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.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Could you tell how was your first approach to the Eskaya language, and how did Eskayan villages in Bohol become a field site for you?
Piers Kelly: Way back in January of 1980, the Eskaya people were ‘discovered’ by agricultural advisers in the highlands of Bohol in the southern Philippines. These isolated people were wearing clothes made of plant fiber, speaking in an unknown language and writing in a strange script. The story of this encounter spread quickly, prompting a series of informal visits from tourists, adventurers and tabloid journalists. Some of the subsequent reports they made about the putatively lost tribe became infused with local folklore traditions of lost worlds and lost treasures. Eventually a hard-nosed journalist from Manila came and wrote an exposé in which she argued that the Eskaya were in fact a rural cult speaking an invented language. In the years that followed Eskaya people started to defend their interests in terms of access to land and resources. They would eventually make use of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act to do this and from the 1990s onwards they began identifying themselves as Indigenous people. It was through this process that I first came into contact with the community.
In 2005 I had been working for the travel publisher Lonely Planet in Melbourne when a job opportunity came up in an Australian government aid program to document an undescribed language of the Philippines. I reached the Philippines at the end of that year and worked out of the service center of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples in Tagbilaran, the main township of the island province of Bohol. My role was to produce linguistic reports to help evaluate an Eskaya claim for legal recognition.
When I got to the Eskaya villages I began working very intensely, making recordings, photographing traditional Eskaya manuscripts and trying to learn the language. I was already aware that the status of the Eskayan language was controversial. Some were saying that it had been fabricated to attract government funding to an underdeveloped corner of the highlands. Others were making even stranger claims, for example, that the Eskayan language was really Hebrew or Etruscan.
At the end of ten months I wrote up a report in which I concluded that Eskayan was likely to have been created within a single generation, and that this theory was consistent with the speakers’ own origin stories that attributed the creation to a heroic ancestor. I also suggested that this creative event likely occurred some time after Spanish colonization in the 16th century. This was on the basis of the fact the Eskayan appeared to share the same morphosyntax as Visayan (the dominant language of Bohol), but with a radically different lexicon, and that this lexicon exhibited a strong influence from Spanish even in core vocabulary. In other words, there were Spanish loanwords turning up in parts of the lexicon that don’t usually attract loans, for example, in body part terms. It looked very much like the creative ancestor had taken Visayan morphosyntax as a basis but systematically replaced all the lexemes with newly devised terms. In doing so, the ancestor was influenced by Spanish as a model of linguistic foreignness.
I was worried that these findings would reinforce a narrative that the Eskaya people were inauthentic since their language was recent. But in fact the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act is less about establishing indigeneity and more about finding evidence for ongoing occupation and cultural continuity.
I was still very interested in this topic but my lack of qualifications ended up weighing on me and when I returned to Australia I started studying linguistics for the first time. I eventually enrolled in a PhD so that I would have the opportunity to go back to Bohol and keep researching.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: The book starts with a question you heard repeatedly from local people: “Is Eskayan real?” How did this question motivate your research on the Eskaya language and how has your work challenged previous approaches to study this language?
Piers Kelly: In some ways this question is the crux of the entire book. From the 1990s onwards Eskaya people began identifying themselves as Indigenous. This was not a category that they had used before so it involved a certain amount of adaptation to meet the administrative requirements of government. For example, each village had to appoint a chieftain and make official lists of tribal customs and laws. At the same time, Eskaya people have always maintained that their special language and script were both invented by the ancestor Pinay, whom they recognize as the first pope in the Philippines. In effect, Eskaya people had a traditional set of beliefs about themselves and their language that didn’t neatly match up with the lowlander image of an exotic lost tribe, nor with the tick-the-box requirements of a government department. All of this is to say that the answer to the question “Is Eskayan real?” depends on what you take linguistic authenticity to be.
Adding further complexity, Eskayan has never been used as a language of everyday communication but is used only in the context of schooling, speechmaking, prayer, song, and the written is used in the reproduction of traditional stories. What I wanted to do was ask the Eskaya people themselves what they thought about their language, where it came from and what their own criteria were for defining a language. Equally, I wanted to do a better job at analyzing the language itself since I was confident that its grammar, lexicon and writing system would reveal something important about the context of creation, mythic or otherwise. This was a departure from previous media commentaries that neither examined the language, nor paid any serious attention to Eskaya perspectives.
Eskaya people narrate that their created language was suppressed under early Spanish rule, but that records of it were discovered carved on tablets by their leader Mariano Datahan (ca. 1875–1949). In the wake of the devastating Philippine–American War (1899-1902), Datahan spearheaded a radical sect within the Philippine Independent Church and gained many followers in the mountains. Today such a movement would indeed be characterized as a cult but in the early 20th century, such movements were commonplace throughout the Philippines and they were highly political organizations. They asserted a desire for independence from US rule and expressed a great deal of cultural self-confidence and patriotism. My analysis—based on linguistic, archival, oral historical and genealogical evidence—places the creation of the language (or its ‘revelation’) in the 1920s and 1930s during a period of relative peace and optimism. In other words, it happened at a time when Filipinos living in remote or isolated areas were invited into the national conversation. It was also a time when both elites and non-elites were imaginatively reaching back to a time before colonization and trying to restore a more authentic and uncorrupted Filipino culture to embody aspirations for independence. Throughout traditional Eskaya literature, written in both Eskayan and Visayan, there is a real struggle to articulate a language ideology that reconciles the supposedly natural and the artificial. The Eskayan language, after all, is understood to have been intentionally created and then recuperated, but the act of creation is regarded as organic. It comes directly from the human body and it can’t be falsified or misrecognized. In this way, the language itself is a political statement that embodies a claim to cultural sovereignty.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Your book offers a brief history of language ecology in Bohol. How is language diversity and linguistic contact traceable in Eskaya manuscripts? What do you mean with “sources of inspiration”?
Piers Kelly: The language of Bohol is called Boholano-Visayan and it’s one of several varieties that make up the Visayan language. The Eskayan language has the same morphosyntax as Visayan but a radically different lexicon. I was interested in taking the traditional account of a creative ancestor seriously and then asking, how did he go about making this language? What was his theory of language? What resources did he draw on? It’s clear that he drew on Visayan primarily including regional varieties like Hiligaynon, but when it came to innovating a lexicon he took inspiration from Spanish, especially in the syllable structure. There is also an influence from English. What’s fascinating is that the influence from outside languages doesn’t conform to typical patterns of borrowing. Filipino languages certainly draw on Spanish or English models when it comes to lexifying products, species or technologies introduced during the colonial encounter. But languages in the Philippines and elsewhere do not generally borrow terms for really basic concepts, like ‘air’, ‘water’, ‘head’ or ‘hand’. Eskayan bucks the trend. It relies on Spanish and English words for core vocabulary like body parts (the Eskayan word for skin is piyil from Spanish piel), while creating native terms for new technologies like ‘airplane’ (the Eskayan word is kanis) or introduced animals like ‘horse’ (the Eskayan word is bril). So innovation goes right through the language. The creative ancestor, and his prophet Mariano Datahan, were not concerned with replicating naturalistic patterns of borrowing but rebuilding the lexicon from the ground up.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Could you explain more how the Eskaya writing system is unique among world’s scripts and how it has enabled the Eskaya people and their knowledge to be protected in the Philippines?
Piers Kelly: Unlike languages, all writing systems of the world are artificial. At the same time there are only a limited number of ways that a writing system can encode language, so the typology of writing systems is relatively narrow. What’s interesting about the Eskaya writing system is that it combines so many different typologically distinct methods of representing language. It has alphabetic, alphasyllabic, syllabic and even morphographic characteristics, and there are more than one thousand individual signs. The outward form of the script is said to be inspired by human body parts and in some cases you can recognize this iconicity. There is a symbol that represents an ear, and another that represents a brain and another that represents an esophagus. Interestingly too, the script is visually complex to an almost excessive degree and there’s no evidence that it has been simplifying as other scripts tend to do over time. What I argue is that this complexity if a feature not a bug. It is designed to be cryptic and hard to learn. It acts as a natural barrier to acquisition, so if you learn to read and write in Eskayan it proves that you have passed through a challenging intellectual process. At the same time, the complexity of the script is presented as tangible evidence of cultural sophistication. I see this dynamic at work throughout the Eskayan language and literature, and I use the term ‘mimicry and rejection’ to describe it. It’s all about replicating a colonial model but then ratcheting it up to a more complex formation to then stand in opposition to the original model.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: How does the Eskaya language encourage us to rethink “what is a language”?
Piers Kelly: The creation of Eskayan might represent an extreme situation but it’s one that I think brings the politics and aesthetics of language into sharp relief. Learned from infancy, language is understood a natural and even instinctual aspect of human development. At the same time we’re always forming analogies between linguistic phenomena and social phenomena, and we love manipulating language to do things other than straightforward communication. In a very stark way, the Eskayan lays bare the kinds of language ideologies that underpin language use around the world.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: Your fascinating book argues that script serves as a “critical semiotic modality through which Santali speakers assert temporal and spatial autonomy from hegemonic historical narratives, administrative territories, and dominant class and caste based social orders” (26). The concept of autonomy is very central to the book. Can you speak about how a graphic politics of autonomy is distinct from identity or state-based politics of recognition that have, perhaps, been more frequently been addressed in linguistic anthropological work?
Nishaant Choksi: First of all, thank you so much for the interview, and giving me a chance to discuss my work with you and the CAMP audience. Yes, you are right, I have deliberately tried to avoid using the words ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’ in the book and instead tried to outline the concept of autonomy. It is not like the struggle that the proponents of Santali language and Ol-Chiki undertook was not about identity or recognition, it certainly was. However, these notions in terms of political vocabulary are relatively recent in India, and they also, as many anthropologists have discussed, come with analytical limitations. Instead, I draw on a longer discourse of autonomy among the communities I worked with which was tied to the struggle for Jharkhand, which was a long-running struggle among indigenous communities in eastern India to have a federal region with an indigenous majority that would have a specifically indigenous political and cultural character. The struggle was both spatial in that it focused on territory, and temporal, in that it sought to emancipate the Adivasi (original inhabitants) from a temporal discourse of backwardness and primitiveness. The area of West Bengal state in eastern India where I did my fieldwork was left out of the eventual Jharkhand state but the assertion for script in this area, I found, had many continuities with the struggle for Jharkhand. While interfacing with the state for resources and institutions for Santali language and script, the discourse might revolve around identity or recognition, the everyday graphic politics practiced in the rural areas where I did fieldwork revolved more around the conceptual fulcrum of autonomy.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: While many scholars treat writing as a secondary reflection of speech, your book focuses specifically on the graphic politics afforded by the invention and circulation of the Ol-Chiki script. What does your attention to script and multiscriptality reveal beyond what a study attending primarily to language and multilingualism might find?
