hence, scripts and standardization vary in meaning from corporate management to participants on the floor. Against this background, the notion of what standardized, standard or standardization means becomes more difficult. If understanding depends on the hierarchical position of a participant, whose understanding do we take?
Finally, I wanted to draw a more complex picture of standardization as in social theory and sociology it has tended to be derogatory leading to homogenization, deskilling and ultimately to dehumanization. I started off from the assumption that standardization does not have to be negative and investigated possible benefits in actual use. For example, a significant number of college graduates work in call centers in London because competition for most jobs is fierce and graduates from other countries compete with graduates of over 50 domestic colleges/universities. It often requires some time in London before migrants find a satisfying job in their fields of expertise. In the meantime, to make money and improve their English, they may work in a call center. Often this becomes an opportunity to improve one’s linguistic competence and launch oneself into an appropriate professional career.
Kristina Nielsen: Would you say that your book is a story of how call center agents… have agency?
Johanna Woydack: This is one of the facets of the book. I wanted to re-conceptualize the concept of resistance as it can be crude. Previous works on resistance, both Neo-Marxian and Foucauldian, although epistemologically very different, have succumbed to what Dennis Mumby has “called the duality of control and resistance”, wherein there is no room for agents, agency or subjectivity. Agency tends to be limited to upper echelons of power structures. Equally, if there is resistance, it is assumed to be guerilla-like, never collective, as it is read as subsumed within and reproduced by control mechanisms.
Agency, however, in call centers such as the London centers I explored is part and parcel of the skilled work entailed by those who operate the phones as well as by their leaders and management. Lower-level agency is often missed because of the negativity associated with calling as robotic and because it is a job that is mostly oral; the oral and technical skills of agents can be invisible and illegible even to managers.
I was also interested in producing a framework to study an organization in the new economy, including providing voices to different people such as middle management and lower-level employees.
On yet another level the book is about how standardization works or perhaps fails to work and how it is interpreted. The drive to standardization is not limited to call centers (including the desire to impose scripts top-down) but also appears in institutions like schools and hospitals, making the topic one of even greater general interest.
Lastly, I provided a larger story about being a graduate/immigrant in London, about London socialization and about how call centers play an integral part in the local and global economies. One’s call center past is something successful graduates or other individuals might hide due to social stigma but in safe settings agents report gaining important cultural and linguistic skills there.
Kristina Nielsen: Finally, call centers are a topic that most readers can relate to because they have inhabited the role of customer at one point or another. Is there one thing that you would want readers to learn about call centers, not as academics but as customers?
Johanna Woydack: Call center workers usually work hard, are educated, tech savvy and with time, become skilled in communicative competence, although this is sometimes hidden by constraints of the system. They try to help consumers but sometimes cannot because of conflicting logics and rules within rules that the system has created. They navigate their way through these constraints the best they can but often this is a challenge they cannot meet on their own. The industrial sociologist Marek Korczynski has theorized this conflict and dilemma as consumer-oriented bureaucracy.
Steven Feld: Congratulations on Sensing Others, which I found a thoroughly rich inquiry into how Batek “voice their own experience of difference.” Can you introduce us to the key themes of this intellectual project that always places “otherness” in question, under negotiation? And can you tell us about the general shape of your book and how it takes up the challenge to sensuously and ethically engage indigenous rainforest lives confronted by myriad social, historical, and ecological change?
Alice Rudge: Thank you so much for this generous prompt to expand on the key themes of the book. My reason for making negotiations of “Otherness” or “difference” the focus of the text is that for me it is both an intellectual concern, and an ethical imperative. And thinking about Otherness as both an ethical and intellectual project in an anthropological sense is directly derived from how Batek people theorise it intellectually, ethically, sensorially and politically in their own lives. Over the course of my fieldwork, it became apparent that the ways that Batek voice their experiences of and encounters with difference is highly subtle, sensitive, and always shifting. To them as much as me, Otheness was an intellectual project – something to be held to the light and examined at every available opportunity. This examination often took place through vocal utterances, which Batek use to negotiate degrees of difference with a constant attunement to the effects that articulations of difference can have in the world.
At the same time, I became acutely aware how in academic and public spheres in both the UK and Malaysia, whether indirectly (through media or commonly circulating perceptions), or directly (in tourism, policy, and conservation), Batek are rarely granted this subtle attunement in return. Whether it was through the idea that a presentation of radical differenceis necessary for theoretical anthropological innovation, or through crude stereotypes and their harmful on-the-ground effects, attention to the particularities of what difference is, how it comes to be known, and its effects in the world, are often missing. Without attention to these questions, there is a risk that notions of difference in anthropology can become reified, missing the real-life contingencies that bring it into being in unique circumstances. When we’re talking about a context of profound and rapid change such as Batek’s, this becomes especially problematic.
The book traces some of these contingencies across various domains of everyday life. In each chapter, I take a particular tension of everyday life in which conceptions of ‘difference’ are articulated. I first explore haʔip ‘longing, yearning, nostalgia’ and explore how the dynamics of closeness and loss that are evoked through this sentiment shape notions of interpersonal relations that are suffused with this bittersweet knowledge that what you hold close will always be eventually lost. In turn, this prompts a retheorisation of temporality, as through haʔip both past and future are felt as coexisting bodily in the present. This is a challenge to classic colonial and some contemporary accounts of “hunter-gatherers” which often portray them as modernity’s ultimate Others, existing in a pristine past. Yet Batek theorise themselves and gɔp (‘outsiders’)as always having coexisted in the complex messiness of the present – a present which is always situated in relation to the past and to the future. I then explore the tension between aloneness and togetherness through Batek ethical visions of being blaʔ (‘alone’) as the basic order of existence, an idea which coexists with the fact of the intimate togetherness and mutuality of everyday life. Moments when people react to perceived wrongdoing are when this tension – and the orders of difference that it makes clear – come to the fore. In the third chapter, I explore how people attune to the effects of difference through their uses of voice, expanding on the idea of ethical ‘aloneness’ through attention to Batek aesthetic theories of the danger of likenesses – a potential impingement on the bodily autonomy (or aloneness) of the person. With this autonomy in mind, I then inquire into Batek sensory experiences of the non-human persons of their forest, proposing that an appreciation for the unknown, and unknowable, aspects of non-human life are essential for ensuring that those different persons are permitted an autonomous existence. Finally, I explore sharing as a material means of creating both mutality and detachment through the creation of alignments and distinctions. Reconceiving difference as a negotiation that is always in flux, it becomes possible to understand how living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating Otherness’s ambivalences, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. When looking from the boundary, what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down.
Steven Feld: In your introduction you say that the book is not an attempt to “give voice” but rather an exploration of what voice is and what voice does. Some readers might gloss this to mean that you are more interested in ontology and metapragmatics than you are in politics and ethics. But in fact you go on, deeply in chapter 3, to complicate and overtake any such simple reduction in your ways of presenting and unraveling Batek narratives. These are very rich themes for the anthropology of language; can you speak to how your theoretical interests emerge with your many revelations about Batek metalinguistics and conceptions of language, speech, and narration?
