Kristina Nielsen: Call Centers have been the study of multiple linguistic and cultural studies that often focus on the topic of outsourcing labor or the spread of neoliberal values. Your book seems remarkably different in its focus in that it takes place in London and focuses on calling scripts, could you please explain how your book frames call center work in a different light than other scholars who have studied this kind of workplace and why that is so important?
Johanna Woydack: As a global city, London has been a hub, if not the hub, of Europe’s call center industry, making and taking calls worldwide. Call centers support numerous industries, such as financial services, fintech, and the tech industry by relying on highly educated multilingual migrants who, taken together, form a capable workforce. It is not unusual in London call centers to find someone working from the EU or the Commonwealth making calls to places across the globe including the US, Gulf countries, the EU, Asia, South America or New Zealand and doing so in multiple languages. As a result London is an important focus for call center work.
As you mentioned, a lot of the other call center literature focuses on offshore (monolingual) call centers as part of the spread of neoliberal and (neo)colonial values, allowing researchers to highlight topics such as globalization. Typical emphases in the literature are the novelty, exploitation, and exoticness of call centers and offshoring of services from the Global North to South including time-space compression. Although this has been important research, it perhaps paints a misleading picture by downplaying the importance of onshore call centers, which outnumber offshore call centers in terms of employment workforce percentages. By contrast even vibrant and vital Western call center hubs such as Toronto, Dublin or London, sites of incredibly large numbers of call centers, look odd. Yet these centers are integral to the global and local economies and allow us to study globalization, post-fordism, migration and integration, standardization, organizations, surveillance, gender, social class, language learning, and upskilling among other things.
I was fortunate to be able to enter the call center industry as both an employee and researcher thus giving me unusual access for a researcher to daily practices. To my knowledge, there is no other long-term ethnography of a call center. Based on my four years of fieldwork and over one hundred interviews, I found that a call center is a lot more than just a place where people read from scripts and are monitored round the clock and as a result become robotic and deskilled. In fact, I observed that scripts aided second language learning and grounded increasing professional, cultural and linguistic competencies. I focused on scripts because they were not only representative of call centers and their standardization, but linked different levels of the company: corporate management, middle management, and agents. My work is inspired by classic ethnographies of workplaces such as Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent and Donald Roy’s Banana Time, but also Erving Goffman’s books Asylum and Stigma. I applied an innovative methodology combining Dorothy Smith’s ‘institutional ethnography’ with Greg Urban and Michael Silverstein’s ‘transcontextual analysis’. I call this framework ‘institutional transpositional analysis’, a method by which I follow the career of a script to investigate why it is created, changed and performed as it travels through the organization and how different actors contribute to an organization and express their agency. I believe this method can be applied to studying other organizations, not just call centers.
Kristina Nielsen: In this book, you follow the social life of a call center script, how does focusing on following a script’s career rather than a person’s career allow you to tell a story that is not often told about the workplace?
Johanna Woydack: There is a tradition to design research around chains, threads, and trajectories to follow the flow of objects to create multi-sided ethnography. I am thinking, for example, of Sidney Mintz’s and Ulf Hannerz’s work. By following text trajectories, in this case, the social life of a script from its creation to its death, I created an ethnography within an organization that is integrally multi-sided in terms of the corporate hierarchy, employees of diverse backgrounds, and clients around the world. Following a person’s career would not have highlighted this multiplicity. My methods further allowed me to explore what standardization means in the call center. As the call center’s controversial raison d’être, standardization raises questions of agency, surveillance, resistance and compliance by multiple actors from (corporate) management, to team leaders and finally to call agents. Besides that, I was inspired by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban’s seminal book on The Natural History of Discourse, especially Richard Bauman’s chapter on the “Transformation of the Word in the Production of Mexican Festival Drama” which also explores how a script is re-contextualized and re-entextualized, although in a different context.
Kristina Nielsen: Working with corporations while in the field poses its own sets of challenges to fieldwork, could you tell us about your approach to working within a corporate setting?
Johanna Woydack: As many other ethnographers who have done fieldwork in corporations or on factory floors, I was also an employee and gained full access as an insider. I first worked the phones and then was promoted to team leader. One challenge in such research, especially when the agenda is developed outside the corporation, is to gain management approval. I asked management whether they would allow me to do research and interview fellow co-workers while working myself as an employee and they agreed. It was my impression that they appreciated my application of linguistics not only in my own work for the corporation and in my research but also in training and helping co-workers interact on the phone and improve their performances so that corporate targets were met.
Kristina Nielsen: One of the theoretical frameworks you engage with in your book is the notion of standard which has been a mainstay of linguistics but is often looked at as a phenomenon that is resisted from the bottom and controlled from the top. How does your account of standardization show some of the nuances and motivations that might not be clear from previous accounts?
Johanna Woydack: My account of standardization offers insights into types of participants marginalized or overlooked in previous non-ethnographic studies such as middle management and team leaders, not just the agents.
These insights emerged through the mapping of a script’s textual trajectories encompassing the entire organization, and through field notes on the surrounding real life back-stage activities during a script’s career. Campaign managers and team leaders are important figures whose interpretations and actions influence proceedings on the floor. Ethnographic observation allows one to see how they perceive standardization or work with it on a daily basis. Discussion of team leaders or middle managers in previous call center studies has been limited to mention of supervisors who are part of a system, but has not recognized these employees as a significant interest group with the capability to act differently from their line managers.