Too often the study of writing systems has been conflated with that of language, drawing from, as you rightly point out, the idea that writing is a secondary reflection of speech. In this book, I try to intervene by analytically separating script from language (by language I mean ‘code’ or ‘oral variety’). In doing so, I see how script carries different semiotic significations from a linguistic variety, which is important when analyzing languages written in multiple scripts. Starting from this vantage point also allows us to see under what conditions a script becomes ideologically tied to code, and what the significance of the script is for readers and speakers of a language beyond the fact that it represents a particular language. For instance, the Eastern Brahmi script is ideologically tied to the Bengali language in West Bengal, although it is also used to write Santali, which places Santali written in the Eastern Brahmi script in an inferior position to Bengali. This is one of the arguments used for the argument that an independent script such as Ol-Chiki is needed for the Santali language. Yet, Eastern Brahmi is also the most accessible script for Santali speakers and readers, and therefore it is highly visible in the linguistic landscape and in certain types of Santali-language media, where it carries different significations, such as that of local territorial affiliations and literary culture for Santali-speaking communities residing in West Bengal. Understanding the layered and complex signification of script and its multiple relationships with a particular linguistic code was not possible within prevailing analytical frameworks that focused on multilingualism alone.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: In Chapter 2, you describe a moment in which, noticing a diagram chalked at the entrance of a Santali household, you were told that the marks were writing (ol) but not symbol (chiki). This moment is suggestive of Santali semiotic ideologies about the potential properties, functions, and social indexicalities of writing that differ significantly from understandings of the nature and purposes of writing held by missionaries, state administrators, and other institutional figures Santali speakers encounter. Can you speak a bit about how variously positioned Santali writers understood and deployed Ol-Chiki?
Yes, as I argued in Chapter 2, the originator of Ol-Chiki script, Pandit Raghunath Murmu, had incorporated ritual elements into the graphic construction and rationale for the script that drew a much older practice of writing/drawing or what in Santali is called ol. The same went for other Santali intellectuals and writers who created their own distinct scripts, for instance the famous Santali poet Sadhu Ramchand Murmu also based his script, Monj Dander Ank, on ritual writing and “divine sound” (ishrong). These scripts were both modern in that they represented spoken language, but also departed from the notion that writing was an arbitrary representation of speech that informs modern regimes of literacy. Scriptmaking, I suggest, emerged in the Santali-speaking area at a time when many of the leading intellectuals of the community were experimenting with ways of how to usher the community into modern regimes of literacy and education while also preserving community values and histories. Ol-Chiki was the most successful of these new scripts to emerge during this period but despite its success, was not immediately accepted by all. Many writers still value the Roman script, while other senior writers preferred writing in regional scripts like Eastern Brahmi so their writing could be made more accessible to the widest possible audience. However, as technology changed and the politics of autonomy became more identified with the graphic domain, most writers under 50 in my field area have more fully embraced Ol-Chiki as the most appropriate script for writing Santali literature.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: In Chapter 5, while focusing on the role of print media, you introduce what you call the “Jharkhand imagination,” which challenges both Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities and theories of Indian nationalism. Could you elaborate on the concept and how it intervenes in these frameworks?
Nishaant Choksi: Anderson’s concept of imagined communities is useful in that it provides a way that we can incorporate “imagination” into our social scientific analysis, seeing how collectives can exist beyond the present status-quo, both temporally and spatially, and allows us a way to examine how media, specifically, facilitates that imagination. It is limiting in that, as many linguistic anthropologists have argued, its notion of imagination is flat and homogenous, based on a presumption of a monolingual reality. In the study of South Asia, the concept has come under criticism, famously by Partha Chatterjee, who argued that the Indian elite had a simultaneously spiritual domain of what constituted the nation, based on writings in Bengali, and material domain oriented toward the British imperial power, based on the English language. This division between English and what is viewed as the vernacular has been constant in the linguistic understanding of South Asian nationalisms and sub-nationalisms.
Such formulations do not adequately explain the multiscriptal, multilingual milieu of eastern India where I did my fieldwork. Print media was very important for Santali-language activists and writers, but the articulations of community were highly varied depending on what genre of media, and what combinations of script and language they used. Magazines and newspapers had different aims, for example, and they used different linguistic and graphic resources to fulfill these aims. “Jharkhand” as it was imagined in the regional media, especially the multilingual and multriscriptal newspapers which I discuss in the chapter, as a space not identified with any language or script, but with the idea of a convivial and co-eval multilingualism and multiscriptality. Hence the project challenged the idea of linguistic uniformity as a basis of shared community as well as the concept of a hierarchically ordered bilingualism that informs studies of Indian nationalism.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: You note in the book that digital media use has proliferated among Santali speakers since your research began in 2010. You offer an analysis of the role Ol-Chiki had begun to play on digital media during the period covered in the book, but I wonder if you can speak to any changes following this period in how digital media has been drawn into the scalar work through which Santali and other Adivasi groups create autonomous spaces that extend beyond state lines?
Exactly, so much has changed since 2010-2011 which is when I conducted my long-term fieldwork on which this book is based. At that time hardly anyone (including myself) had a smart phone. Carrying my laptop and a USB dongle, I was one of the few people who even had an internet connection. My research assistant had never even heard of email, much less social media. In the years I have been back, mobile smart phones have revolutionized the communicative situation, and now so many people, both young and old, have access to the internet and are communicating with each other through messages and social media. Filming which used to take place with cameras and VCDs has now become extended to anyone with a phone. Choices of script, which before had to be written by hand, or if typed, given to a specialist who knew typing, can now be accessed and changed at one’s fingertips. Ol-Chiki is even available as a Google font. YouTube channels also abound with Ol-Chiki script displayed prominently in the videos. I suggest the digital transformation hasn’t reduced the importance of script, and print media is still important though it is supplemented and complemented with digital media now. Moreover, digital media provides new platforms where the script can be used to different ends. I have written a little about this in the book, and more substantially in a separate journal article and a book chapter, but there is so much more to explore on the subject. I think for the study of indigenous languages in South Asia and elsewhere, this will be the most important area of research in the coming years.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: Who are you most hoping to address in this book and what do you most want readers to take away from it?
Nishaant Choksi: Originally when I wrote the book, I had in mind primarily the research and student community in anthropology, linguistics, South Asian Studies, and indigenous studies. I wanted to place the study of script and writing front and center in the study of South Asian languages, an area still underexplored given the vast diversity of writing systems. In addition, I had hoped to contribute to the development of the study of the graphic from a linguistic anthropological standpoint, a field that has really picked up in recent years, much more than when I started my graduate studies. Thirdly, India’s Adivasi (indigenous) communities are primarily identified with oral culture and oral tradition, and this is one of the few scholarly books discussing the Adivasi communities in terms of their writing practices and encounter with literacy. For both Adivasi scholars and those working on Adivasi communities, I am happy to see that it has had some impact.
Finally, it is nice to see sometimes when you write a book it goes beyond your intended audience. For instance, I had no idea that the graphic design community would find this book useful, but recently a font designer who has worked on developing culturally sensitive Indian language fonts read my book and interviewed me for a documentary, for which he also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand in Santali villages. I have also received an invitation to speak about the book to a design group focusing on indigenous design. It is a positive development that our work as anthropologists can also have influence in other kinds of fields, and because of the book and the conversations I have had around it, I was also able to expand my own intellectual and creative horizons.
Rahul Advani: In your book Fada, you attend to the ways in which young men in urban Niger facing economic uncertainty sign up as members of fadas where they experiment with social norms and rehearse aspirational modes of adulthood. Could you tell us more about this dynamic and the tensions it produces?
Adeline Masquelier: Waiting has become something of an endemic condition for young male urbanites unable to secure stable jobs in Niger. The fada or “tea-circle” is where they wait. Together. In the book I describe the fada as a socio-spatial formation that is symptomatic of the destitution experienced by many Nigerien young men facing limited prospects of employment. Modelled after the chief’s court, the fada is essentially a masculine space where young men fulfill their need for sociality and self-affirmation. Male youths speak of their fadas as places where they can escape the crushing weight of social expectations and just be themselves while they engage in a variety of pastimes and projects aimed at making life livable not just in the present but also in the future. What interests me is precisely how the fada constitutes a staging ground affording both sanctuary and prospect. Centered as it is on on male activities and aspirations, the fada is well suited to nurture the dreams of the good life young men may harbor. I propose that we see the fada as a social laboratory where fadantchés (fada members) experiment with who they want to be without fearing criticism. At a time when traditional avenues of self-realization are blocked, young men imagine a future for themselves, whether that means becoming a rapper or a prime minister, or simply a self-sufficient household head. Paradoxically, some fadantchés defer adulthood rather than embrace it, using dress to fashion themselves as youth, for instance. The fada, I have argued, provides a forum for playing with the boundaries of youth and testing how life might be lived.
Rahul Advani: The young men in your book – much like the young men in north India who engage in “timepass” that Craig Jeffrey has written about – make life purposeful through killing time in the face of diminishing returns on their schooling and college degrees. What is it about time and waiting that offers a useful framework for understanding contemporary experiences of liberalization?
Adeline Masquelier: Temporality is a central concern of the book. On the one hand, young men confronted with the lack of job prospects are worried about their futures. Trapped in the imposed presentism of daily survival, they feel robbed of the futurity previous generations took for granted, as is the case in India as well. On the other hand, they often have too much time on their hands. I show how the fada attends to both these temporalities. It is a place where young men marginalized by the workings of capital seek solace and wait and hope. They share their anguish at being unable to follow expected life courses. They also learn skills and how to prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood. Now, waiting may be experienced as a suspension of time but it is not, I argue, a suspension of activity. At the fada, idleness is transformed into a rewarding experience thanks to the way that the practice of tea-drinking–a central dimension of fada life which I call teatime–shapes the texture of waiting and resituates young men in the tempo of daily life. Young men are often accused by elders of doing nothing but sip tea, but we must see the fada (and teatime) as a by-product of structural inequality. Part routine, part ritual, teatime creates ideal conditions for actualizing aspirations and cobbling together new practices of self-making. The condition of jobless youth in the global south has been described as waithood–a wait for adulthood. I find the concept inadequate to capture the micropolitics of waiting. I was interested in exploring how time is lived at the fada through its simultaneities, its tensions, its trajectories. Anthropologists have long dismissed waiting as a form of inactivity, but I am, in fact, claiming the opposite. We must attend to the work that waiting requires and to the complex ways in which people customize time when they wait, whether they wait for jobs, for the end of the month, or for the tea to brew.