Alice Rudge: Thank you so much for asking this! It was writing Chapter 3 (which appears in a prior form in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology), that prompted the broader theoretical framing of the book in terms of developing an exploration of what voice is and what it does (as you point out a question of ontology and metapragmatics), and yet it was the same chapter that initially prompted my desire to formulate an ethical, political challenge to standard conceptions of ontology. Which is suffice to say that I see these two aspects of the work as deeply entangled! And this very much goes to the heart of Batek theories about voice. Thinking about the metapragmatics of voice in detail – beyond description (as you do so beautifully and influentially in Sound and Sentiment) – is a unique way in to understanding how people theorise their relationships with the həp (‘forest’ – which I use here as a proxy to actually mean the hugely diverse human, animal, plant, and ghostly other-than-human presences contained within this term). We come to see names as part of human and animal bodies, for example, and their utterance as a powerful way to impinge on or inhabit the being of another in ways that can be experienced as a form of violence. We may see songs as part of the bodies of fruits, and bird sounds as inextricable from the being that utters them. There is danger in vocalising too great a likeness between one thing or person and another. And yet we see beauty and strategies for living well found in toying with this danger, evoking just enough likeness to hint at connection, while encoding the ethical and aesthetic importance of just enough difference. And so when we follow Batek metapragmatic theories (or language ontologies), it becomes clear how metpragmatic concernns are political and ethical concerns because they dictate the terms and outcomes of your engagements with Others (Batek or not, human or not). And in particular, they lead me to challenge the reliance of common conceptions of ‘ontology’ in anthropology on ideas of radical difference – because as Batek ethical and aesthetic strategies show, difference is not something that exists on its own, it is something that is created, negotiated, played with, and held in focus as an everyday of enquiry – both in terms of the metapragmatics of voice and in other domains of people’s lives.
Steven Feld: As a narrative and intervocal and intermedial (with photographs) device, your book’s five “chapters” are interwoven with five “interludes.” Unpack for us a little the textual poetics and politics of these interludes and the meta-narrative and meta-theoretical spaces that they open. How do they play into your larger intellectual aims with engaging vocal, sensory, narrative, and interspecies authority? Did you also imagine the interludes to connect to audio streams, so that these narratives and their ambient surrounds could be acoustically sensed and audibly entangled by your readers?
Alice Rudge: This question makes me wish I had included audio streams as part of the book! But to begin with the first part of your question, my reason for including the interludes as they are – separated out from the rest of the text (though with a little contextualisation preceding each) – was that I wanted the presentation of the stories in the book to reflect a little the feeling of how they emerge in Batek everyday life – as always connected to, yet set apart from everyday existence. They might be referenced in everyday moments where their topics or messages come up, in jokes, or when people hear the sounds of the birds that they speak about such as the pompakoh who appears in Interlude One. Or they are told in those hazy moments between wakefulness and sleep, where the children who begged to hear them are drifting off and its only the adults still trying to listen. As appropriate as ‘interlude’, might also have been ‘refrain’, something told in full in one moment, or perhaps appearing in other guises in other moments (as they do across the book’s various chapters).
As well as an aesthetic concern, it was also a practical concern because I wanted to present the stories as they were told to me – with enough interpretation that someone yet to be immersed in Batek life could still understand them – but not so much that my narrative imposed too much interpretation on them (as I may have done had I included them in the body chapters). I think including a sounded aspect would be an exciting direction for future work. Yet at the same time, now I think about it, I wonder if there’s something to be said for the written form in terms of it somehow evoking how Batek aesthetics rarely dictate exactly what something is and how you should interpret it (as I write about in Chapters 1 and 3). Instead, a space for ambiguity – perhaps for individuals to interptret through haʔip for different kinds of things – tends to be opened up by aesthetic creation. Would presenting a recording be presenting too much of a likeness? Does reading perhaps allow for difference to remain in interpretation as readers sound the words in their own minds? Maybe, or maybe not. These are questions I will definitely continue to think about!
Steven Feld: In chapter 4 you write: “In speech, in music-making, and in sharing other sensory experiences, Batek and the other-than-human entities of the forest attempt to make sense of one another, in the process constructing one another as moral agents.” This kind of cohabiting actant relationality is quite familiar to me through my experiences of rainforest Papua New Guinea, and it leads me to ask you a question that has been posed to me in one way or another often in the last 50 years. Why are rainforests so good to think? Is it that the (inter)sensory affordances are so overwhelmingly dense and multivalent? Is it that the (over)abundance of signs stimulates greater complicities of human, non-human, material, and spiritual entities? What figures the ground for the kind of deep listening intersubjectivity that so richly topicalizes moral agency and difference?
Alice Rudge: This is a question I’ve also grappled with both in the process of writing the book and in many conversations surrounding my work! I think that for me the answer is an excited yes, and. To explain, yes I do think that rainforests are amazing to think with – and your own work is a perfect example of what can be gained through deep attention to the (over)abundance of signs in these dense and multivalent contexts, as are recent texts by Eduardo Kohn and others. I also would agree wholeheartedly with the point that rainforests can configure a highly particular ground for deep listening intersubjectivity. And I also have two additional thoughts on this matter. First, that I would always want this point to avoid heading towards arguments that might indirectly support environmental determinism, as though rainforests may be special sites for this kind of polyvalence, they may not be the only sites of it: people may also develop or maintain a deep listening sensitivity outside of rainforest contexts. In a site of rapid environmental change, where people inhabit rainforest and non-rainforest contexts simultaneously, I think it is also important to think through the role of human agency and creativity in developing deep listening skills and an attunement to polyvalent moral agency and difference even amidst profound change and in their lives outside the forest. Second, any such argument must also attend to the particularities of and diversity within how rainforest dwelling peoples attune to and interact with this polyvalence. This is my aim in Chapter 4, where I argue that although Batek are highly attuned to the non-human entities of the forest, they also theorise this in terms of their difference from these entities – and the resultant unknowability of the inner lives of these other persons. I think this is an important point regarding your final question – what figures the ground for the kind of listening intersubjectivity that so richly topicalizes moral agency and difference – because we see how different attitudes and alignments and contingencies with regards to different rainforest contexts may produce quite distinctive understandings of what it is to be a moral agent. In short, I guess all this amounts to my attempting to theorise the political/ethical alongside the environmental/semiotic when thinking about the sensory affordances and meanings of rainforest contexts.
Steven Feld: As a certifiable language nerd I just loved the moment I opened to the page that says “Appendix 1, Grammar.” And I found there many things that captivated my attention and took me back to other parts of the book where you unpack lexical semantics and ethical pragmatics. But hey, this is not what most anthros are used to finding at the end of a narrative ethnography that embraces topics as diverse as difference and Otherness, intentionality, emotion and well-being, living well amidst environmental uncertainties, sensory epistemology, and, most broadly, relational ontology. Horay! I found this embrace of the materiality of language courageous and cool. But hey, tell us more about how you want this section to speak to the majority of your readers, who I daresay will not be linguists or area specialists, but anthros drawn to both Batek and your meditation on sensing and managing difference in the presence of remoteness.