The trajectories of the script and many of my fieldnotes not only highlight the actual existence of different interest groups within the organization, but also show that in real time all participants (agents, team leaders or middle managers) have agency, for example, when they recontextualize a script in a new context, orally or through hand-written annotations. This is an important form of agency overlooked in most previous studies that draw only on interviews or questionnaires. Ethnographic insights reveal that it is not the sole purpose of a script to regulate activities within the organization. Only corporate management and the client believe a script is static. Participants further down the hierarchy conceptualize a script as part of a textual trajectory and therefore transforming throughout its journey. Changing a script is not an act of resistance but of performative improvement of benefit to the company and its clients, as well as agents. Hence, scripts and standardization vary in meaning from corporate management to participants on the floor. Against this background, the notion of what standardized, standard or standardization means becomes more difficult. If understanding depends on the hierarchical position of a participant, whose understanding do we take?
Finally, I wanted to draw a more complex picture of standardization as in social theory and sociology it has tended to be derogatory leading to homogenization, deskilling and ultimately to dehumanization. I started off from the assumption that standardization does not have to be negative and investigated possible benefits in actual use. For example, a significant number of college graduates work in call centers in London because competition for most jobs is fierce and graduates from other countries compete with graduates of over 50 domestic colleges/universities. It often requires some time in London before migrants find a satisfying job in their fields of expertise. In the meantime, to make money and improve their English, they may work in a call center. Often this becomes an opportunity to improve one’s linguistic competence and launch oneself into an appropriate professional career.
Kristina Nielsen: Would you say that your book is a story of how call center agents… have agency?
Johanna Woydack: This is one of the facets of the book. I wanted to re-conceptualize the concept of resistance as it can be crude. Previous works on resistance, both Neo-Marxian and Foucauldian, although epistemologically very different, have succumbed to what Dennis Mumby has “called the duality of control and resistance”, wherein there is no room for agents, agency or subjectivity. Agency tends to be limited to upper echelons of power structures. Equally, if there is resistance, it is assumed to be guerilla-like, never collective, as it is read as subsumed within and reproduced by control mechanisms.
Agency, however, in call centers such as the London centers I explored is part and parcel of the skilled work entailed by those who operate the phones as well as by their leaders and management. Lower-level agency is often missed because of the negativity associated with calling as robotic and because it is a job that is mostly oral; the oral and technical skills of agents can be invisible and illegible even to managers.
I was also interested in producing a framework to study an organization in the new economy, including providing voices to different people such as middle management and lower-level employees.
On yet another level the book is about how standardization works or perhaps fails to work and how it is interpreted. The drive to standardization is not limited to call centers (including the desire to impose scripts top-down) but also appears in institutions like schools and hospitals, making the topic one of even greater general interest.
Lastly, I provided a larger story about being a graduate/immigrant in London, about London socialization and about how call centers play an integral part in the local and global economies. One’s call center past is something successful graduates or other individuals might hide due to social stigma but in safe settings agents report gaining important cultural and linguistic skills there.
Kristina Nielsen: Finally, call centers are a topic that most readers can relate to because they have inhabited the role of customer at one point or another. Is there one thing that you would want readers to learn about call centers, not as academics but as customers?
Johanna Woydack: Call center workers usually work hard, are educated, tech savvy and with time, become skilled in communicative competence, although this is sometimes hidden by constraints of the system. They try to help consumers but sometimes cannot because of conflicting logics and rules within rules that the system has created. They navigate their way through these constraints the best they can but often this is a challenge they cannot meet on their own. The industrial sociologist Marek Korczynski has theorized this conflict and dilemma as consumer-oriented bureaucracy.
Steven Feld: Congratulations on Sensing Others, which I found a thoroughly rich inquiry into how Batek “voice their own experience of difference.” Can you introduce us to the key themes of this intellectual project that always places “otherness” in question, under negotiation? And can you tell us about the general shape of your book and how it takes up the challenge to sensuously and ethically engage indigenous rainforest lives confronted by myriad social, historical, and ecological change?
Alice Rudge: Thank you so much for this generous prompt to expand on the key themes of the book. My reason for making negotiations of “Otherness” or “difference” the focus of the text is that for me it is both an intellectual concern, and an ethical imperative. And thinking about Otherness as both an ethical and intellectual project in an anthropological sense is directly derived from how Batek people theorise it intellectually, ethically, sensorially and politically in their own lives. Over the course of my fieldwork, it became apparent that the ways that Batek voice their experiences of and encounters with difference is highly subtle, sensitive, and always shifting. To them as much as me, Otheness was an intellectual project – something to be held to the light and examined at every available opportunity. This examination often took place through vocal utterances, which Batek use to negotiate degrees of difference with a constant attunement to the effects that articulations of difference can have in the world.
At the same time, I became acutely aware how in academic and public spheres in both the UK and Malaysia, whether indirectly (through media or commonly circulating perceptions), or directly (in tourism, policy, and conservation), Batek are rarely granted this subtle attunement in return. Whether it was through the idea that a presentation of radical differenceis necessary for theoretical anthropological innovation, or through crude stereotypes and their harmful on-the-ground effects, attention to the particularities of what difference is, how it comes to be known, and its effects in the world, are often missing. Without attention to these questions, there is a risk that notions of difference in anthropology can become reified, missing the real-life contingencies that bring it into being in unique circumstances. When we’re talking about a context of profound and rapid change such as Batek’s, this becomes especially problematic.