Rahul Advani: The book makes an important insight into how people come together to create what you term an “infrastructure of solidarity.” Could you describe the role of conversation – from the forms of speech adopted to the activities such as tea-drinking that punctuate and facilitate conversation – in how young men at the fada navigate precarity together and make sense of the world?
Adeline Masquelier: The term “infrastructure of solidarity” was inspired by AbdouMaliq Simone’s concept of human infrastructure, by which he means the use of people’s bodies in combination with objects, spaces, and practices to create nodal points between individuals and make cities work more effectively. In urban Niger, one cannot but notice groups of young men, huddled together, that take over the street at night. They fill the space with their tea-making, their conversation, actualizing their togetherness through the clusters their assembled bodies make; once they return home, however, there is no trace of their presence, save for the name of the fada written on the wall against which they sit. The fada then has no permanent structure. As a place of and for conversation, it offers the kind of support needed after a romantic setback, a failed job search, a quarrel with one’s parents, or simply to unburden oneself of the daily humiliations inflicted by a life of precarity. Such conversation is best accomplished while waiting for the tea to brew. Tea is said to untie tongues: it enmeshes people in comforting intimacy while energizing them. Significantly, there are rules regulating fada life, including teatime. I have tried to highlight that, far from constituting “anti-societies,” most fadas have a moral code–an ethos centered on solidarity and loyalty, that, in the absence of conventional modes of generating value, lays an alternative path to masculine dignity.
Rahul Advani: In your chapter on the naming of fadas, you discuss the overseas locations and global popular culture that fada names draw inspiration from. As you note, these inscriptions reflect how young men in urban Niger project their imagined fantasies and at the same time, in spite of their social immobility, engage in their own politics of exclusion.In what ways do names materialize young men’s claims for inclusion in the city and the world beyond while also excluding other men?
Adeline Masquelier: Once a fada is founded, fadantchés typically give it a name that reveals something of their ideals, ambitions, or pastimes. Finding a name that fits the fada is critical. Names have intrinsic potency. They fix the identity of thing they are attributed to, endowing it with substance while also “activating” it. In documenting how marginalized young men affirm their presence in the city, I came to see the fada as a locus of self-narration. Fadantchés often draw inspiration from figures of heroic masculinity or they select names that conjure distant elsewheres. Names like Delta Boys, Cowboys, Dragon Show, Young Money, Texas, or Territoire des Milliardaires (Territory of Billionaires). I was particularly interested in the connection between image, topography, and language. By branding the neighborhood with the name of their fada and decorating the walls with symbols (hearts, dollar signs, and so on) and images (a rapper, a cobra, and so on) fadantchés strive for visibility: they want members of other fadas to notice them. It’s about inserting themselves in a famescape. The practice also provides a vehicle of self-realization, by putting the accent on young men’s accomplishments or future projects–chimeric as they may be. In this regard, the martial art hero and the black US rapper embody audacity and virility, signaling that fadas are microcosms of social aspirations. While they procure stability in the face of the volatility of everyday life, they also serve as experimental grounds where samari can test out a range of possibilities while nurturing aspirations of the good life. Let me stress that not all fadas are forward-looking projects. Some I’ve visited bear names like L’Internationale des Chômeurs, that put the accent on the marginalization of youth, but they are in the minority.
Rahul Advani: Anthropology has, until fairly recently, only occasionally examined men as men – that is, as engendered and engendering subjects. While your initial research intended to focus on women’s lives, upon visiting fadas, you “switched course and embarked fully on a study of the lifeworlds of young men on the streets of Dogondoutchi.” How did the fada as a fieldsite inform your method and approach, and how did your decision to focus on men and masculinities determine the kinds of research questions you asked?
Adeline Masquelier: When I started this project, I saw the fada as the mere setting for young men’s conversations around a pot of tea. Eventually, I realized that far from being a container of activities, the fada was at the very heart of young men’s preoccupations and projects. It was a world unto itself that needed to be problematized from a variety of angles. Given all that goes on at the fada, the fada turned out to be the right forum for exploring dimensions of urban life in Africa — in particular, ethical, aesthetic, and existential dimensions — that are frequently eclipsed by concerns with crisis. From the beginning, young men stressed the sense of homeliness the fada provided. I therefore tried to orient my questions towards the practices of solidarity and belonging young men fashioned. That meant focusing on the experience of teatime (which I had previously ignored as unimportant) and exploring the (spoken and unspoken) moral codes regulating fada life, something fadantchés were keen to impress upon me in the face of elders’ constant criticisms. In observing fadantchés’ diverse forms of engagements, I also came to rethink the experience of waiting. Now, questions about temporality are rarely straightforward. I turned my attention to the emergent and the unresolved, which meant considering less obvious “empirical” findings. There were lots of small but revealing moments. Often, it was the fadantchés themselves who oriented the conversation and shaped it with their concerns and questions. In the end, I did a lot of waiting and listening! In the process, I became interested in the intersecting and overlapping modalities of engagement that waiting entails, that ranged from longings for ever-receding horizons of possibilities to efforts to keep life projects alive to more ordinary struggles to navigate uncertainties, all the while stitching together discordant temporal regimes.
Toni Nieminen: First of all, thank you! Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age is a brilliant and a profound piece of work. For all of those who haven’t read it yet, I strongly advise you to do so. To hit things off, I want to ask you two questions about the form of and method behind this book. First, you largely use memoirs – written or ghostwritten by either persons living with neurological conditions or their relatives and caretakers – as your ethnographic data. This choice is an interesting and productive one. You do discuss this in the introductory chapter, however, for the readers of the blog, could you elaborate more on this choice and the implications it has had for this project? How does a memoir as a literary format work as an ethnographic data set? And how did you decide which memoirs to include?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Thanks Toni—I’m glad that you found Unraveling generative to work with. It was a challenging book to write, so learning that it’s helpful to people is always gratifying.
Unraveling really started as an exploration of why the capacity for “normal” modes of communication had become so foundational for the conceptualization of disability in the US in the twentieth century and its implications for clinical practice, the lives of disabled people, and social scientific theorizations of subjectivity. I had been doing fieldwork related to the project for several years, which included participant-observation in a neuroscience laboratory, a neurology clinic, a psychoanalytic training seminar, a special education school, and parent support networks. In many ways, it was very traditional fieldwork. As I started to write up that work, I found myself recurrently dissatisfied: the clinicians or neuroscientists or psychoanalysts kept appearing as a problem and the experiences of disabled people and their families served as some kind of correction. It felt very predictable in the “weapons of the weak” tradition that ethnography is sometimes drawn to, and I was very sensitive to how it reproduced ideas about power and resistance that satisfy some readers and really bother other ones (like me!). I was also increasingly troubled by my positioning myself as speaking for disabled people who were atypical communicators; it reproduced the problem I was seeking to solve. I wanted to find a way to attend to how disabled people were communicating on their own terms. So, I scrapped that version of the project.
In working through how to build the project differently, I started to read memoirs written by disabled people who were diagnosed with “neurological” disabilities or the memoirs of family members of people with “neurological” disabilities. I was especially interested in texts written by people who were atypical speakers, which ended up creating a corpus of books that were mainly focused on experiences of autism, deafness, and stroke-based aphasia. It’s an unlikely set of disabilities to put together, but as a way to get at the relationship between communication, the “neuro,” and disability, it created a big canvas. My interest in the “neuro” is why I put “neurological” in quotes above: central to what Unraveling tries to do is work against the reductionism that insists that we are our brains. It’s a weird feature of contemporary science and disability activism, where neurological reductionism serves as the basis for both a medical model of disability and the basis of neurodiversity, that is, some brains are just different and lead to behaviors that are intrinsic to an individual. Unraveling tries to tackle that biological reductionism and reconceptualize how we can imagine disability without reliance on the neurological as a source of intractable difference. In making that argument in the book, I wanted to focus on how disabilities framed as neurological have been mobilized in the US over the twentieth century and tell a story about the brain and its role in American conceptions of personhood and subjectivity.
That commitment to telling an American story led me to methodologically limiting myself to memoirs by Americans and in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, since I wanted to locate the project in the U.S. and focus my attention on modern neuroscience and psychiatry. In the end, there were several dozen memoirs to choose from, and they ran the gauntlet from self-published pamphlets to mass marketed literary memoirs. They covered experiences from the 1930s through the early 2000s, were pretty evenly distributed between men and women, and were overwhelmingly white and middle class. Those last elements were a problem in terms of sampling, but were useful in working through the relationship between whiteness and normalcy, particularly as they work together to uphold ideas about legitimate forms of communication. In the end, I selected a set of memoirs that mobilized a way of conceptualizing an interactive practice—and they usually had language to describe that practice. That led to pairing memoirs as parallel cases in each of the chapters and the development of the chapters into discussions of “connection,” “modularity,” “facilitation,” and “animation.”
For some anthropologists and ethnographers, Unraveling might seem like more of a literary analysis since it’s so focused on memoirs. For me, it’s much more in line with person-centered ethnography, and I treated the memoirs as if they were long-form interview transcripts. They also provided descriptions of atypical forms of communication that grew out of intense forms of family intimacy that participant-observation would have a very hard time capturing, which addressed my concerns with speaking for atypical communicators. Rather than addressing the literary elements of the text, I was interested in the text as a form of data in itself and worked to elaborate the nested theories in the texts while also situating the experiences of disabled people and their family members alongside modes of practice in American neuroscience and psychiatry. In the end, each of the chapters is organized around one of the above-mentioned ideas that is drawn out of a memoir or two and puts those ideas into dialogue with other ethnographic, archival, or theoretical work. As a whole, Unraveling builds a cybernetic model of disability, subjectivity, and personhood that each of the chapters is integral to developing, and which draws its inspiration from Gregory Bateson’s work on consciousness. It has become very hard for me to conceive of the chapters as discrete entities—they feel inexorably woven together (which may just be the effect of my having read the book so many times during the revision and copyediting process!).