Alice Rudge: I’m so delighted to read that that you were excited by the grammar! As a language nerd myself, that means a great deal, not least because this was exactly one of my reasons for including the grammar in the first place: I wanted the option for language nerds to be able to unpick more, but not to interrupt the flow of my other arguments that might have a wider readership – not least the topics that you list. This goes back to the same point that I made in relation to your earlier question about metapragmatics – that I see the linguistic contributions of the book as fundamentally entangled with its political and ethical aspects.
At the same time, it was also a difficult decision to include the grammar and the lexicon. This was partly because of my awareness of the coloniality of the dictionary/grammar writing endeavour – particularly from British colonial officials working in Malaysia – as so meticulously documented by Rachel Leow’s work in Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaya (2016, Cambridge University Press). And it was partly to do with my understanding of the central role that dictionary writing has historically played and continues to play for missionaries as well – missionary activity being a very live issue in some of the Batek villages where I work. Yet I also had to square this apprehension with the fact that Batek friends often ask me to produce an English-Batek dictionary, and with my own desire to do proper justice to the detail and care with which Batek interlocutors taught me about the subtlety and power of their use of language and its centrality to their everyday lives.
Matthew Webb: Against the contemporary backdrop of right-wing nationalisms and populist sentiment across the world; in a country steeped in authoritarian state history (Germany); your ethnography highlights the ‘reflexive’ ethical possibilities of artistic practice in a public theatre institution. What are some of the key ideas and interventions you want to put forward?
Jonas Tinius: Alongside Alfred Gell, I consider it important not to confuse Art with “per se a Good Thing.” In fact, the Nazis created an entire ethico-aesthetic system of judgements of what is good and what is beautiful, what is bad and what is ugly. They appropriated some of the same classical and ancient Western artistic forms, genres, and content that before and after might have been used to celebrate humanity. Theatre, in the German context, was at the heart of this ‘modern problem.’ In State of the Arts,I trace some of the ways in which theatre became a matter of concern for the emerging German state and a central site and practice constitutive of what Louis Dumont has described as the “German Ideology” (1994 [1991]), that is, a particular fixation on the interrelation between autonomy and authority, and self-realization and structure. By looking at how the German state, and after WWII, in particular the Länder [provinces] and cities became patrons of public theatre institutions, I investigate how an ethics of self-formation does not necessarily contradict normative and authoritative contexts of work and play. Furthermore, I study how German theatre—both as a kind of institution and as a specific tradition—became at once a projection screen and stage for the enactment of nationalist ideals, as well as a site and practice that could subvert a focus on national and identitarian heritage.
It was for this reason that I went back to a particular theatre in a small city in the postindustrial Ruhr region to conduct my long-term ethnographic research. Through 18 months of fieldwork in a context where I could incorporate memories of my late father’s engagement as a leftist high-school teacher, as well as my own memories of growing up in this region, I developed an institutional ethnography of one of the first migrant-run theatres in Germany that propagated an anti-nationalist modern theatre aesthetic. Founded by the Italian philosopher, migrant, guest-worker, clown, actor, and director Roberto Ciulli, this theatre understood itself as a place for and of the Bastardo—those without father-land and mother-tongue—and as such exemplified both a culmination of the German logic of state patronage and its starkest rebuttal in a post-migrant logic of transnational becoming. It is precisely the practice of reflection on how one can be both within and in some ways against this German tradition of Bildung and Kultur that got me to think of this theatre as a prism, a public theorizer, itself.
Matthew: Working in a field site in which your participants (and their institutions) are such practiced public theorizers in their own right posed some important implications for the way you conducted the research and writing. Could you please say a little about this?
Jonas: The book is based on many years of what I think of as interlocutorship, sparring partnership, or as my fellow anthropologists call it: fieldwork, participant observation, or simply deep hanging out, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz. I conducted what I think of as a kind of reverse anthropology, which is to say that unlike the classic model of going far from home, I went far to go home. I inversely didn’t like the exoticizing tendencies of an anthropology that sends trained professionals into former colonies to extract knowledge about people they think have no theories about what they do—people, who, in this view, needed explanation for their practices.
In my case, the field of professional German theatre was a highly reflexive field and the Theater an der Ruhr a particular case of an institution that positioned itself already in contrast to not only a long-standing cultural tradition of the educated bourgeoisie, but also in contrast to theories of acting and theatre as mediators of literature. In other words, the field abounded in theorizing about its own practices. This has several consequences for how I conducted fieldwork: My position, first of all, was not unmarked. I was positioned. My work was re-interpreted. I was given reading lists about “anthropological” authors by the in-house dramaturg, which consisted of references to Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Adorno. Critical theory was a staple reference in the field. I needed thus to “catch up” with the theories of this field in order to be able to converse in this field.
For this reason, the ethnography I wrote wasn’t simply about a particular cultural field, but written among theories of culture. Reading in particular James Clifford’s introduction to Writing Culture (1986) reminded me that I would have to accept my writing as an arrangement of competing discourses that already problematize themselves. Many central concepts of anthropological writing—culture, aesthetics, art, practice, performance, ritual, organization—were already marked and I had to distinguish more precisely immanent theories from my etic vocabulary of explanation. Ethnographic terms came already with their own theoretical genealogies. Centrally, I had to position theory not as an analytical phenomenon outside of the field but as a practice constitutive of it.
Matthew: I really appreciated your descriptions of how practitioners ground their intellectual activities in “rehearsals,” in which cultivating and practicing Haltung [attitude] seems central to the Theater an der Ruhr’s broader political and ethical aspirations. As you note, rehearsals are less oriented toward preparing to address public audiences. How then do they enable practitioners to circulate their politics and ethics?
Jonas: Rehearsals, as I witnessed, are the principal modus and locus, that is, the main means by which and place in which the values and forms of the tradition of this theatre are negotiated. This became fairly evident in everyday forms of labor in the organization: the days are structured, morning and evening, around this social institution, important decisions regarding plays are made therein, but they are also forms of ethical reference points for the way in which the actors and agents in the Theater an der Ruhr articulate their professional and personal lives.
Consider the tensions around the different translations of the verb “to rehearse” (which, by the way, is fairly similar in French, répéter). In German, one speaks of “probieren” or “proben,” both of which have English correspondents in the verbs “probing,” that is, trying, experimenting, peeking into a different way of doing things. In the context of the Theater an der Ruhr, proben was precisely not a matter of repeating, learning by heart, as in fact many European theatre traditions since the 18th century have instituted, during which the utmost precision in repeating gestures as intended by a director, or words as written by a playwright, were to be respected. Instead, the rehearsal (die Probe) is a form of enactment—an actual practice that aims at creating a corporeal posture, but also an intellectual conduct, and an ethical stance. It is a forward-facing, prefigurative practice, which combines the work on body with the work on one’s relation towards a role, or a political theme that is being addressed. Rehearsing is a professional, extra-ordinary practice that seeks to incorporate and craft future capacities of being, and in that sense of course speaks, as a social practice, to other forms of everyday and non-quotidian behavior.