The book traces some of these contingencies across various domains of everyday life. In each chapter, I take a particular tension of everyday life in which conceptions of ‘difference’ are articulated. I first explore haʔip ‘longing, yearning, nostalgia’ and explore how the dynamics of closeness and loss that are evoked through this sentiment shape notions of interpersonal relations that are suffused with this bittersweet knowledge that what you hold close will always be eventually lost. In turn, this prompts a retheorisation of temporality, as through haʔip both past and future are felt as coexisting bodily in the present. This is a challenge to classic colonial and some contemporary accounts of “hunter-gatherers” which often portray them as modernity’s ultimate Others, existing in a pristine past. Yet Batek theorise themselves and gɔp (‘outsiders’)as always having coexisted in the complex messiness of the present – a present which is always situated in relation to the past and to the future. I then explore the tension between aloneness and togetherness through Batek ethical visions of being blaʔ (‘alone’) as the basic order of existence, an idea which coexists with the fact of the intimate togetherness and mutuality of everyday life. Moments when people react to perceived wrongdoing are when this tension – and the orders of difference that it makes clear – come to the fore. In the third chapter, I explore how people attune to the effects of difference through their uses of voice, expanding on the idea of ethical ‘aloneness’ through attention to Batek aesthetic theories of the danger of likenesses – a potential impingement on the bodily autonomy (or aloneness) of the person. With this autonomy in mind, I then inquire into Batek sensory experiences of the non-human persons of their forest, proposing that an appreciation for the unknown, and unknowable, aspects of non-human life are essential for ensuring that those different persons are permitted an autonomous existence. Finally, I explore sharing as a material means of creating both mutality and detachment through the creation of alignments and distinctions. Reconceiving difference as a negotiation that is always in flux, it becomes possible to understand how living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating Otherness’s ambivalences, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. When looking from the boundary, what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down.
Steven Feld: In your introduction you say that the book is not an attempt to “give voice” but rather an exploration of what voice is and what voice does. Some readers might gloss this to mean that you are more interested in ontology and metapragmatics than you are in politics and ethics. But in fact you go on, deeply in chapter 3, to complicate and overtake any such simple reduction in your ways of presenting and unraveling Batek narratives. These are very rich themes for the anthropology of language; can you speak to how your theoretical interests emerge with your many revelations about Batek metalinguistics and conceptions of language, speech, and narration?
Alice Rudge: Thank you so much for asking this! It was writing Chapter 3 (which appears in a prior form in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology), that prompted the broader theoretical framing of the book in terms of developing an exploration of what voice is and what it does (as you point out a question of ontology and metapragmatics), and yet it was the same chapter that initially prompted my desire to formulate an ethical, political challenge to standard conceptions of ontology. Which is suffice to say that I see these two aspects of the work as deeply entangled! And this very much goes to the heart of Batek theories about voice. Thinking about the metapragmatics of voice in detail – beyond description (as you do so beautifully and influentially in Sound and Sentiment) – is a unique way in to understanding how people theorise their relationships with the həp (‘forest’ – which I use here as a proxy to actually mean the hugely diverse human, animal, plant, and ghostly other-than-human presences contained within this term). We come to see names as part of human and animal bodies, for example, and their utterance as a powerful way to impinge on or inhabit the being of another in ways that can be experienced as a form of violence. We may see songs as part of the bodies of fruits, and bird sounds as inextricable from the being that utters them. There is danger in vocalising too great a likeness between one thing or person and another. And yet we see beauty and strategies for living well found in toying with this danger, evoking just enough likeness to hint at connection, while encoding the ethical and aesthetic importance of just enough difference. And so when we follow Batek metapragmatic theories (or language ontologies), it becomes clear how metpragmatic concernns are political and ethical concerns because they dictate the terms and outcomes of your engagements with Others (Batek or not, human or not). And in particular, they lead me to challenge the reliance of common conceptions of ‘ontology’ in anthropology on ideas of radical difference – because as Batek ethical and aesthetic strategies show, difference is not something that exists on its own, it is something that is created, negotiated, played with, and held in focus as an everyday of enquiry – both in terms of the metapragmatics of voice and in other domains of people’s lives.
Steven Feld: As a narrative and intervocal and intermedial (with photographs) device, your book’s five “chapters” are interwoven with five “interludes.” Unpack for us a little the textual poetics and politics of these interludes and the meta-narrative and meta-theoretical spaces that they open. How do they play into your larger intellectual aims with engaging vocal, sensory, narrative, and interspecies authority? Did you also imagine the interludes to connect to audio streams, so that these narratives and their ambient surrounds could be acoustically sensed and audibly entangled by your readers?