Toni Nieminen:Second, by choosing to work with memoirs as your primary ethnographic data set, what are you adding to, commenting on, or reconfiguring within anthropological writing more broadly? How does this choice of data and the analysis it enables speak to your own positionality as a researcher and writer on the topic of neurological disorders?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: In terms of positionality and ethnography, I’m not sure that I have any easy answers.
I write in Unraveling about how atypical communication and neurological disability are things that I’ve had to work through, first with my father’s experience of Alzheimer’s and memory loss and later with my son’s apraxia. But I didn’t want the book to be about them as people, nor about my experience as a son and father who would speak for my father and my son. Those kinds of accounts of disability exist and I find them unsatisfying. That might be because they falsely substitute the experience of the writer for the experience of the written about, which is a form of refusal of what Cassandra Hartblay refers to “disability expertise” and Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer refer to as “cripistemologies.” Or it might have to do with how they substitute a sample size of one for a wide swath of human experience. Or maybe it’s both! But, in any case, my experience is important to the analysis but the analysis is not of my experience, which is a critical distinction and I try and make that clear in the book. Many of the memoirs resonated with me—and that may have done some subtle work on why I selected the books that I did—but assembling them into the evidentiary body of Unraveling was very grounded and organic in that I really wanted to focus on accounts that gave language to otherwise ignored elements of communicative interaction.
In terms of ethnography as a practice and written form, I might have too much to offer in response. My early training was in literary analysis and historiography, and I came to anthropology late and only in my Ph.D. work. As a literature student, I grew increasingly tired of just reading books and treating them as representative of something. Ethnography drew me in as a way to triangulate between texts, everyday experiences, and my role as an analyst, and in the beginning I was really drawn to the ethnographic work that motivated the Birmingham school of cultural studies. When I started my Ph.D. program and had to read E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, I was astonished at what anthropology actually was. These days, I’m troubled by how much ethnography solely focuses on what people say in interviews and what ethnographers observe—as if there are no other forms of data available to them. If anthropology really is the study of humankind, you have to spend a lot more time watching TV, reading books, and scrolling social media—or else you’re ignoring the integral role technology has always played in human experience (which Evans-Pritchard was actually pretty good at!). Some people might object that these are phenomena of different orders and that may be true—but it’s true based on your ontological position about what phenomena are and how they can be categorized. If, in the end, you rely only on human speech, you’ve successfully cut a wide swath of people out of being part of the humankind you’re interested in studying or representing, which is either explicit or implicit ableism. Either way, it reinforces particular kinds of people and forms of expression as “normal” and others as abnormal or pathological.
Which leads me to my grumpy feelings about contemporary written ethnographies: There’s been a generic shift away from the old functionalist models of Evans-Pritchard where “kinship” and “political structure” motivate individual chapters and toward a model of ethnographic writing where each chapter has an idea based on an extant theory and each chapter feels separable from the others in the book because they don’t really build on each other. I express versions of this with some regularity, but a chapter about the Freudian uncanny next to a chapter about Foucaultian technologies of the self is theoretically impoverished—they believed in fundamentally different conceptions of subjectivity, consciousness, and power! Books should be ontologically consistent and change the way readers interact with the world. I don’t know if I accomplish this, but it’s what I strive toward. And it’s what we should all work toward as scholars. If we want to forward knowledge, there needs to be some consistency in the ontological basis of that knowledge. Otherwise, it’s just a mishmash of theoretical concepts and examples. That said, I’ve learned over time to subtly invoke my ontological commitments—which are to a Spinozist materialism—because I find their invocation to be disruptive to generic conventions and they ruffle the feathers of peer reviewers. But they’re there and motivate everything from why I do what I do to how I analyze what I’m analyzing.
Toni Nieminen:You position epiphenomenal communication in opposition to symbolically, historically, and culturally significant communication and language. You suggest that – especially in the context of neurological disorders – epiphenomenal communication can be used as a modular technology to facilitate different kinds of speakers, hearers, and interpreters, thus making space for what you call cybernetic subjects. Would you like to gloss these concepts, how and why do you use them in your book? Further, could you say more about the possibilities for facilitating cybernetic subjects in institutional settings that privilege – and in many ways gain from privileging – certain kinds of (neoliberal, normative) subjects?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: You’re right to focus on epiphenomenal communication as the heart of the text. It’s my attempt to offer a corrective to the idea that communication is always embedded in a continuous and transparent, individualized subjectivity. In the US (at least), the dominant assumption is that what we communicate is based on a version of the self that is consistent over time and that how we communicate is with language that is straightforwardly interpretable to an audience. So, when I ask my partner what she wants for dinner tonight, what and how she answers is indebted to a version of her self and culinary desires that are continuous and transparent—and that I’m intimate with. If she says “pasta” or “tacos,” I know that there is a subset of both of those categories that is meaningful to her (and to us as a family): serving her pasta con le sarde or carne asada tacos would be upsetting to everyone involved and would be a betrayal of both her history of desire and her present expectations.
For the most part, assumptions about continuity and transparency are just fine in our everyday lives, but when you’re living with someone who doesn’t communicate in those ways—say a toddler who is new to speech or a person with dementia for whom language is not as referential as it once was or a disabled person who communicates atypically—you can’t rely on interpersonal history or the conventions of interpretation to do the heavy lifting of communication. Instead, you need a practice that attends to needs and desires in the present, which communicative interactions provide a window onto. My call for epiphenomenal modes of communication is meant to draw attention to that and to how our interpretive labor is always working through what we know about the past of a person and what they need in the present.
Language is a technology, and like other technologies, it obscures a wide variety of labor through its efficiency. When we obscure all of the labor that is embedded in language, we run the risk of naturalizing language as a necessary feature of communication. But attention to nonhumans shows how diverse communication can be. And attention to varieties of human communication—including gestural forms—demonstrates how unnecessary spoken and written language are to subjectivity. Focusing on disability experiences of communication opens up what communication can be—and is a challenge to anthropology’s reliance on speech as a transparent medium of communication and semiotics as a unproblematically isomorphic mode of referentiality.
Displacing the naturalness of language as the basis of subjectivity and personhood also serves to describe subjectivity and personhood in more complex ways. Anthropologists from Marriott McKim to Marilyn Strathern to E. Valentine Daniels have been invested in the idea of the “dividual,” or the necessary interdependence of personhood on connections between bodies, which American forms of individualism obscures. Similarly, disability studies scholars like Mia Mingus and Alison Kafer have long drawn attention to how interdependence is a better description of how human sociality works—rather than the rugged independence that underlies American ableism. Unraveling tries to describe how dividualism and interdependence work as the foundation for communication, and reliance on ideologies of transparent communication of the self tend to obscure this. Cybernetic subjects—and I’m really indebted to Bateson on this front—are comprised of (at least) processes of connection, modularity, facilitation, and animation as described by the memoir writers who make up the spine of Unraveling. Focusing on those processes provides ways to describe how subjectivity and personhood are made through ongoing interactions between people, between people and institutions, and between people and their environments.
My hope—and this is the kernel at the heart of my critique of value and discourses around “quality of life” in Unraveling—is that drawing attention to the processual aspects of subjectivity and personhood serve to disrupt the dominance of neoliberal models of subjectivity that rely on the individual as a discrete individual. It’s wild to me how many anthropologists want to critique neoliberalism and then fall back on the individual as the base unit of analysis—and as the base unit of interpretation through a reliance on self-representation through speech acts. It’s also wild to me how many people want to critique capitalism and yet rely on “value” in their analysis: we have to find ways out of capitalist imaginaries and their compulsory terminology. That doesn’t mean foregoing critiques of capitalism, but finding means of critique that actively help to build new imaginaries that are inclusive and sensitive to the needs of others.
In the heat of postmodernism, polyvocality was a key interest, but we seem to have lost that. One way to regain it—and use it as a means to unsettle the dominance of neoliberalism in our imaginations—is to adopt methodologies that disrupt the univocity of the subject, both the people who make up our evidentiary cases and our interpretive roles as social scientists. Incorporating disability expertise is one way of doing this, which treats disabled people as theorists. Participatory and community-led models of research do similar work. On some level, resisting the individual as the unit of analysis—and neoliberalism as a cultural dominant—depends on a willingness to be uncomfortable and to make other people uncomfortable, and too few scholars are willing to do this. Unraveling is purposefully disturbing. If a reader gets through it without being disturbed, I’ve done something wrong!
Toni Nieminen:You seem to suggest that facilitation – one of your core concepts – as an interactional and ethical practice builds on epiphenomenal communication on the one hand, and a kind of future oriented collaborative effort on the other hand. I might be wrong here, however, this seems to contain a tension: how is communication to draw both on immediate meaning-making in the present whilst also anticipating a kind of publicly shared modular futurity, without producing dysfunctionally functional webs of communication, as you call them? Put in other terms, how are we to scale up your analysis of epiphenomenal and modular communication beyond the interactional event?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: This is thorny, but I’m not sure that we should scale up past the interactional event of communication. Or, if we do so, we need to know that that’s what we’re doing and what the dangers are.
One of my influences in the book—and really, in life—is Mony Elkaïm, who was a family systems therapist that was heavily influenced by Bateson. Elkaïm was of the view that most families are dysfunctional, but also that most families find that dysfunction to be functional: dysfunction serves a purpose and part of kinship is finding people whose assumptions about the world complement your own. Dysfunction can be a problem when it leads to actual harm, but for the most part, some dysfunction serves as a motor to human relations. To describe how dysfunction works, Elkaïm makes a distinction between “worldview” and “official program,” which are the difference between desire and need. Sometimes, desire and need are isomorphic; but, sometimes, they directly contradict one another, which is what Bateson described as the basis of schizogenesis, that is, meeting one contradicts meeting the other, and as a result, I’m trapped in either betraying stated desires or working against needs. For Elkaïm, surfacing the latent needs and desires of a dysfunctional family system is the work of family therapy, and is necessarily a historical project: only by knowing the history of needs and desires in a family can that surfacing work be accomplished.
I say all of that because there are times when history and continuity are important to address, but it is often the case that most communication is a response to present conditions and bringing in historical understandings of an interactional partner might just confuse things or obscure possibilities. When my younger son says he wants to watch something, I could put on the latest episode of the last cartoon he watched, but I could also allow him to express his desire by picking something new. When we only fall back on what we think we know about a person, we limit the possibilities of their desire.