All of this crystallizes in the most frequently used term—a term with quite some modern theatre baggage, as it was used by Brecht, albeit in other way—, the notion of Haltung. Haltung is precisely the combination of the corporeal, the emotional, the intellectual, the social, ethical, aesthetic. To cultivate one’s Haltung, the principal aim of rehearsals, means to cultivate a certain capacity for becoming otherwise. It is a term aimed for my interlocutors at the Theater at overcoming the all-too-common assumption that acting is predominantly being a different person and remaining in that role (epitomized by method acting), or being entirely yourself, without any recourse to fiction (epitomized by documentary performance). Cultivating a Haltung means being able to be and not to be, to be in a role and reflect that constant becoming towards another. This is precisely where the political rests—rehearsals are here understood as the training of a capacity fundamental to acting: the capacity to remain reflexive about one’s comportment, posture, stance in life, whilst also training to be able to be otherwise, to be open to alterity, empathic to other ways of being.
Matthew: You conclude the book with a reflection on the stakes of art as an ethical field, highlighting the significant risks perceived by Theater practitioners in attempting to make their cultural-political expertise accessible to lay publics. How should we think about such desires among artists to produce culture in closed and restricted ways, in a moment where, for example, our own academic work is saturated with demands to make knowledge public?
Jonas: The longer I worked on and with this artistic field of cultural production, the more it struck me just how many parallels there are between the developments in an increasingly economized academic university setting and the affordances of artistic work. Of course, each national context, or each field of artistic production, just like every academic context, has their different forms of relationship between the call to “open”, “render accessible”, or “democratize” their results. In the field of theatre, which I studied, a series of very specific cultural historic elements played a particular role. Centrally, the experience of the Gleichschaltung (forceful coordination) of the arts to fit a particular Aryan ideology during the Third Reich prompted a very strong reaction against the public instrumentalization of art. This was embedded in a critical reflection expressed most clearly by the Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer in his The Eclipse of Reason (1947), when he criticized the collapse of public reasoning through purely instrumental means-ends logic. The Theater an der Ruhr founders argued that theatre should catch up with the other modern arts precisely in its autonomization from an instrumental reason of providing a particular function in society. Its function, they argued, lay in a becoming conscious, or Bewusstseinswerdung, through which actors could prefigure a wider social process.
In this sense, though avant-garde art has certainly also developed forms of inward-looking elitism that contradicted a critical process of reasoning on its own goods, the Theater an der Ruhr, I argue, offered a view to think about the act of cultural production as a process of becoming ethical, becoming conscious through social interaction and inter-reflection. (Besides the archived fact that it was a pioneering institution in its street-theatre, youth projects, and engagement with severely marginalized and ostracized communities.) The questions the actors, directors, and cultural workers in the Theater an der Ruhr asked themselves were thus not about scale—how many people you reach—but about intensity, depth, and understanding—who actually understands so that the conversation can be carried onwards. This is not per se a stance against audiences or against a wide democratic participation, as it is often misunderstood, but against an instrumental logic of the functionalization of culture that I think we would do well to heed as scholars, too.
Shinjung Nam: Your representation of everyday life in Tirana Modern felt surprisingly close to my current home, here in Seoul. Though vehemently “anti-Communist” rather than “pro,” South Korea’s military dictatorships (1950s–1980s) also built a country dependent on extractive urbanism, authoritarian hierarchy, corrupt nepotism, propaganda of all kinds, and ultimately, a normalization of capitalist desires. Continuing these traditions, South Korea’s electoral democracy has proven no better, especially for those without social, cultural, and educational capital.
Considering these similarities, your interlocutors’ outlook and way of life made me think back to my own interlocutors in Seoul. At the same time, I also thought about some of the differences characterizing their projects, especially their orientation towards the idea of a utopian community. Perhaps because Ataol and Arlind had such visceral experiences with (and under) the violence of a state-led utopian project, they have been less concerned with the problem of how to make an alternative community through their publishing activities. In contrast, many of my (now older) interlocutors in Seoul had been concerned with creating a new communal life—always dreaming of a true democratic society to come.
This comparison developed only when I began to truly appreciate your interlocutors’ self-positioning as “readers.” During my first reading, my immediate impression was, “I want to know more about their readers. Who are the readers that came to visit the bookstore and frequented it? Why did they come?” While I’m still curious to learn more about other readers, I now realize that I had lost track of your interlocutors’ identification as readers themselves. I had been identifying them by the place they occupied within the physical space of the bookstore, the way I had focused on the different positions making up the pedagogic relationship between the teacher-readers and the student-readers I worked with in Seoul. The lack of utopian trajectories in Ataol and Arlind’s reading and publishing only made sense to me when I began to focus on their love of reading and literature (as well as their clear understanding of its contradictory powers, including the ill it can serve), and not just the post-socialist conditions of Albania.
Perhaps this is all the more why I keep wondering about their imagination of “the social.” While categories of the social such as “the nation” and “the people” enter your interlocutors’ conversations on literature and writers, there is no conversation recorded in your ethnography on their explicit critique of these categories themselves. This leads me to ask how they view Albanian society in terms of the social, that is, of collective(s), how this shapes their understanding of “Albanian literature,” and how their reading practice in turn shapes their view of “Albanian society”? I note, for instance, that some of your interlocutors refer to the dialectical movement (or the tension) between “the universal” and “the particular,” with Elvis stating, “We have writers but not literature” (p. 67). Since according to the ethnography their imagination of the world and its map that both shapes and is shaped by their reading seems to be very much concerned with Europe, as well as the non-European frontiers (such as the Ottoman past), can you say more about how your interlocutors imagine “the public” and “Albanian readers”?
Matt Rosen: I’m happy to hear how reading Tirana Modern prompted you to reflect on your ethnographic experiences in Seoul. I also like to read ethnography that way. Not just to learn about social life in a specific time and place but to help me, as you said, think through matters that are closer to home. I only wish the common thread could be something other than corruption and violence!
On the differences in outlook you noted, it’s true that Arlind and Ataol rarely expressed much hope for the future. From what I could gather, they had no illusions about the structural problems in their social world. I think a lot of this goes to the critical stance they’ve developed through their reading and discussion practices. But it also seems to me a kind of defense mechanism. They might see it differently, but I think their way of always tempering expectations about their work was a way to protect themselves. By the time I met them, when they were in their early thirties, I think the harsh realities of living in Tirana had taken a toll on whatever youthful optimism first pushed them toward literature and philosophy as a way of life. Still, they saw that reading and social change could go together, and I think their work in publishing was a way to keep that vision alive.