Alice Rudge: This question makes me wish I had included audio streams as part of the book! But to begin with the first part of your question, my reason for including the interludes as they are – separated out from the rest of the text (though with a little contextualisation preceding each) – was that I wanted the presentation of the stories in the book to reflect a little the feeling of how they emerge in Batek everyday life – as always connected to, yet set apart from everyday existence. They might be referenced in everyday moments where their topics or messages come up, in jokes, or when people hear the sounds of the birds that they speak about such as the pompakoh who appears in Interlude One. Or they are told in those hazy moments between wakefulness and sleep, where the children who begged to hear them are drifting off and its only the adults still trying to listen. As appropriate as ‘interlude’, might also have been ‘refrain’, something told in full in one moment, or perhaps appearing in other guises in other moments (as they do across the book’s various chapters).
As well as an aesthetic concern, it was also a practical concern because I wanted to present the stories as they were told to me – with enough interpretation that someone yet to be immersed in Batek life could still understand them – but not so much that my narrative imposed too much interpretation on them (as I may have done had I included them in the body chapters). I think including a sounded aspect would be an exciting direction for future work. Yet at the same time, now I think about it, I wonder if there’s something to be said for the written form in terms of it somehow evoking how Batek aesthetics rarely dictate exactly what something is and how you should interpret it (as I write about in Chapters 1 and 3). Instead, a space for ambiguity – perhaps for individuals to interptret through haʔip for different kinds of things – tends to be opened up by aesthetic creation. Would presenting a recording be presenting too much of a likeness? Does reading perhaps allow for difference to remain in interpretation as readers sound the words in their own minds? Maybe, or maybe not. These are questions I will definitely continue to think about!
Steven Feld: In chapter 4 you write: “In speech, in music-making, and in sharing other sensory experiences, Batek and the other-than-human entities of the forest attempt to make sense of one another, in the process constructing one another as moral agents.” This kind of cohabiting actant relationality is quite familiar to me through my experiences of rainforest Papua New Guinea, and it leads me to ask you a question that has been posed to me in one way or another often in the last 50 years. Why are rainforests so good to think? Is it that the (inter)sensory affordances are so overwhelmingly dense and multivalent? Is it that the (over)abundance of signs stimulates greater complicities of human, non-human, material, and spiritual entities? What figures the ground for the kind of deep listening intersubjectivity that so richly topicalizes moral agency and difference?
Alice Rudge: This is a question I’ve also grappled with both in the process of writing the book and in many conversations surrounding my work! I think that for me the answer is an excited yes, and. To explain, yes I do think that rainforests are amazing to think with – and your own work is a perfect example of what can be gained through deep attention to the (over)abundance of signs in these dense and multivalent contexts, as are recent texts by Eduardo Kohn and others. I also would agree wholeheartedly with the point that rainforests can configure a highly particular ground for deep listening intersubjectivity. And I also have two additional thoughts on this matter. First, that I would always want this point to avoid heading towards arguments that might indirectly support environmental determinism, as though rainforests may be special sites for this kind of polyvalence, they may not be the only sites of it: people may also develop or maintain a deep listening sensitivity outside of rainforest contexts. In a site of rapid environmental change, where people inhabit rainforest and non-rainforest contexts simultaneously, I think it is also important to think through the role of human agency and creativity in developing deep listening skills and an attunement to polyvalent moral agency and difference even amidst profound change and in their lives outside the forest. Second, any such argument must also attend to the particularities of and diversity within how rainforest dwelling peoples attune to and interact with this polyvalence. This is my aim in Chapter 4, where I argue that although Batek are highly attuned to the non-human entities of the forest, they also theorise this in terms of their difference from these entities – and the resultant unknowability of the inner lives of these other persons. I think this is an important point regarding your final question – what figures the ground for the kind of listening intersubjectivity that so richly topicalizes moral agency and difference – because we see how different attitudes and alignments and contingencies with regards to different rainforest contexts may produce quite distinctive understandings of what it is to be a moral agent. In short, I guess all this amounts to my attempting to theorise the political/ethical alongside the environmental/semiotic when thinking about the sensory affordances and meanings of rainforest contexts.
Steven Feld: As a certifiable language nerd I just loved the moment I opened to the page that says “Appendix 1, Grammar.” And I found there many things that captivated my attention and took me back to other parts of the book where you unpack lexical semantics and ethical pragmatics. But hey, this is not what most anthros are used to finding at the end of a narrative ethnography that embraces topics as diverse as difference and Otherness, intentionality, emotion and well-being, living well amidst environmental uncertainties, sensory epistemology, and, most broadly, relational ontology. Horay! I found this embrace of the materiality of language courageous and cool. But hey, tell us more about how you want this section to speak to the majority of your readers, who I daresay will not be linguists or area specialists, but anthros drawn to both Batek and your meditation on sensing and managing difference in the presence of remoteness.
Alice Rudge: I’m so delighted to read that that you were excited by the grammar! As a language nerd myself, that means a great deal, not least because this was exactly one of my reasons for including the grammar in the first place: I wanted the option for language nerds to be able to unpick more, but not to interrupt the flow of my other arguments that might have a wider readership – not least the topics that you list. This goes back to the same point that I made in relation to your earlier question about metapragmatics – that I see the linguistic contributions of the book as fundamentally entangled with its political and ethical aspects.
At the same time, it was also a difficult decision to include the grammar and the lexicon. This was partly because of my awareness of the coloniality of the dictionary/grammar writing endeavour – particularly from British colonial officials working in Malaysia – as so meticulously documented by Rachel Leow’s work in Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaya (2016, Cambridge University Press). And it was partly to do with my understanding of the central role that dictionary writing has historically played and continues to play for missionaries as well – missionary activity being a very live issue in some of the Batek villages where I work. Yet I also had to square this apprehension with the fact that Batek friends often ask me to produce an English-Batek dictionary, and with my own desire to do proper justice to the detail and care with which Batek interlocutors taught me about the subtlety and power of their use of language and its centrality to their everyday lives.