The future is a collaborative act. On the micro level, epiphenomenal communication is about building a shared future between participants: we build a future to inhabit through our communication of desires and needs and the ways that those desires and needs are responded to as the basis of a shared animation. And we can scale up from there, to how we build our kinship, to how we build and interact with institutions, and to how we sustain and change our environments. When we moor our desires and needs to history, we limit the possibilities for the future—which is one of the reasons why I’m drawn to speculative fiction, which many anthropologists are. We have to find ways to be open to new desires and needs, which is about how we theorize the subject, how we make research projects, and where we seek to intervene (and how) in dominant theories.
Scaling up beyond the interactional event has a lot at stake, and what’s needed is a commitment to articulating the various needs and desires that are at play. Family systems therapy provides one model to do this kind of deliberative work, which both acknowledges the past while also seeking to articulate a livable future. But it depends on a commitment to participation and building something new, which, again, can be really uncomfortable. And we need to be committed to being uncomfortable if we’re going to build more inclusive futures. I know that’s pretty far from addressing atypical forms of communication, but it’s all part of the same project: if we want to build more inclusive futures, we need to address the forms of ableism that foreclose specific people from participation in society as full persons. We need new ways of collaborating.
Toni Nieminen: Finally, as Unraveling was published in 2020, what have you been working on lately and in what kind of ways does the work build on the thinking behind Unraveling?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Unraveling came out six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and it really felt like it was a book out of time and place—there were just more immediate things to worry about. Maybe Unraveling’s time and place is returning for better and worse, since it feels like we’re returning to an old, exclusionary “normal” rather than having built a more inclusive one in the interim that the pandemic provided us in 2020-2022. As I tried to bend the lessons from Unraveling into more immediate applicability, I put together an edited volume called Proposals for a Caring Economy, which I hope comes out sometime soon. It has chapters from a wide variety of people who are working with ideas of connection, modularity, facilitation, and animation as they apply to the arts, agriculture, immigration, and more—all to demonstrate how the ideas in Unraveling are applicable outside of disability experiences.
And then I started working with Denielle Elliott on a book that comes out next year called Naked Fieldnotes, which is pretty much what it seems like it should be: a huge compendium of ethnographers’ fieldnotes and contextualizing essays, which makes apparent how ethnographers do the work they do.
The big thing is a new book called American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within, which comes out in spring 2024. It was a backburner project for several years, which started with a little project on fecal microbial transplants, and then developed into this sprawling project about American dietary recommendations, racism, the use of biologics in medicine, and how settler-colonialism informs American disgust. It ends with the recent rise of fecal microbial transplants in the US and contextualizes the resistance to their use in the US as based in longstanding ideas about bodies and contamination that has motivated people like John Harvey Kellogg and is apparent in things like the inclusion of yogurt into American diets.
A lot of the last three years has been spent supporting my partner and kids—first through the early days of the pandemic and then during a year abroad in Finland as a fellow at Tampere University’s Institute for Advanced Study—and I’m kind of surprised that I’ve gotten anything done. It was really due to working with other people—either in collaborations or peer pressure—that anything got done, which has also been a great way to work against the individualization of academic labor conditions. Someone recently suggested that I should work on a project about historically important collaborations and at the time I dismissed the possibility—but I increasingly think I just might. But before that I need to finish a book called Living Technologies: Designs for the Biology of Everyday Life, which is an attempt to build social theory through bodily processes (like the dormancy of sleep) to disrupt biological deterministic ways of thinking about people and their capacities. It’s been a slowly simmering project and just needs to be put into the world, particularly because it seems like we’re constantly confronting revanchist forms of determinism that skirt—if not outright embrace—racism, sexism, and ableism in the worst ways.
In writing all that out in the context of revisiting Unraveling, you get a pretty good sense of where I’m coming from: I have some real frustration with where we’ve been as anthropologists and socially (especially in the US), but real hope that things can be different. And part of the role of the social sciences isn’t just diagnostic, but utopian. If we want a better world, we need to help build it.
Ilana Gershon: What does focusing on listening and ideologies of listening among people living in Yopno Valley in Papua New Guinea allow you to examine? What assumptions do you have to disrupt?
James Slotta: The study of political speech has a long and venerable history, going back at least to Plato. Rhetoricians, philosophers, anthropologists, communications scholars and others have all probed the role that speech and speaking play in political life: the power of words to influence and affect others, the importance of voice as a tool of politics, the role of public discourse in democratic politics, and much else besides.
I myself went to Papua New Guinea to study political oratory, a topic that has attracted a fair amount of interest among anthropologists. But right from the start of my research, I was struck by how ineffective the oratory I had gone to study was. Community leaders would make public speeches announcing a community meeting or some construction work to be done on the community school, and I would show up at the appointed hour to find only a few people there. We would sit around for a bit, waiting to see if others would come, and then give up and go our separate ways.
Needless to say, this did not seem like a very auspicious context to study political oratory and the power of words. But it helped me to appreciate something that other ethnographers of Melanesia—Bambi Schieffelin, Don Kulick, Joel Robbins, Lise Dobrin, Rupert Stasch—have remarked on: in the region, it is often listeners who are regarded as the powerful and important figures in communicative events. As I was discovering, that’s because they are!
In the literature on political communication, listening doesn’t often figure as an activity of much importance, perhaps because it is typically associated with passivity and submission. But in the Yopno Valley, people are attuned to the power and consequentiality of listening. Every time community members failed to heed an announcement, it was a reminder of the power of listeners—and a reminder of the impotence of speeches and the would-be leaders who made them. As we sat around waiting to see if others would show up for a meeting or a community work project, talk inevitably turned to why others weren’t coming. And that often focused on listening—how people should listen, why they should listen, and especially how they don’t listen.
So, I started to pay attention to norms and practices of listening in Yopno villages—how people think about it, talk about it, and do it. That gradually revealed what a complicated and fraught activity listening was for people. It also became clear that many of the listening practices involved in local village politics were also part of people’s dealings with actors and institutions from outside the valley: missionaries, government officials, environmental conservation NGOs, anthropologists, and so on. Listening became an important lens not only for understanding village politics, but for understanding colonialism, globalization, and missionization in the region.
Ilana Gershon: What is your approach for studying different ways of listening?
James: Listening is difficult to study because, unlike speaking, it doesn’t leave an immediate trace. Perhaps that’s one reason speech and speaking have received so much more attention from scholars of political communication. But people’s listening practices do leave their mark. For one, they can be glimpsed in the way people talk about listening. In the Yopno Valley, people talk a lot about listening and there are characteristic ways of talking about it—a kind of lexicon of listening—that shed light on local ideologies and norms of listening. There is also much effort made to explicitly advise and instruct people on how to listen, which puts this lexicon to use in illuminating ways.
Different practices of listening are also evident in the ways people respond to others’ speech. When few people show up for community meetings, that’s a clue to how people are listening to the speeches of community leaders. In my research, verbal responses proved to be a particularly important resource for looking at how people listen. Community meetings are important political events in Yopno villages, and much of what people do there is talk over other people’s proposals. In this talk about others’ talk, we get a palpable indication of how people are listening and a public performance of a kind of listening that is central to the politics of Yopno villages.
Finally, I focus a lot on the kinds of speech that people want to listen to. Early in my research, I was often asked to speak at public events, which made me pretty uncomfortable. As I saw it, I was there to listen, not to give advice and make speeches. My ethnographic desire to listen, you might say, blinded me to my interlocutors’ desire to listen. Eventually, as it became clear that listening was an activity worth attending to, I started thinking about why people wanted me to speak and what kind of speech they wanted from me. And I could see that often what they wanted me to talk about echoed the kind of speech that people in Yopno villages are often looking for from each other—namely, expert advice. Why is that the sort of thing listeners in Yopno villages seek out? Working out the answer to that question helped me understand why listening is such an important part of Yopno political life.
So, even though this book is about listening, it is filled with speech! Speech about listening, speech about speech, and speech that people listen to.
Ilana Gershon: Why do you call the listening practiced by people in Yopno Valley anarchic?
James: As in many rural parts of Papua New Guinea, political life in Yopno villages is largely anarchic in character. I mean this in the etymological sense: it is a political environment without rulers, without people or institutions with the power to issue commands, adjudicate disputes, or enforce laws. Community leaders do not have the means to coerce people to act, nor is the Papua New Guinean state really able to do so in this out-of-the-way region.
The book focuses on the critical role that listening plays in sustaining this anarchic political environment. For instance, ignoring the public speeches of community leaders is a way listeners subvert the authority of would-be rulers. But other listening practices also play a part. To organize community activities consensually, without a leader calling the shots, requires a different sort of listening.
Of course, listening is important in other domains of Yopno life as well. I concentrate on anarchic listening in the book because listening plays such a visible and vital role in Yopno political life.
Ilana Gershon: Telling others what to do appears to be a highly charged speech act for people living in Yopno Valley. Why do you think it is so highly charged, and what social strategies develop as a result?
James: Telling others what to do cuts right at the heart of the anarchic, egalitarian ethos of Yopno political life. Adults, particularly men, value their self-determination and they guard it closely.
But it is important to specify the limits of this. First off, telling others what to do is not universally disapproved of. People are constantly telling children what to do and have no qualms about doing so. To an extent, husbands boss their wives around without compunction, though they often get pushback if they go too far. As Michelle Rosaldo says of Ilongot households, directives might be the paradigmatic act of speech within Yopno kin groups. Concerns about self-determination and equality really come into force in dealings among adults, especially those without kin ties to one another.
Secondly, the kind of egalitarianism one finds in the Yopno Valley and many other parts of New Guinea is what James Woodburn termed “competitive egalitarianism.” Equality among people is not presumed; it must constantly be proven. So, people must be careful to ensure they are not being pushed around, even as they are often trying to get the better of others. As Anthony Forge noted, in New Guinea “to be equal and stay equal is an extremely onerous task requiring continual vigilance and effort.”
The result is that those men who try to verbally direct other men in the community must be very very careful. Historically, community leaders tended to die young, the targets of occult violence from angry community members pushed too far. Today, with the advent of Christianity, sorcery and witchcraft are less common. Leaders may feel less besieged, but now they too don’t have recourse to threats of sorcery, which were one of the key tools leaders in the past used to get people to listen to them.