I also appreciate how you came to see Arlind and Ataol not just as publishers but as readers. When I started the project, I felt something similar to what you described in reading the account. But when I expressed this, for example, by asking questions about how their readers responded to a particular book, they would either say, “You’d have to ask them yourself,” or they’d remind me that speaking of “our readers” was a very broad generalization and not something they were comfortable doing. I did of course ask other readers I met in Tirana for direct input, but more importantly, I took Arlind and Ataol’s refusal to generalize seriously. So although I managed to pick up some good anecdotes from many different readers, I chose to focus the ethnography on Arlind and Ataol because they were the ones I got to know best. And even though I did get to know them well, and we talked a lot of social theory, precisely because their views were so nuanced and carefully considered, I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting into my own words how they see categories of the social such as the nation, the people, or the public. Let me just say that though they were very aware of the hazards of generalization, they had clear ideas about these concepts. After all, as publishers working in a very small literary field, these were not just academic concerns. For them, talking about the future of the Albanian reading public was something they worried about in very practical terms.
Shinjung Nam: The meaning of the word “imagination,” as in “technologies of imagination,” gains new traction when considered in light of Arlind and Ataol’s narratives on the present and their avoidance of any explicit collectivist utopian prescriptions for the future. The work of imagination they seem to be dedicated to and wish for other readers to engage in is less about producing “images” (new images of the social in any specific, as in species-wise, terms) but more about opening. Some books or texts are considered “foundational” (p.71) to this opening/opening up (of oneself). Why is this so? What would the anatomy of a reader (or his/her/their soul) be like according to Arlind and Ataol’s reading of (a) certain texts and their intertextuality, and (b) the practice of reading?
Matt Rosen: I’m glad you brought this up. I also see the work of imagination here as being about opening up new spaces of possibility. In the introduction (p. 11), I related this idea to the work of cultivating “good readers” in the Borgesian sense. By this I meant that the books in Pika pa sipërfaqe’s catalogue were places where Albanian readers could now go to encounter new ideas, which in turn could be the starting point of further translations and even new social arrangements. Considering your question now, having recently reread The Aesthetic Dimension (1977), I think something very close to my understanding of Arlind and Ataol’s view of what they were doing in publishing comes through in Marcuse’s notion of the permanence of art as measured by its nearness to the simple but elusive criteria of showing the reader a truer truth or a realer real than what we tend to get caught up in due to the stresses and demands of everyday life. Calling a book “foundational” in this context is both a shorthand and a result of multiple translations. I chose the word foundational for the English rather than other potential fits, including “fundamental,” “essential,” or “most important.” But thinking about it now, I might just as well have said “good books” or “must reads” as these were also words Arlind and Ataol used when I tried to press them on the question of why they chose to translate and publish this or that title.
Shinjung Nam: Tell us about what it was like to create an ethnography that is in a way a product of collective reading and reading nearby (you mention how your interlocutors have had a chance to read your drafts and respond to them, to the point where some of the details were omitted, making a reader like me thirsty for them precisely).
Matt Rosen: It was in many ways a very enjoyable way to spend time. I really like talking with Arlind and Ataol and listening to what they say about the books they’re reading and working on. I think most of my best reading experiences since 2015 have come out of—and returned to—conversations with Arlind and Ataol “in the field.” Being conscious of my desire to represent the richness of these conversations in writing did cause me some internal tension though. I would sometimes jot or scrawl a few words in a notebook while we were together, but for the most part, I tried to be present and attentive and relied on writing fieldnotes at the earliest opportunity, often in the company of my partner (Smoki) or daughter (Simone) in the Mulliri vjetër coffeeshop near Arlind and Ataol’s office. On the practice of dialogic editing you mentioned, I can’t stress how grateful I am that Arlind and Ataol read drafts of the work in progress and helped me improve the account. With reference to the spicy details I decided to omit from the eviction narrative in chapter 5, I have to say, this was really on me. It wasn’t because they asked me to remove any specific material or because I wanted to make things mysterious. It was more to do with my own anxieties about fixing those details in print.
Shinjung Nam: One of the reasons I loved reading your ethnography is that it rekindled in me the sense of reading ethnographies as an anthropology major back in college who was less concerned with the reproduction and promotion of anthropological theory and more engrossed in the stories of the people I have yet to encounter and their making/unmaking of realities. Theoretical concepts enter your ethnography as frames and lenses. And then your ethnographic narratives on your interlocutors’ work and life—and their words—re-turn your reader (me, in this case) back to these concepts so as to re-read them in yet another fashion (my second question is proof of that). Tell us (your readers) about your choices in foregrounding ethnographic narratives (over theoretical advances) in your text.
Matt Rosen: Thank you, it’s very nice to hear this! I think I just follow the writerly advice of trying to make the kind of work I would want to read. Some of this also has to do with what feels comfortable for me. Let me put it this way. Though I can appreciate a snappy dresser when I see one, I’m not the kind of person who can “pull off” a very fashionable look. Similarly, while I like to read and absorb challenging theory and philosophy, I don’t think of myself as the one who should write it.
Shinjung Nam: Your biblio-ethnography walks and makes a renewed path in today’s literary and media anthropology. It also re-appreciates classic texts in the field that may be considered by many as outdated, creating an intertextuality unforeseen in contemporary anthropology. Having said this, can you walk your reader (back) through the current “trends” in literary and media anthropology, if any, and elaborate on some of the challenges and promises that such trends might be bringing to the proliferation of more works in line with your imagination of biblio-ethnography?
Matt Rosen: Yes, though it’s difficult to put the answer in brief. In the process of researching and writing Tirana Modern, I tried to stay as close as I could to studying “what people actually do” with books, and what books in turn do with people. At bottom, the idea I developed of biblio-ethnography is grounded in my reading of practice theory as packaged for anthropology by people like Pierre Bourdieu and Sherry Ortner. In that regard the 2010 collection Theorising Media and Practice edited by Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill was a touchstone for me. And though this is not necessarily one of the usual references for literary and media ethnography, I found Bruno Latour’s brand of actor-network theory to be an extremely helpful and readily applicable way to get at what he called “the event of the social” in relation to the event of reading and the medium of text. Although there is not room here to go into more detail, I tried to be as clear as I could about the theories and methods I brought together in the account, and I sincerely hope other readers will pick up and give their own twist to this thing I call “writing the relationship between books and people.”
Hyemin Lee: Readers might be curious about your intellectual trajectory as well as the motivation behind the years-long research and writing this book. What were the starting points that led you to explore this issue? How are your previous books and research in dialogue with Scripting Death?
Mara Buchbinder: I came to my research on assisted death via a study that I did in 2012 investigating how abortion providers in North Carolina were adapting to a new restrictive abortion law that introduced a 24-hour waiting period and counseling with state-mandated content. That study made me curious about other sites in which law and medicine collide. The end of life piqued my interest because it is one of the areas of medicine that is most heavily regulated by law. A palliative care physician suggested that assisted dying would be ripe for the sort of inquiry that I was interested in. When I learned that Vermont was the U.S. state that had most recently legalized medical aid in dying, I was hooked—I had spent a lot of time in Vermont and knew I could successfully carry out a long-term project there, despite the distance. Studying the implementation of assisted dying in Vermont, similar to studying the implementation of a new abortion law, also picked up a thread from my previous work on newborn screening, through which I became interested in how new health policies are implemented, navigated, and contested by patients, families, and clinicians. Each of these projects are also animated by concerns about sociality and care in matters of health and illness.