Matthew Webb: Against the contemporary backdrop of right-wing nationalisms and populist sentiment across the world; in a country steeped in authoritarian state history (Germany); your ethnography highlights the ‘reflexive’ ethical possibilities of artistic practice in a public theatre institution. What are some of the key ideas and interventions you want to put forward?
Jonas Tinius: Alongside Alfred Gell, I consider it important not to confuse Art with “per se a Good Thing.” In fact, the Nazis created an entire ethico-aesthetic system of judgements of what is good and what is beautiful, what is bad and what is ugly. They appropriated some of the same classical and ancient Western artistic forms, genres, and content that before and after might have been used to celebrate humanity. Theatre, in the German context, was at the heart of this ‘modern problem.’ In State of the Arts,I trace some of the ways in which theatre became a matter of concern for the emerging German state and a central site and practice constitutive of what Louis Dumont has described as the “German Ideology” (1994 [1991]), that is, a particular fixation on the interrelation between autonomy and authority, and self-realization and structure. By looking at how the German state, and after WWII, in particular the Länder [provinces] and cities became patrons of public theatre institutions, I investigate how an ethics of self-formation does not necessarily contradict normative and authoritative contexts of work and play. Furthermore, I study how German theatre—both as a kind of institution and as a specific tradition—became at once a projection screen and stage for the enactment of nationalist ideals, as well as a site and practice that could subvert a focus on national and identitarian heritage.
It was for this reason that I went back to a particular theatre in a small city in the postindustrial Ruhr region to conduct my long-term ethnographic research. Through 18 months of fieldwork in a context where I could incorporate memories of my late father’s engagement as a leftist high-school teacher, as well as my own memories of growing up in this region, I developed an institutional ethnography of one of the first migrant-run theatres in Germany that propagated an anti-nationalist modern theatre aesthetic. Founded by the Italian philosopher, migrant, guest-worker, clown, actor, and director Roberto Ciulli, this theatre understood itself as a place for and of the Bastardo—those without father-land and mother-tongue—and as such exemplified both a culmination of the German logic of state patronage and its starkest rebuttal in a post-migrant logic of transnational becoming. It is precisely the practice of reflection on how one can be both within and in some ways against this German tradition of Bildung and Kultur that got me to think of this theatre as a prism, a public theorizer, itself.
Matthew: Working in a field site in which your participants (and their institutions) are such practiced public theorizers in their own right posed some important implications for the way you conducted the research and writing. Could you please say a little about this?
Jonas: The book is based on many years of what I think of as interlocutorship, sparring partnership, or as my fellow anthropologists call it: fieldwork, participant observation, or simply deep hanging out, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz. I conducted what I think of as a kind of reverse anthropology, which is to say that unlike the classic model of going far from home, I went far to go home. I inversely didn’t like the exoticizing tendencies of an anthropology that sends trained professionals into former colonies to extract knowledge about people they think have no theories about what they do—people, who, in this view, needed explanation for their practices.
In my case, the field of professional German theatre was a highly reflexive field and the Theater an der Ruhr a particular case of an institution that positioned itself already in contrast to not only a long-standing cultural tradition of the educated bourgeoisie, but also in contrast to theories of acting and theatre as mediators of literature. In other words, the field abounded in theorizing about its own practices. This has several consequences for how I conducted fieldwork: My position, first of all, was not unmarked. I was positioned. My work was re-interpreted. I was given reading lists about “anthropological” authors by the in-house dramaturg, which consisted of references to Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Adorno. Critical theory was a staple reference in the field. I needed thus to “catch up” with the theories of this field in order to be able to converse in this field.
For this reason, the ethnography I wrote wasn’t simply about a particular cultural field, but written among theories of culture. Reading in particular James Clifford’s introduction to Writing Culture (1986) reminded me that I would have to accept my writing as an arrangement of competing discourses that already problematize themselves. Many central concepts of anthropological writing—culture, aesthetics, art, practice, performance, ritual, organization—were already marked and I had to distinguish more precisely immanent theories from my etic vocabulary of explanation. Ethnographic terms came already with their own theoretical genealogies. Centrally, I had to position theory not as an analytical phenomenon outside of the field but as a practice constitutive of it.
Matthew: I really appreciated your descriptions of how practitioners ground their intellectual activities in “rehearsals,” in which cultivating and practicing Haltung [attitude] seems central to the Theater an der Ruhr’s broader political and ethical aspirations. As you note, rehearsals are less oriented toward preparing to address public audiences. How then do they enable practitioners to circulate their politics and ethics?
Jonas: Rehearsals, as I witnessed, are the principal modus and locus, that is, the main means by which and place in which the values and forms of the tradition of this theatre are negotiated. This became fairly evident in everyday forms of labor in the organization: the days are structured, morning and evening, around this social institution, important decisions regarding plays are made therein, but they are also forms of ethical reference points for the way in which the actors and agents in the Theater an der Ruhr articulate their professional and personal lives.