At the time of my research, efforts to direct others often involved the communication of expertise, which is a fascinating and seemingly contradictory speech act. Leaders share their purported expertise with listeners as a way to steer their actions. At the same time, listeners seek out this expert knowledge as a way to empower themselves. In other words, the communication of expertise is a way leaders attempt to exert power over listeners while enhancing listeners’ self-determination. Such a seemingly contradictory speech act is a fitting instrument for those who play the seemingly contradictory role of leaders of anarchic communities.
Ilana Gershon: What role does repetition play in Yopno Valley communicative life?
James: Repetition is a ubiquitous part of verbal life. In community meetings, the same issues are discussed and the same points made week after week. Community leaders make announcements and when no one listens they make the same announcements again. As people step out of church on Sunday, church leaders launch into a summary of the sermon everyone just heard. And throughout all of this, speakers comment on how repetitious they are being.
There are a variety of reasons for all this repetition, a primary one being that speakers assume listeners are ignoring them. They repeat themselves in the hopes that eventually their message will get through. People are attuned to how listeners listen and they fashion their speech accordingly. Repetition is one very visible result. The communication of expertise is another. Norms and ideologies of listening are part of an ecology of communication and so they shape the ways people speak. The upshot is that any analysis of speech—from research on speech registers and genres to the analysis of conversations and texts—really needs to attend to the way participants think about and go about listening.
A conversation between Slava Greenberg, Michelle Pfeifer, Vijay Ramjattan, Pooja Rangan, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar
In 2021, as our co-edited book Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice entered production, a Silicon Valley start-up began advertising an app that uses AI to modify accents in real time. As one reporter put it, “rather than learning to pronounce words differently, technology could do that for you. There’d no longer be a need for costly or time-consuming accent reduction training. And understanding would be nearly instantaneous.” Thinking with an Accent offers a sorely-needed alternative to this vision of a world where communication and understanding happen automatically, and seemingly magically, without translation or friction. Taking as our point of departure the idea that an accent is not an unfortunate thing that only some people putatively have, but rather a powerful and world-forming mode of perception, a form of minoritarian expertise, and a complex formation of desire, our volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice.
Thinking with an Accent was published in print and Open Access in February 2023. This summer, a few of us co-editors and contributors gathered online for a conversation about our respective contributions to the book and our thinking on and after its publication. Highlights from our virtual roundtable appear below.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (co-editor): It’s been six months since the publication of Thinking with an Accent (TWA). In the intervening time, I’ve been tremendously excited by how many of us are already extending and expanding our interventions in the accent volume: in new articles, in video essays, and even in just-published or forthcoming monographs. I know that my own recently completed book manuscript, on the pedagogy and accented reading of Indian English literature in the Anglo-American university, could not have been written as it is without TWA.
Pavitra, you’ve just written a book (congratulations!) in which you theorize the practice of “listening with a feminist ear.” Relatedly, your chapter for TWA theorizes “listening with an accent” as a “queer kind of listening.” In a recent video essay, you perform “listening to listening.” How do these four forms or modalities of listening relate to each other?
Pavitra Sundar (co-editor): Thanks for this question, Ragini! As you know, I was working on my book and our accent volume around the same time, which meant that I was circling around similar issues in the two projects. Both “listening with a feminist ear” and “listening with an accent” are animated by a kind of critical utopianism. Enfolded within them is a critique of current sonic regimes – of what Jennifer Stoever, for example, calls the racialized “listening ear” – as well as a challenge to those regimes. My concepts turn on the belief that we can re-tune the listening ear. In my book, Listening with a Feminist Ear, I bring a sonic sensibility to the analysis of Bombay cinema, examining how specific voices, languages, genres, and sounds come to be understood as they are. So the questions at the heart of my monograph are similar to the ones we ask in Thinking with an Accent: how do we hear accent/cinema? Can we hear it differently?
In my essay for TWA, I play with a wonderful poem by Aracelis Girmay to re-theorize accent in relation to place. Accent is often thought to be tied in place by place. The aural trace of the place in which we were born or raised is taken as a sign of our national, ethnic, and/or racial identity. I take that potentially essentializing notion and apply it to myself (the listener or reader) instead of the accented speaker. Rather than listening for the place audible in others’ tongues, I ask how my own listening is placed. From where do I listen? In your feedback on my draft, you noted the proximity of my framework to standpoint epistemology. You’re absolutely right! But where standpoint epistemology tends to mobilize visual metaphors (regarding how one sees the world) I emphasize the aural. How does my social location, including and especially my experiences with language, shape the ways in which I listen? To what extent is that place from which I listen fixed? How might I re-orient – or, better yet, disorient – the standpoint I habitually occupy as a listener?
In these projects and in my recent video-essay work, I’ve been inspired by Nina Sun Eidsheim (another of our TWA contributors!), who, in her brilliant book The Race of Sound, calls on us to “listen to listening.” To shift attention away from the sonic object (voice, in particular) and to the naturalized ways in which we make sense of voice through listening. Relatedly, I’ve been thinking about your work on voice, Slava. One of the things I love about your TWA chapter, “Accenting the Trans Voice, Echoing Audio-Dysphoria,” is that it forces us to think about voice and accent in relation to each other. Could you say a bit about how your thinking on either or both of those categories developed over the course of writing the essay?
Slava Greenberg: Thank you, Pavitra, for the opportunity to share my writing process, some of which was inspired by conversations with you, Rigini, Pooja, and Akshya, and which have also influenced my work on the unauthorized biography of gender dysphoria. When I first sat in front of a blank document to write my chapter, a childhood memory from preschool in Kyiv typed itself. It was about hearing a disembodied voice that sounded like my mom, speaking Ukrainian, which drew me out of the classroom and onto the school grounds, where I found a child on a tree on the other side of the school fence being scolded by my teacher in Russian while surrounded by my classmates. I told the kid to wait for me because my mom would be able to understand. The next thing I remember is the three of us eating sweet strawberries in our kitchen. What was actually at the core of that memory was my dad’s condescending jokes about my mom’s Ukrainian accent. It wasn’t that she gladly spoke Ukrainian – with whoever was willing (or not), particularly her two siblings, at any and all occasions – but her accent that became the punchline of his jokes. My mom laughed along, paying it no attention and carrying on with pride.
I deleted the story, realizing that I had conflated voice and accent because they were both the butt of my dad’s jokes, and the kid was just speaking Ukrainian in a Russian-speaking-dominant city, not Russian with a Ukrainian accent as I initially remembered. I also deleted the bit about my dad’s favorite joke merging the two by provoking my mom to respond with a word that sounded like a bark to a Russian-speaking ear (how). As an accented speaker, I am experienced with training for vocal assimilation. As a trans man, I am experienced with the transition of my voice on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) into a deeper, yet somewhat grinding-sounding and, as I elaborate in the chapter, feminine-sounding voice over the phone. The accenting of my voice and speech are intertwined.
Activating and then deleting this childhood memory was how I knew that the only representation of this entangled voice-accent phenomenon that resonated with me was in a film centering an accented trans woman who does not utter a word but sings one karaoke song, echoing someone else’s words and muffling her accent and trans voice at the same time. Hiding an accented trans voice for safety has brought back to me the memory of the child up on a tree, proudly yelling back in their own voice and language, and the taste of those strawberries my mom sprinkled sugar all over, which we shared.
Michelle, I would like to extend the same opportunity to you now, to share a shift in your thought process as you were writing your chapter, “‘The Native Ear’: Accented Testimonial Desire and Asylum.” Is there a deletion, omission, perhaps a scene or moment of forgetfulness that you’re now rethinking? I’d love to know more about the motivations behind your thinking through the synthetic voices and the possibilities of migrant testimony.
Michelle Pfeifer: Thank you so much for your question, Slava. I started working on linguistic analysis and migrant testimony in 2015 when Germany took center stage in the so-called European refugee crisis. While Germany was hailed as a benevolent, liberal, and humanitarian center of Europe – supposedly “welcoming” refugees with open arms – what we were actually observing on the ground was an intensification of border and asylum regimes. One way in which this intensification took place was through different technological, biometric, and data-driven tools that were used to determine the identities and countries of origin of people seeking asylum in Germany. One of those tools is a dialect recognition software that supposedly can distinguish between different, mostly Arabic, dialects on the basis of a speech sample with an average length of 25 seconds. This software was used to contradict the statements people made in their asylum interviews and ended up further restricting the right to asylum in Germany because people’s claims to asylum could be and still are regarded with suspicion.
As I started to research this dialect recognition software, it became apparent that its use, development, and functioning were shrouded in intentional secrecy and obfuscation. So, the motivation for my research was twofold. First, I wanted to find, collect, and publish information on linguistic analysis and asylum in order to expose and challenge how it reproduces and intensifies the precarity of people seeking asylum. Second, I wanted to dig deeper into the underlying assumptions and claims of linguistic expertise of voice recognition and asylum to show and critique how applicants are placed in a double bind: they are incited to speak during asylum procedures, and then simultaneously have their testimony scrutinized and placed under general suspicion. My contribution to TWA shows one of the directions of this research. I focus on predecessors of dialect recognition software and the convergences of linguistic expertise and law, as well as the longer colonial continuities that produce what I call a linguistic passport that, like other passports, distributes both possibilities and impossibilities of movement and mobility.
Since writing my chapter, I’ve been thinking about linguistic mobilities more broadly, including within the classroom setting. Vijay, your chapter, “Accent Reduction as Raciolinguistic Pedagogy,” ends with a discussion of possible strategies for a counterpedagogy to accent reduction programs. This discussion was very generative for my thinking on my own pedagogical practice and experience navigating educational institutions. Would you like to share an example (or examples) of these counterpedagogical strategies from your teaching, research, and/or writing practice?
Vijay A. Ramjattan: Thanks, Michelle! As someone who teaches listening and speaking to international students, who may experience anxiety about their accents and thus seek out accent reduction, my counterpedagogy attempts to alleviate this anxiety by challenging the alleged effectiveness of accent reduction. While this service is marketed as a means to become intelligible, its conceptualization of intelligibility is problematic, to say the least. Instead of being a quality of an individual, intelligibility should be understood as a goal requiring the collaboration of speaker and listener (in the case of oral communication). The problem with accent reduction, then, is that it requires the speaker to undertake the entire burden of communication without ever considering how the listener needs to put in some effort as well. This is particularly concerning when listening practices can be informed by ideologies of oppression and thus unfairly position certain speakers as orally deficient no matter how they sound.