The concept of scripting came into play relatively late in my work on the project. After completing my fieldwork, I became fascinated with the ways in which the concept of scripting could serve as a useful frame for thinking about human agency over death. My use of scripting built on my previous work on abortion counseling scripts (Buchbinder 2016), in which I considered the multiple meanings of scripts and scripting. My use of “scripting” in Scripting Death highlights the theatrical dimensions of planning for and controlling one’s death, yet it offers the added value of several additional analytic dimensions, including the bureaucratic and regulatory aspects of the process, and the provision of a prescription (i.e., a “script” for death-hastening medication). Because it invites consideration of the performative dimensions of clinical speech, scripting is also a useful analytic for bridging medical and linguistic anthropology, which is a cross-cutting theme in my work. In sum, Scripting Death brought together several different strands of my previous projects in a way that I found intellectually exciting.
Hyemin Lee: One of the central arguments of this book is how the legalization of aid in dying represents the cultural imaginaries surrounding “aspirational death,” where the expectations for “choice” and “control” impact how people imagine the experience of dying. Could you tell us more about how the cases of aid in dying described in the book offer broader and more instructive pictures of assisted death in America more generally?
Mara Buchbinder: Doing this research in Vermont was an amazing opportunity to return to a state that I loved, where I had spent large chunks of my childhood. But it was also challenging because it’s so small. The absolute numbers of medical aid in dying utilization in Vermont, while reflecting national rates, are rather small—just 52 patients filed paperwork to use it in the first four years after the law passed. So, while it is a fascinating case study, I understand why it may be tempting to ask why this case matters on a bigger scale. However, the themes that I elucidated regarding agency and choice at the end of life are relevant beyond the context of assisted death. In the Conclusion, I discuss how we are seeing these desires reflected in a variety of other end-of-life practices in the US, though typically they focus on burial and funerary practices. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s excellent book American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2021) shows similarly. Medical aid in dying makes it possible to realize a particular aspect of aspirational death—namely, control over the time of death. This enables one to eliminate certain types of suffering that often accompany dying from a prolonged terminal illness. But even if controlling the time of death is not possible, there are other ways in which middle-class people strive for aspirational deaths, within and outside the US. This is also demonstrated beautifully in Anne Allison’s recent book, Lonely Death (Duke University Press, 2023).
Hyemin Lee: Upon seeing the title of the book, Scripting Death, and reading your beautifully written Chapter 6, Choreographing Death, readers might be interested in the concepts of “script” and “choreography.” Both refer to certain modes of action but also entail significant social phenomenology of aid-in-dying deaths. How did you come up with posing these as key concepts for understanding human control over death and, ultimately, for portraying a bigger picture of aid in dying in the American cultural context?
Mara Buchbinder: The concept of scripting speaks to broader concerns about managing, ordering, and controlling death, as well as theoretical questions about human agency over death. Choreographing serves a similar function in Chapter 6, yet I see its analytic scope as more narrowly focused on the scene of death, as opposed to scripting, which encompasses all aspects of the process, including following the bureaucratical protocol to ensure compliance with the legal requirements, obtaining a lethal prescription, and regulating clinical communication. These were not emic terms; they emerged in my interpretive analysis. As I mentioned above, I came to scripting because I had previously engaged this concept in my work on abortion counseling. I was struck by its relevance to the case of assisted dying and I thought I could build on, and deepen, my earlier use of this terminology. The concept of choreography came to me, in part, because I noticed the ways that caregivers performed crucial social, emotional, and material labor to help their loved ones realize aspirational deaths. It occurred to me early on that they were essentially “stage-managing” these deaths, particularly because their loved ones eventually grew too sick and weak to carry out the necessary tasks on their own. The choreography I am concerned with in that chapter is very much a relational practice, which highlights the intersubjective nature of assisted death. It’s not a radically autonomous act, as people often presume.
Hyemin Lee: It is striking to find out the structural constraints that lead to critical access inequalities embedded in the legalization of aid in dying. Could you elaborate more on what your finding tells us about the larger patterns in US health care and the best path forward for improving the access issue?
Mara Buchbinder: It should not have surprised me to find that patients encountered significant barriers to accessing assisted death in legal jurisdictions. As you note, this pattern mirrors largescale, deeply entrenched access barriers that patients find across many sectors of US healthcare. On the other hand, these access barriers contradict the dominant messaging from advocacy groups promoting legalized assisted dying, which suggests that the primary barriers are legal ones. The access difficulties repeatedly surprised, troubled, and enraged patients and families in Vermont. This pattern is reflected in media reports supporting my findings from other permissive jurisdictions in the US. One of my major goals in writing Scripting Death was to expose the illusion of end-of-life choice. I wanted to highlight the gaps between advocacy narratives regarding patients’ rights to self-determination and autonomy at the end of life—which tend to make the option of assisted dying seem to be a simple matter of legalizing the practice—and the realities of access barriers, bureaucratic obstacles, and multiple forms of assistance from caregivers and clinicians that must be navigated to accomplish an assisted death.
My findings tell us, perhaps not surprisingly, that relatively affluent people who are better connected to physician networks will have more options at the end of life, including medical aid in dying. Constrained access to medical aid in dying presents a conundrum for both scholars and practitioners, however, because it is a medical service that is death-producing rather than health-producing. For many physicians, access to assisted dying should be hard; they see access hurdles as a safeguard against abuse or coercion. We don’t want to improve access to a swift death for people who cannot access good care. For this reason, I think that improving access to palliative care is much more of a priority than improving access to medical aid in dying, particularly for socioeconomically marginalized groups.
Hyemin Lee: As a concluding question, I would like to ask about your method–doing ethnographic research that documents, broadly, death. Could you speak more about your research design for ethnographically investigating death and dying? Did you encounter any challenges and questions when you first designed your research on this research? How did you manage your positioning as a researcher and a person with your own stance, values, and views?
Mara Buchbinder: One challenge I encountered was that it was very hard to identify patients to follow prospectively who were willing to speak with me about their desire to use medical aid in dying. I understood and deeply respected the fact that few people close to the end of life would be willing to share some of their limited time with a stranger. I decided to lean heavily on retrospective accounts from family members and friends when it proved difficult to recruit many terminally ill patients. An unexpected advantage of this approach was that I was able, in several cases, to interview multiple people about a specific individual’s death. This enabled me to triangulate accounts across multiple sources and identify areas of converging and diverging understandings, a strategy that proved analytically fruitful.
With regard to my own positioning, this really evolved over time. When I started, I told everyone I met that I was approaching this project from a position of neutrality. I found my views repeatedly challenged as I sympathized with perspectives that I had not anticipated sympathizing with—such as a pro-life advocate who explained to me that she was not afraid of death because she had been exposed to it from an early age. Over time, I began to reframe my “neutral” perspective through the lens of ambivalence. (I write about this in the Introduction.)