Consider the tensions around the different translations of the verb “to rehearse” (which, by the way, is fairly similar in French, répéter). In German, one speaks of “probieren” or “proben,” both of which have English correspondents in the verbs “probing,” that is, trying, experimenting, peeking into a different way of doing things. In the context of the Theater an der Ruhr, proben was precisely not a matter of repeating, learning by heart, as in fact many European theatre traditions since the 18th century have instituted, during which the utmost precision in repeating gestures as intended by a director, or words as written by a playwright, were to be respected. Instead, the rehearsal (die Probe) is a form of enactment—an actual practice that aims at creating a corporeal posture, but also an intellectual conduct, and an ethical stance. It is a forward-facing, prefigurative practice, which combines the work on body with the work on one’s relation towards a role, or a political theme that is being addressed. Rehearsing is a professional, extra-ordinary practice that seeks to incorporate and craft future capacities of being, and in that sense of course speaks, as a social practice, to other forms of everyday and non-quotidian behavior.
All of this crystallizes in the most frequently used term—a term with quite some modern theatre baggage, as it was used by Brecht, albeit in other way—, the notion of Haltung. Haltung is precisely the combination of the corporeal, the emotional, the intellectual, the social, ethical, aesthetic. To cultivate one’s Haltung, the principal aim of rehearsals, means to cultivate a certain capacity for becoming otherwise. It is a term aimed for my interlocutors at the Theater at overcoming the all-too-common assumption that acting is predominantly being a different person and remaining in that role (epitomized by method acting), or being entirely yourself, without any recourse to fiction (epitomized by documentary performance). Cultivating a Haltung means being able to be and not to be, to be in a role and reflect that constant becoming towards another. This is precisely where the political rests—rehearsals are here understood as the training of a capacity fundamental to acting: the capacity to remain reflexive about one’s comportment, posture, stance in life, whilst also training to be able to be otherwise, to be open to alterity, empathic to other ways of being.
Matthew: You conclude the book with a reflection on the stakes of art as an ethical field, highlighting the significant risks perceived by Theater practitioners in attempting to make their cultural-political expertise accessible to lay publics. How should we think about such desires among artists to produce culture in closed and restricted ways, in a moment where, for example, our own academic work is saturated with demands to make knowledge public?
Jonas: The longer I worked on and with this artistic field of cultural production, the more it struck me just how many parallels there are between the developments in an increasingly economized academic university setting and the affordances of artistic work. Of course, each national context, or each field of artistic production, just like every academic context, has their different forms of relationship between the call to “open”, “render accessible”, or “democratize” their results. In the field of theatre, which I studied, a series of very specific cultural historic elements played a particular role. Centrally, the experience of the Gleichschaltung (forceful coordination) of the arts to fit a particular Aryan ideology during the Third Reich prompted a very strong reaction against the public instrumentalization of art. This was embedded in a critical reflection expressed most clearly by the Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer in his The Eclipse of Reason (1947), when he criticized the collapse of public reasoning through purely instrumental means-ends logic. The Theater an der Ruhr founders argued that theatre should catch up with the other modern arts precisely in its autonomization from an instrumental reason of providing a particular function in society. Its function, they argued, lay in a becoming conscious, or Bewusstseinswerdung, through which actors could prefigure a wider social process.
In this sense, though avant-garde art has certainly also developed forms of inward-looking elitism that contradicted a critical process of reasoning on its own goods, the Theater an der Ruhr, I argue, offered a view to think about the act of cultural production as a process of becoming ethical, becoming conscious through social interaction and inter-reflection. (Besides the archived fact that it was a pioneering institution in its street-theatre, youth projects, and engagement with severely marginalized and ostracized communities.) The questions the actors, directors, and cultural workers in the Theater an der Ruhr asked themselves were thus not about scale—how many people you reach—but about intensity, depth, and understanding—who actually understands so that the conversation can be carried onwards. This is not per se a stance against audiences or against a wide democratic participation, as it is often misunderstood, but against an instrumental logic of the functionalization of culture that I think we would do well to heed as scholars, too.
Shinjung Nam: Your representation of everyday life in Tirana Modern felt surprisingly close to my current home, here in Seoul. Though vehemently “anti-Communist” rather than “pro,” South Korea’s military dictatorships (1950s–1980s) also built a country dependent on extractive urbanism, authoritarian hierarchy, corrupt nepotism, propaganda of all kinds, and ultimately, a normalization of capitalist desires. Continuing these traditions, South Korea’s electoral democracy has proven no better, especially for those without social, cultural, and educational capital.
Considering these similarities, your interlocutors’ outlook and way of life made me think back to my own interlocutors in Seoul. At the same time, I also thought about some of the differences characterizing their projects, especially their orientation towards the idea of a utopian community. Perhaps because Ataol and Arlind had such visceral experiences with (and under) the violence of a state-led utopian project, they have been less concerned with the problem of how to make an alternative community through their publishing activities. In contrast, many of my (now older) interlocutors in Seoul had been concerned with creating a new communal life—always dreaming of a true democratic society to come.