In my chapter, I imagine a counterpedagogy in terms of and at the scale of institutional change. However, as an educator, I realize that counterpedagogies first form at the micro level. To counteract the idea of intelligibility as an individual trait and place more importance on listening, I try to have students develop listening strategies, which can range from paying closer attention to the context of an utterance to decipher unclear words, to recognizing how other semiotic practices such as gesture help to communicate a message. Wherever possible, I also have classroom discussions that explore how accent helps to reproduce racism, xenophobia, and other interlocking systems of oppression in educational contexts and beyond. Inspired by these discussions, students have given presentations on accent discrimination.
To return to the matter of scale, I continue to imagine how what I do in the classroom could be translated into a collective effort to undo the pernicious effects of accent reduction. Ragini, I wonder if you might similarly describe your chapter “Is There a Call Center Literature?” as a micro-instance of a larger possible intervention. In your chapter, you use the idea of call center literature to pursue the accentedness of reading. For example, your discussion of Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning highlights your own accented perception that Majumdar is writing for a non-Indian Anglophone reader. For readers who may be uninterested in “call center literature” as such, what are some key takeaways from your chapter that you would like to emphasize?
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan: A terrific question, Vijay. You’re very right that I hope my essay on call center literature might offer an intervention at multiple scales. On the one hand, it is an inside baseball response to academic debates on World Literature. On the other hand, I intend it to be a more generally applicable performance of thinking and argument-formation that takes seriously the ways that all of us variously pronounce our desired interventions into any critical conversation. Call center literature is an archive, a method, and an object of desire. It is also, I argue, a literature of accommodation that draws our attention to what we might call, following Jennifer Stoever, the “reading ear” and how it is primed to perceive the non-Western Anglophone text. To repeat Pavitra’s questions about listening with a difference: from where and how do we read, and how do our own accented readings in fact produce the texts we read?
I mentioned earlier that I recently completed a book manuscript on the pedagogy of Indian English literature. In that work, I try to further develop a method of accented reading that combines close textual exegesis of literary texts with discursive analysis of critical debates and responses to the texts. The result is a metacritical mode of engagement with literature that strives to attend to the cross-pollinating and co-creative dynamics of reading and writing. When we read any work of literature, we have to ask not just what the author is saying, but rather what they are saying to whom in what disciplinary and curricular contexts – or, for that matter, what the text is being made to say by a critic or pedagogue in order to advance some particular argument. In this way, I seek to build on TWA’s signal revisioning of the relationship between listening and speaking through an elaboration of accent as a non-indexical mode of perception, and not simply as an identitarian marker.
It’s been such a joy to do this work alongside all of you! Looking forward to our next opportunity to think together with and about accent.
James Slotta: A couple of decades ago, paeans to the liberatory potential of the internet were common. Since then, the mood has darkened considerably as the capacity of digital media to buttress all manner of domination and inequality has become clear. In this book, you argue that there is truth to both digital optimist and digital pessimist perspectives—that, in fact, it is this Jekyll-and-Hyde quality of digital media that needs attending to. What led you to this ambivalent—unsettled—view of the digital and how does it shape your analysis of digital media?
Sahana Udupa: I have been researching political cultures of digital media and digitalization for about two decades now. It started with my ethnographic study on news cultures in early 2000s when print journalists had started to worry about the “specter of digital media” that haunted them. I explored these tensions in my first monograph, Making News in Global India, observing how digital networks were beginning to reshape the conditions of mediated political discourse. The expansion of interactive social media amplified the momentum around digital networks as novel constellations for political participation. What form this would take remained an open question, but liberal technocratic ideology advocated especially by Silicon Valley pundits helped ramp up the euphoria around digital media as radical enablers of civic participation. Although digitial social media have no doubt offered pathways to enter and alter political discursive fields for multiple publics, it became apparent in the later years that the democratizing force of digital media did not necessarily portend a progressive future.
My fieldwork took me to the darker sides of digital discourse and growing incidents of intimidation and abuse on social media. Ironically, abusive exchange had also opened up lines of political participation for a diverse range of actors who had been excluded or found themselves alienated from the serious tone of political deliberation and official centricity. The analytics of “gaali cultures” [gaali is an emic term for vitriol] developed in this work prompted me to collaborate for a global ethnographic inquiry around online extreme speech. Taking a closer look at this phenonmenon in the Digital Hate volume, I started to center decolonial perspectives in ways to emphasize ethnographic and historical sensibility and to depart from technocentric and leader-centric analyses common in this field of research.
These efforts helped me to open the broader question around decoloniality and the digital. In a 2020 e-seminar paper, I approached coloniality as a global unfolding of the interrelated relations of the nation-state, race, and market, arguing that coloniality continues to shape the macro-historical structures within which proximate, affect-intensive battles of words are fought online, often with grave political consequences. Collaborating with Gabriel ignited more lines of inquiry around varied entanglements and ambivalences of the digital in relation to decoloniality. Unsettling for us functions as a heuristic that helped us to probe the ambivalences but this not a sort of balancing act. Far from it, it highlights the profound unevenness of the digital condition. In my view, ambivalence does not just signal transcending an either/or dyad. It is about the specific ways in which digital networks entrench, rework and reinforce longstanding and novel forms of heirarchy while co-creating multifarious conditions to challenge them. We have sought to advance this approach in Digital Unsettling.
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan: I first started writing about digital media in 2011. I had recently begun following a group of emerging hip hop artists from socially and spatially marginalized locations in Delhi. As I watched them develop their aesthetic, creative, and playful audio-visual interventions online, I grew enamored with how these young men were taking up the participatory condition, to borrow a term or concept from one of the major and early proponents of the liberatory potential of the internet, Henry Jenkins. It seemed, at first glance and from afar, that the otherwise deeply segregated, classed worlds of Delhi were opening up for them in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years prior, before the advent of 3G networks and flood of inexpensive smartphones in India. It was only when I started doing on-the-ground fieldwork with various hip hop crews in Delhi that I saw the complicated ways that digital media at once opened new opportunities—social, economic, even political—for these young men even as it reinforced their racialized and classed positions in the city and country. In my first book, The Globally Familiar, I grappled with this contradiction.
From this on-the-ground experience (as well as other ethnographic and personal forays into the worlds of digital media in the last decade) I have developed an increasingly ambivalent position towards digital media and its circuits of flow. As Sahana rightly suggests, ambivalence is not an affective register that marks a transcendence from an either/or dyad. Rather, it is a disposition towards the relationships between online and offline words that locates the distance between what is performed and what is lived and that, crucially, engages with the political economies and histories that frame and engender (social) media production, circulation, and consumption. I approached writing Digital Unsettling with Sahana with this analytical stance.
James Slotta: Beyond analysis for analysis’s sake, the book is deeply interested in the role of digital media in activist, decolonial projects. What makes digital media particularly well suited to facilitate such projects? What dangers lurk for these projects when they embrace the digital?
Gabriel and Sahana: In social movement contexts, digital/social media enables a way to quickly and efficiently communicate goals, set agendas, and coordinate action. Digital/social media also creates opportunities to broadcast interventions and direct action—as we discuss in the book—in ways that put pressure on institutional actors to change policy and/or practice by generating public spectacle while creating the potential to spark or invigorate action across borders.
The dangers to using social media/digital media in service of social movements – particularly commercial, mainstream platforms – are multiple. Social movement actors, once identified as such, are under constant surveillance and exposure can lead to various forms of risk and, potentially, violence and harm. Mainstream social media companies, as we have seen across national contexts, have very little motivation to protect individuals (or collectives) given that their platforms run at the discretion of state interests.
Another danger, of course, is the appropriation and commodification of social movement symbols, methods, and intellectual projects. As we briefly discuss in the introduction, decoloniality has suffered from its pop discursive success in online circuits and academia in ways that have taken away from materially grounded, historically rooted struggles where decoloniality has been developed as a rigorous praxis.
Finally, creating online affinities towards addressing social issues doesn’t necessarily translate into embodied forms of action. Often, liking a protest or commenting on a movement agenda offers a way to feel like one is doing something while not necessarily putting anything on the line.
James Slotta:The book moves across an impressive array of settings—from campus protests to content moderation to right-wing movements to your own online lives. Why did you decide to bring all of these different contexts together here? Is there something about digital media that compels such a multi-sited approach?
Gabriel and Sahana: There are three key factors, we think, that produced the montage of sites/settings/encounters in Digital Unsettling. First, each of us brought a different set of cultivated research relationships and inquiries to the table. Sahana has been working with content moderators and on right-wing movements for several years. Gabriel had been engaging with campus movements and various, heterogenous online (creative) knowledge projects. As we began to discuss the book we felt these different sites/relationships/encounters spoke to each other in important ways, ways that gave shape to the kind of unsettling that the digital has engendered in the last decade.
The ethnographic method we developed to theorize these multiple unsettlings works by placing events and spaces each of us have encountered in our respective long term projects—similar to a timeline on a social media site—into radical juxtaposition. Our reimagining of comparison as digital method puts distinct locations in productive relation with each other in ways that hold the potential to reveal the enduring structures that connect contexts.
As important was our decision to bring a reflexive, personal engagement to the book. We were, in the tradition of feminist approaches to ethnography, committed to creating a text that offered a rigorous view from somewhere, that sincerely located each of us in the contexts we analyzed and in relation to one and other.
Finally, the pandemic shaped our approach and writing. The majority of this book was written in 2020 and 2021, when forced quarantines, lockdowns, and rising death tolls seismically impacted the world. It seemed fitting and appropriate that, as we watched this unfold on our respective social media timelines, we took up a multi-sited approach to this project.
James Slotta: Throughout the book, you stress the need to decenter the perspectives and experiences of white male elites when researching digital technologies. What do we gain when we bring other perspectives to the center of our analysis, such as those from the global South?
Sahana and Gabriel: The digital has touched the lives of millions of people around the world, especially in the global South, and staying close to how it unfolds in the lived worlds of diverse actors is an essential approach to any grounded study. This is not just an empirical task but also an epistemological challenge.
In the book, we emphasise that decentering hegemonic perspectives is a critical step towards unsettling the conceits and deciepts of liberal thinking. One example in our book comes from the Capture chapter. We begin the chapter by revisiting the vastly popular Netflix production, “Social Dilemma.” The docudrama highlighted how big tech firms have imbedded polarization as part of the business model, driving democracies to the danger point where animosities are hardwired into the business models of mega corporations rather than spilling out as unintended effects.