I am frequently asked how I experienced this fieldwork on a personal level, often by people who assume that it was difficult to hear stories about death and bear witness to survivors’ suffering. This research was certainly sad. For the most part, however, I did not find it personally challenging. My overwhelming feeling was one of gratitude for the connections I formed with my interlocutors and the stories they shared with me. I deeply appreciated the intimate encounters with research participants and all that they taught me about living well while dying. I felt like this project—more than any of my previous projects—had taught me something that would be valuable on a deeply personal level, rather than just an intellectual or scholarly one.
References
Buchbinder, Mara. 2016. Scripting Dissent: US Abortion Laws, State Power, and the Politics of Scripted Speech. American Anthropologist 118(4):772-783.
Eléonore Rimbault: Much of the energy of The Globally Familiar derives from your candid and involved focus on the young b-boys and rappers you worked with in Delhi. Their everyday experience is a point of departure that leads you and the reader to engage with many longstanding lines of anthropological research. It also informs the concept of the globally familiar that is the central analytic of this book. In a few words, could you explain why the globally familiar emerged as a central idea for this book, and how it reflects the practices and experiences of the youths and artists you spent time with?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Thank so much for engaging with the book and for your thoughtful questions! I first started to think about what familiarity and the familiar might mean for my project in early 2013, when I spent time with a couple of branding consultants who were hired by global multinationals interested in cultivating India’s enormous youth market segment. Drawing from 21st century marketing discourse that has increasingly moved away from marketing products towards inculcating lifestyles, these self-styled experts were charged with fostering the nascent and globally wired youth scenes in the country by curating a series of events in major cities across India (Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi) that featured local b-boys, skateboarders, BMXers, graff artists and so on. In our conversations, the consultants repeatedly used the term familiar to describe the desires and aspirations of young people across the world in relation to consumption, urban space, and practice, specifically youth cultural practices like b-boying or skateboarding.
For these branding consultants, producing the familiar through the events they curated and the digital traces of them that circulated in social media was a way to signal the kind of always already global connectedness between metropolitan centers across nation-state boundaries that has only intensified through digital connection. They did so by mobilizing youth cultural practices and amplifying their aesthetics in the events they curated as well as introducing new ones, hoping they would stick. Something clicked for me in these conversations. I realized the hip hop practitioners in Delhi I spent time with, albeit in a different register and towards different ends, were also producing the familiar through their online and offline practices in ways that put them, their city, and their neighborhoods on the map, so to speak, as global subjects.
Once I got hooked on the concept, I couldn’t stop thinking with it! It did, however, take me a while to write about it as I couldn’t wrap my head, at the time, around how the different spatial and temporal scales these young people traversed – the local, national, the transnational, the past, and the present – coincided and informed one another. I also felt uncomfortable, early on, with utilizing a synthetic term as an explanatory analytic when it wasn’t a term that my hip hop interlocutors were using or a concept within the broader global hip hop lexicon. I finally came to terms with theorizing the familiar, partially because I couldn’t unthink its explanatory power but also and importantly because I felt that it resonated with my experiences in Delhi in ways that were respectful of my youthful participants self-making projects.
Eléonore Rimbault: I was struck by the way your writing about hip hop in Delhi conjures up a portrait of the city that includes so many of the intimate, idiosyncratic, and perhaps, globally not-so-familiar features of this city. Whether it is the transformation and gentrification processes in the Khirki neighborhood, or the routine ways in which people of different class backgrounds have made Delhi’s malls or the metro their own, or the kin networks of hip hop artists and their anchoring in specific neighborhoods of the city, your work is an invitation to think about urban space through people’s engagement with the city. Do you think that the book’s attunement to Delhi can be explained by the street-focused character of hip-hop, or does it have more to do with your approach and your commitments as an anthropologist?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: I knew, early on, that I wasn’t interested in writing a book that focused on hip hop cultural production in Delhi in ways that, for instance, narrowly focused on one of its elements (b-boyin’ or MCing, or DJing) or that thought through the media histories between Indian popular cultural forms and the emergent practices of the young men I was getting to know. More to the point, I didn’t want to write a book that either obscured hip hop or over-invested in the micro-specificities of its practice in Delhi and India. I was more interested in how my participants’ mobilization of hip hop’s artistic practices and their media making endeavors for online circulation offered a lens to carefully think about their lives within the changing contours of the city.
Hip hop, of course, lends itself to an engagement with the urban. As a musical, poetic, visual, and kinesthetic genre and discourse of practice that was born in the tumult of structurally produced economic inequality that engulfed the South Bronx in the 1970s, it has been long engaged with the politics and poetics of street life with depictions—both realistic and fantastic—of classed, racialized, and spatialized struggle and projects of emancipation. My participants’ hip hop experimentations—as rappers, graf writers, and dancers—took me metaphorically and physically into Delhi’s intimate and idiosyncratic topographies. Our meanderings through the city offered me an opportunity to think about and, ultimately, write about their vision of and for the city that at once celebrated its particularities even as it strove to make these very same features familiar.
Eléonore Rimbault: The Globally Familiar pays great attention to the technological mediation that conditions the aesthetic of hip-hop in India. Your portrayal of groups of young people hanging out and gathered around their phone screen, for instance, is striking, but your attention to fieldwork-like interactions occurring through social media long after your fieldwork was over is another reminder of how the anthropological method is evolving. As you point out in the book, these moments and modes of sociality are familiar much beyond ethnographic work. Do you think some of your findings on the mediation of a hip-hop aesthetic in South Asia are applicable to other domains of our lives and to professional cultures, such as our own as anthropology professionals?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Absolutely, although application can be a tricky thing. I hope the familiar, as I have theorized it in the book, invites engagements within other social domains in ways that recognize and attempt to broadly and specifically think through the profound ways that communications technologies are shifting how we interact with each other and how we imagine the world. To specifically engage with processes of inventive mediation, however, requires a careful appraisal of the particular material, social and political stakes of online/offline participation within designated communities of practice.
For the working-class young men that I worked with in Delhi, producing the familiar was and continues to be a way to stake a claim to the city they grew up in and, crucially, a means to create local and transnational relationships through these claims. An integral part of the individual and collective claims they make through hip hop’s practices is that Delhi is part of a global network of capital that locates racialized, classed, and gendered bodies in ways that are at once recognizable, legible, or familiar, even as they are particular. This process of claiming through creative mediation is generative and, as I show in the book, creates economic, political, and social possibilities for these young men. It might be the case that the familiar, as I have developed the term, doesn’t quite offer the conceptual framing that is required in other worlds of practice and exchange. In that case, new conceptual language needs to be developed. Regardless of the conceptual language we use to theorize processes of digital mediation within specific communities, what I think is important is that we—as ethnographers—attend to the material, political, and social underpinnings and consequences of online communicative and creative practices.