This comparison developed only when I began to truly appreciate your interlocutors’ self-positioning as “readers.” During my first reading, my immediate impression was, “I want to know more about their readers. Who are the readers that came to visit the bookstore and frequented it? Why did they come?” While I’m still curious to learn more about other readers, I now realize that I had lost track of your interlocutors’ identification as readers themselves. I had been identifying them by the place they occupied within the physical space of the bookstore, the way I had focused on the different positions making up the pedagogic relationship between the teacher-readers and the student-readers I worked with in Seoul. The lack of utopian trajectories in Ataol and Arlind’s reading and publishing only made sense to me when I began to focus on their love of reading and literature (as well as their clear understanding of its contradictory powers, including the ill it can serve), and not just the post-socialist conditions of Albania.
Perhaps this is all the more why I keep wondering about their imagination of “the social.” While categories of the social such as “the nation” and “the people” enter your interlocutors’ conversations on literature and writers, there is no conversation recorded in your ethnography on their explicit critique of these categories themselves. This leads me to ask how they view Albanian society in terms of the social, that is, of collective(s), how this shapes their understanding of “Albanian literature,” and how their reading practice in turn shapes their view of “Albanian society”? I note, for instance, that some of your interlocutors refer to the dialectical movement (or the tension) between “the universal” and “the particular,” with Elvis stating, “We have writers but not literature” (p. 67). Since according to the ethnography their imagination of the world and its map that both shapes and is shaped by their reading seems to be very much concerned with Europe, as well as the non-European frontiers (such as the Ottoman past), can you say more about how your interlocutors imagine “the public” and “Albanian readers”?
Matt Rosen: I’m happy to hear how reading Tirana Modern prompted you to reflect on your ethnographic experiences in Seoul. I also like to read ethnography that way. Not just to learn about social life in a specific time and place but to help me, as you said, think through matters that are closer to home. I only wish the common thread could be something other than corruption and violence!
On the differences in outlook you noted, it’s true that Arlind and Ataol rarely expressed much hope for the future. From what I could gather, they had no illusions about the structural problems in their social world. I think a lot of this goes to the critical stance they’ve developed through their reading and discussion practices. But it also seems to me a kind of defense mechanism. They might see it differently, but I think their way of always tempering expectations about their work was a way to protect themselves. By the time I met them, when they were in their early thirties, I think the harsh realities of living in Tirana had taken a toll on whatever youthful optimism first pushed them toward literature and philosophy as a way of life. Still, they saw that reading and social change could go together, and I think their work in publishing was a way to keep that vision alive.
I also appreciate how you came to see Arlind and Ataol not just as publishers but as readers. When I started the project, I felt something similar to what you described in reading the account. But when I expressed this, for example, by asking questions about how their readers responded to a particular book, they would either say, “You’d have to ask them yourself,” or they’d remind me that speaking of “our readers” was a very broad generalization and not something they were comfortable doing. I did of course ask other readers I met in Tirana for direct input, but more importantly, I took Arlind and Ataol’s refusal to generalize seriously. So although I managed to pick up some good anecdotes from many different readers, I chose to focus the ethnography on Arlind and Ataol because they were the ones I got to know best. And even though I did get to know them well, and we talked a lot of social theory, precisely because their views were so nuanced and carefully considered, I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting into my own words how they see categories of the social such as the nation, the people, or the public. Let me just say that though they were very aware of the hazards of generalization, they had clear ideas about these concepts. After all, as publishers working in a very small literary field, these were not just academic concerns. For them, talking about the future of the Albanian reading public was something they worried about in very practical terms.
Shinjung Nam: The meaning of the word “imagination,” as in “technologies of imagination,” gains new traction when considered in light of Arlind and Ataol’s narratives on the present and their avoidance of any explicit collectivist utopian prescriptions for the future. The work of imagination they seem to be dedicated to and wish for other readers to engage in is less about producing “images” (new images of the social in any specific, as in species-wise, terms) but more about opening. Some books or texts are considered “foundational” (p.71) to this opening/opening up (of oneself). Why is this so? What would the anatomy of a reader (or his/her/their soul) be like according to Arlind and Ataol’s reading of (a) certain texts and their intertextuality, and (b) the practice of reading?
Matt Rosen: I’m glad you brought this up. I also see the work of imagination here as being about opening up new spaces of possibility. In the introduction (p. 11), I related this idea to the work of cultivating “good readers” in the Borgesian sense. By this I meant that the books in Pika pa sipërfaqe’s catalogue were places where Albanian readers could now go to encounter new ideas, which in turn could be the starting point of further translations and even new social arrangements. Considering your question now, having recently reread The Aesthetic Dimension (1977), I think something very close to my understanding of Arlind and Ataol’s view of what they were doing in publishing comes through in Marcuse’s notion of the permanence of art as measured by its nearness to the simple but elusive criteria of showing the reader a truer truth or a realer real than what we tend to get caught up in due to the stresses and demands of everyday life. Calling a book “foundational” in this context is both a shorthand and a result of multiple translations. I chose the word foundational for the English rather than other potential fits, including “fundamental,” “essential,” or “most important.” But thinking about it now, I might just as well have said “good books” or “must reads” as these were also words Arlind and Ataol used when I tried to press them on the question of why they chose to translate and publish this or that title.
Shinjung Nam: Tell us about what it was like to create an ethnography that is in a way a product of collective reading and reading nearby (you mention how your interlocutors have had a chance to read your drafts and respond to them, to the point where some of the details were omitted, making a reader like me thirsty for them precisely).