While laudable for stirring public consciousness around the pitfalls of internet communication—at least among its audiences—the film nonetheless diverted attention from the diverse stakes of the political economy of digital capitalism. At the outset, by reproducing the white, male, tech elite as the central moral subject and eventual savior, it reinstated the terms of debate within the European-Enlightenment racial paradigm of the reflexive interiority of the white subject as the bearer of the authoritative view of the world and concomitant curative capacity. By pinning the focus on well-meaning white guys whose passionate creation has now transformed into Frankenstein’s creature beyond the original intentions or control of its creators, the film, despite its title, ironically had little to say about “the social”—the entangled complex of histories, institutions, interests, and mediations—that compose the actual grounds on which technology emerges and expands, in turn deepening and disrupting the grounds that seed it.
Such an analytical turn opens up a range of questions that liberal elite moral consciousness tends to obscure—vast global disparities in content moderation, pronounced effects of extreme speech upon historically marginalized communities, domination exerted within the nation state structure, and so on. In other words, this analytical approach—what we call a decolonial sensibility—helps us to recognize that digital data practices have not affected everyone uniformly in a presumed post-political state of brute oppression.
James Slotta: This book is the result of what appears to be a close collaboration between the two of you. I’m curious how the book would have differed if each of you had written it by yourself. How did the collaborative nature of this project shape the outcome?
Sahana and Gabriel: Perhaps the book would have tilted more toward the darker side or the hopeful side, depending on who wrote it. What we have accomplished together with a theory of unsettling has emerged from continous exchange to nuance our own theoretical assumptions and conceptual frames. As a result, we have been able to excavate the potential of digital participation by tracing its vastly diverse and contradictory outcomes while staying steadfast in highlighting the reality of (neo)colonial structures that shape them.
Working together has also yielded a range of examples and experiences to think with. We critically engage with the digital in this book as the two of us—each from our distinct positions—have seen, heard, and felt the deep push for change and reckoning with the past that has created our present and our visions for the future, alongside the effects of political, economic, social, and epistemological formations that continue to immiserate the racialized poor and expropriate resources for the few.
Elias Alexander: In the preface of your work, you give us readers a wonderful insight into how your own positionality has uniquely affected your work. You also speak to the importance of looking at queer women’s lived experiences as they are often overlooked in the literature. With this in mind, can you speak further to why it is critical at this juncture to highlight queer women’s experiences and how you came to be interested in queer women’s use of online platforms in particular?
Stefanie Duguay: There are three intertwined reasons that I decided to focus on queer women’s use of digital platforms, defining queer women broadly as including a range of people who are transgender and cisgender women under the LGBTQ+ rainbow. First, as you mention, my starting point for the research was my own positionality; I came out in my mid-twenties and social media played a large role in that process, from notifying acquaintances to figuring out how I wanted to express queerness in my style and everyday life. By experiencing a context collapse among my different audiences, such as family, coworkers and close friends, it attuned me to the difficulty of conveying sexual identity through digital media in ways that reflected exactly how I wanted to be seen. This led me down the path of asking, how do people actually do this through their identity-related practices on platforms?
Secondly, the focus on queer women balances out what I observed most in the field of digital media and technology studies as a disproportionate focus on gay men. In the 2010s, there seemed to be an explosion of what could informally be termed Grindr studies. And while this research built meaningfully on careful work that looked into gay men’s online representation and sexuality in the 2000s, it seemed that one had to seek out studies about people expressing other sexual identities. With the more recent momentum gained by trans digital media studies and more scholars attending to queer women, I feel that the field of LGBTQ+ digital media studies is broadening out.
Lastly, the book stresses that a focus on queer women matters because digital platforms are integral to lives and experiences on these platforms have the capacity to impact their wellbeing. They exist at the intersection of gender and sexual identities that can place them in the crossfire of misogyny and homophobia, both of which are rampant on the internet. Given this, parts of the book ask how, then, do queer women create lives within and through digital technologies that persevere even within these conditions?
Elias Alexander: In your work you forward the concept of identity modulation. This concept is extremely relevant, insightful, and adeptly presented. I was particular struck by queer women’s almost strategic use of stereotypes surrounding lesbian, bi, and queer experiences as a way to leverage identity modulation through the axes of personal identifiability, reach, and salience across dating apps and social media applications. Could you say more about the importance of identity modulation as a concept for queer folks and how the utilization of stereotypes can potentially and paradoxically produce effective outcomes for queer women on online spaces?
Stefanie Duguay: Identity modulation is the ongoing process through which individuals and platforms both modulate, or adjust, the volume on representations of identity. In this process, individuals can make decisions about how they want to show up, and who they want to show up for. At the same time, platforms provide the means for signaling aspects of identity and also tend to respond to our activity, such as through personalization and the curation of content.
Scholars have been thinking about stereotypes for a long time and so I’m not the first one to discuss their utility and constraints. But stereotypes showed up in my research as a way to be recognizable to others. Stereotypes aid the salience element of identity modulation, since they allow people to self-represent aspects of identity in ways that ping on others’ radars. In a sea of information, if you’re a queer person who is attuned to rainbow flags or plaid shirts as a means of finding other people like you, then others signaling identity in this manner is going to be very helpful. At the same time, stereotypes can narrow our perception of what constitutes acceptable or appealing ways of expressing identity. Platforms can also contribute to this narrowing by providing specific menus or categorizing people according to rigid identity labels. So, we need to watch for where stereotypes are useful and resist when they render identities one-dimensional.
Elias Alexander: In Chapters 3 and 4 you explore the ways in which queer women engage in identity modulation across various social media sites, artfully elucidating how women’s efforts at self-branding can rightfully be understood as a form of affective labour. It seems to me that such efforts, however, may work to reify forms of homonormativity that enfolds queer subjectivities into the logic of a heteronormative capitalist agenda. Yet, at the same time, you highlight how your interlocuters like Alex, Jaxx and Chrissy, as well as Mïta, utilize the affordances provided through applications like Instagram and Vine to engage in posting images and videos that seem to subvert and challenge heteronormative standards, taking pride in posting overtly queer or more sexually themed content for their audiences. You note that these practices hold a potentiality to foster a more personalized community among your interlocuters and their followers, producing publics and counterpublics. Can you speak further to how you view the tension between the ever-present specter of homonormativity and capitalist exploitation alongside the possibility for individuals to queer these online spaces?
Stefanie Duguay: I think that so long as this activity is happening on commercial platforms, it’s going to be subject to capitalist markets in various ways. The policies and interests of platforms in appeasing advertisers and appealing to broad audiences means that they reward ad-friendly, marketable content, which can pressure social media users toward homonormativity. At the same time, there might be something to be gained by playing this game: individuals who I interviewed talked about how self-branding on social media gained them visibility and clients that were conducive to their career growth. Yet, they also often strived to post content that they felt still reflected their everyday lives. Therefore, I think we need to move away from attitudes that judge social media creators according to a dichotomy of supposedly selling out or being authentic, and rather consider how individuals are logically self-representing in ways that respond to the commercial conditions in which they’re posting. Of course, I’m not the only one saying this and I encourage folks to check out the work of Tobias Raun, Crystal Abidin and others working in this area.
Elias Alexander: Following the previous question, you further speak about how queer women’s practices of identify modulation on online platforms are buttressed, or rather constrained, by online platforms’ governance policies that are often guided by profit motives. You highlight how such polices are insufficient at protecting queer women from becoming targets of misogynist, homophobic, and racist harassment and discrimination. In today’s climate, and with the continued popularity of platforms like Instagram as well as the rise of applications like Tik Tok what particular challenges to do you see queer folks facing on social media platforms and what strategies do you see queer folks employing to navigate said challenges?
Stefanie Duguay: There are quite a few challenges that queer people face on platforms today, but I think they can pretty much be summed up as not knowing whether a platform has your back – not feeling or being protected.
This is reflected, for example, in the experiences of so many queer people who wonder if they are shadowbanned, which is a state of reduced visibility for one’s posts and activity. Alex Chartrand, a PhD Candidate at Concordia with whom I work, is looking specifically at the algorithmic imaginaries that queer people develop in response to what they observe as shadowbanning and other forms of algorithmic bias. Some of what we’re seeing, and what I heard from queer women in my interviews, is that it’s difficult to know if the platform is punishing you in this way and so you try to respond as best you can, but it really leaves you feeling uncertain.
The queer people I spoke to also didn’t feel that reporting accounts would be very effective in protecting them from harassment and they worried that others would maliciously report them for their queer content, using platform’s automated moderation against them. The main problem here is that platforms assert that they are being fair by treating all users the same. However, we know that in our society there are some people who have been historically (and presently) treated unequally. Certain groups of people, including queer people, have been targeted, discriminated against, and left to function within an inequitable social landscape. These people deserve greater forms of protection and often require specialized attention to these inequities and residual forms of prejudice. When platforms do not provide that, they become inhospitable to queer people.
Elias Alexander: I have been particularly taken by the methods you employ in your study. Your work applies a mixed methods approach with an emphasis on interviews alongside a walkthrough method. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic I have seen many of my collogues in the field of anthropology turn to online mediums to conduct fieldwork. It seems as though the pandemic has re-emphasized the importance of online spaces within the lived lives of individuals. At the same time, I have also been privy to the uncertainty expressed by many researchers of how to appropriately and ethically conduct research in online spaces. In this regard your work stands out as exemplarily. Could you speak to what challenges and possibilities qualitative research through online mediums presents for researchers, and why now, more than ever, understanding peoples use of such mediums is critical?
Stefanie Duguay: Since our lives are thoroughly enmeshed with digital technologies and media, what happens online can’t be ignored in our research. Indeed, it is extremely important to conduct this research ethically and many scholars spanning decades have thought deeply about this. I’d like to point readers to the Association of Internet Researchers’ ethics guidelines that set out key ground principles of ethical internet research.
When thinking about the walkthrough specifically, ethical considerations arise even though the method itself is meant to only engage with an app’s interface and not its users. The researcher must think about whether their profile is disruptive to activity on the app. They need to consider whether users’ personal data is being caught up in screenshots or field notes and how this needs to be protected. More broadly, researchers must reflect on their own positionality and what it means for them to be co-present in that space with others who may be using the app for very personal and intimate reasons. I’ve been thinking through such ethical implications with Hannah Gold-Apel, an MA student at Concordia who is adapting aspects of the walkthrough method to examine TikTok, and we’ve recently published our thoughts in an open access article. One main takeaway is that users must always be considered, since without them, there would be no social media.
CaMP Anthropology 