Eléonore Rimbault: From a regionalist standpoint, your attention to the digital mediation of hip-hop sociality and your development of the idea of the globally familiar resonates with previous works conducted in India on mediation and on the global as a scale, including the works of some of the scholars that you cite, such as Arjun Appadurai, Arvind Rajagopal, William Mazzarella, and several others. It seems like the conceptual work on the global in India closely tracks the transformation of the media through which ideas, politics, and aesthetics are produced and reproduced. How do you position your book in relation to these other ways of articulating the immanence of a global scale, and do you think there is something about Indian cities as locales that prompts this form of theorization?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: I would caution against approaching a particular socio-historic context, in this case India, as more conducive to theorizations of global mediation than other places in the world. This sort of approach reminds me of a bit of apocrypha that I first encountered in graduate school many years ago and again, in the British social anthropology worlds I traversed when I was based in London. In this 20th century anthropological formulation young, enthusiastic anthropologists from across Europe and North America were encouraged to study certain themes or topics in certain parts of the world – hierarchy in South Asia, exchange and gift economies in the Pacific, political systems in Africa, and so on. One’s theoretical interests, in short, determined where one went to do fieldwork.
Perhaps another way of framing this discussion – rather than thinking about how particular places are more amenable to certain theoretical potentials— is to think carefully about the relationship between fieldwork and citation. Undoubtedly, before and during fieldwork I was influenced by reading all the tremendous thinkers you named who, together, have developed a rich media anthropology of global India. In addition, there were many other media/visual anthropologists working in India that also shaped (and continue to influence) my thinking. For instance, Chris Pinney’s work on visual cultures in India, Frank Cody and Sahana Udupa’s work on the news, AmandaWeidman’s work on practices of distinction amongst Carnatic musicians, and Teja Ganti’s careful and sustained work on Hindi cinema worlds have all pushed me to broaden and specify my thinking around my encounters in Delhi. However, I couldn’t solely engage and carefully think with these scholars who have worked in India or the region around questions of mediation and cultural production.
My unique challenge and responsibility, given that I was trying to understand why young racialized men in Delhi were somewhat suddenly picking up digital hip hop to create new self-descriptions, social worlds, and economic opportunities, was to carefully engage with hip hop scholarship, specifically, and Black Atlantic scholarship more broadly, particularly the work that has focused on the African diasporic arts and its spread across the globe. For me what was at stake in my book project centered on bringing these distinct bodies of scholarship into conversation in a carefully calibrated relationship to what I was witnessing and participating in on the ground in ways that animated the otherwise obscured colonial underpinnings of the global in India. So, while all of the scholars you mentioned were incredibly important, particularly in the years before fieldwork where I was voraciously reading everything I could to prepare myself, my fieldwork demanded a different engagement with immanence that put race, gender, and place across colonial geographies at the forefront of my thinking.
Eléonore Rimbault: Finally, I am wondering if you had some thoughts you’d like to share on the way hip hop has developed more recently in Delhi and/or India. Do you see the affirmation of caste, class and ethnic identities in South Indian hip hop (for instance) as re-articulation of the Hip-Hop ideologies you identified circa 2012? More broadly, what are your thoughts on the current circulation of desi hip hop outside of Delhi, for instance, in South India, or on Punjabi hip-hop produced in Canada?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Thanks for this question. There is a lot to say on this but try I’ll keep my response concise. There have been enormous shifts and changes in what can now be described as an Indian hip hop scene since I finished fieldwork in 2014. First and foremost, mainstream hip hop music production has exploded in the last several years as Indian diasporic entrepreneurs, transnational media conglomerates, and more recently, big players in Indian popular cultural worlds, have invested in its potential. As a result, several of the MCs I met in Delhi who were just getting started when I met them and whom I helped produce their first YouTube videos have been catapulted to fame. Their rise to stardom, of course, has had a direct impact on their younger peers who see and want to emulate their success.
With the release of Gully Boy in 2019, a blockbuster production from Zoya Akhtar, the aspiration for hip hop fame across the country has increased ten-fold. Set in Dharavi, Mumbai, commonly referred to as the largest slum in Asia, Gully Boy narrates the coming-of-age story of Murad, a young Muslim man who rapidly transforms from hip hop enthusiast to local hip hop sensation. Gully Boy, with its constant referencing and aestheticization of music and video production for social-media circulation as key aspects of hip-hop potentiality in the contemporary moment, captures, albeit in clichéd ways, some of the affective sensibility of the globally familiar. The film’s success in India and globally also offers an example of the ways in which marginalized masculinities and the spatialities they index in India are currently being imagined and mobilized by mainstream media interests to produce capital and cultivate desire.
With the commercial success and increasing visibility of Indian rap, there has been an explosion of MCs across the country who hone and practice their skills in local ciphas while producing content for social media circulation. What I have been most excited about is how these emergent rappers have embraced the poetics of hip hop as a modality to be explored in their local languages. When I first arrived to Delhi in 2011 to check out the scene, the rappers I met were trying to rap in English and, at best, were switching between Hindi and English in their raps. Since 2013 there has been a decided move towards rappin’ exclusively in Hindi, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu and so on. The move towards rappin’ in regional languages has opened up new and exciting opportunities to bring together localized musical and poetic traditions with hip hop which, of course, opens up new intellectual and ethnographic projects. I’m really excited for the work of Pranathi Diwakar, for instance, who has explored how young people have combined Gaana musical traditions preserved by Dalit communities in Tamil Nadu with hip hop to produce a new sound that elucidates the politics of caste in a contemporary frame. For Dr. Diwakar, that has offered opportunities to theorize caste, race, and the politics of space in Chennai in ways that are productive and grounded. It’s worth mentioning there was a precedent for hip hop’s linguistic localization in the Punjabi hip hop/bhangra scene, which has a longer relationship – through its diaspora – with Atlantic world cultural formations. But that story, like the work by Dr. Diwakar, is for another time and for another scholar!
The point that I suppose I’m trying to make is that even as hip hop has become a commodity form in the subcontinent, it has also continued to be a viable vehicle for political and social expression that is cognizant of and takes up older cultural forms. As such, hip hop continues its fifty plus year career of unashamedly taking up a capitalist hustle while offering opportunities for its practitioners to explore and critique the normative order while voraciously reanimating and remixing locally available sounds and images. Of course, political expression, critiques of power, and inventive cultural bricolage are not always something to be celebrated. Over the last several years I’ve been tracking the shift in tenor and tone of several of my participants, who have turned towards the so-called decolonial promise of Hindutva. I’m currently writing a piece with my long-term collaborator and friend, Jaspal Naveel Singh, about how the elections in 2014 that brought the BJP into power at the national level have impacted in the nascent Indian hip hop scene. Over the years, some of the key figures in the scene have begun to celebrate a Hindu centric right-wing aesthetic and political sensibility in their creative endeavors and public engagements. This has, unsurprisingly, created rifts amongst practitioners. We are grappling with how to tell this story in a way that elucidates something about how ideology inculcates itself in peoples’ world views in real time and the multiple effects of these shifts in perspective and stance. All this to say, what I gestured to in the book as hip hop ideologies – specifically focusing on the ways external and often diasporic actors shaped, in the early days of the scene, the ways in which social difference should be approached and represented through hip hop – has become multiple and localized in ways that are complex and require further attention and study.