Matt Rosen: It was in many ways a very enjoyable way to spend time. I really like talking with Arlind and Ataol and listening to what they say about the books they’re reading and working on. I think most of my best reading experiences since 2015 have come out of—and returned to—conversations with Arlind and Ataol “in the field.” Being conscious of my desire to represent the richness of these conversations in writing did cause me some internal tension though. I would sometimes jot or scrawl a few words in a notebook while we were together, but for the most part, I tried to be present and attentive and relied on writing fieldnotes at the earliest opportunity, often in the company of my partner (Smoki) or daughter (Simone) in the Mulliri vjetër coffeeshop near Arlind and Ataol’s office. On the practice of dialogic editing you mentioned, I can’t stress how grateful I am that Arlind and Ataol read drafts of the work in progress and helped me improve the account. With reference to the spicy details I decided to omit from the eviction narrative in chapter 5, I have to say, this was really on me. It wasn’t because they asked me to remove any specific material or because I wanted to make things mysterious. It was more to do with my own anxieties about fixing those details in print.
Shinjung Nam: One of the reasons I loved reading your ethnography is that it rekindled in me the sense of reading ethnographies as an anthropology major back in college who was less concerned with the reproduction and promotion of anthropological theory and more engrossed in the stories of the people I have yet to encounter and their making/unmaking of realities. Theoretical concepts enter your ethnography as frames and lenses. And then your ethnographic narratives on your interlocutors’ work and life—and their words—re-turn your reader (me, in this case) back to these concepts so as to re-read them in yet another fashion (my second question is proof of that). Tell us (your readers) about your choices in foregrounding ethnographic narratives (over theoretical advances) in your text.
Matt Rosen: Thank you, it’s very nice to hear this! I think I just follow the writerly advice of trying to make the kind of work I would want to read. Some of this also has to do with what feels comfortable for me. Let me put it this way. Though I can appreciate a snappy dresser when I see one, I’m not the kind of person who can “pull off” a very fashionable look. Similarly, while I like to read and absorb challenging theory and philosophy, I don’t think of myself as the one who should write it.
Shinjung Nam: Your biblio-ethnography walks and makes a renewed path in today’s literary and media anthropology. It also re-appreciates classic texts in the field that may be considered by many as outdated, creating an intertextuality unforeseen in contemporary anthropology. Having said this, can you walk your reader (back) through the current “trends” in literary and media anthropology, if any, and elaborate on some of the challenges and promises that such trends might be bringing to the proliferation of more works in line with your imagination of biblio-ethnography?
Matt Rosen: Yes, though it’s difficult to put the answer in brief. In the process of researching and writing Tirana Modern, I tried to stay as close as I could to studying “what people actually do” with books, and what books in turn do with people. At bottom, the idea I developed of biblio-ethnography is grounded in my reading of practice theory as packaged for anthropology by people like Pierre Bourdieu and Sherry Ortner. In that regard the 2010 collection Theorising Media and Practice edited by Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill was a touchstone for me. And though this is not necessarily one of the usual references for literary and media ethnography, I found Bruno Latour’s brand of actor-network theory to be an extremely helpful and readily applicable way to get at what he called “the event of the social” in relation to the event of reading and the medium of text. Although there is not room here to go into more detail, I tried to be as clear as I could about the theories and methods I brought together in the account, and I sincerely hope other readers will pick up and give their own twist to this thing I call “writing the relationship between books and people.”
Hyemin Lee: Readers might be curious about your intellectual trajectory as well as the motivation behind the years-long research and writing this book. What were the starting points that led you to explore this issue? How are your previous books and research in dialogue with Scripting Death?
Mara Buchbinder: I came to my research on assisted death via a study that I did in 2012 investigating how abortion providers in North Carolina were adapting to a new restrictive abortion law that introduced a 24-hour waiting period and counseling with state-mandated content. That study made me curious about other sites in which law and medicine collide. The end of life piqued my interest because it is one of the areas of medicine that is most heavily regulated by law. A palliative care physician suggested that assisted dying would be ripe for the sort of inquiry that I was interested in. When I learned that Vermont was the U.S. state that had most recently legalized medical aid in dying, I was hooked—I had spent a lot of time in Vermont and knew I could successfully carry out a long-term project there, despite the distance. Studying the implementation of assisted dying in Vermont, similar to studying the implementation of a new abortion law, also picked up a thread from my previous work on newborn screening, through which I became interested in how new health policies are implemented, navigated, and contested by patients, families, and clinicians. Each of these projects are also animated by concerns about sociality and care in matters of health and illness.
The concept of scripting came into play relatively late in my work on the project. After completing my fieldwork, I became fascinated with the ways in which the concept of scripting could serve as a useful frame for thinking about human agency over death. My use of scripting built on my previous work on abortion counseling scripts (Buchbinder 2016), in which I considered the multiple meanings of scripts and scripting. My use of “scripting” in Scripting Death highlights the theatrical dimensions of planning for and controlling one’s death, yet it offers the added value of several additional analytic dimensions, including the bureaucratic and regulatory aspects of the process, and the provision of a prescription (i.e., a “script” for death-hastening medication). Because it invites consideration of the performative dimensions of clinical speech, scripting is also a useful analytic for bridging medical and linguistic anthropology, which is a cross-cutting theme in my work. In sum, Scripting Death brought together several different strands of my previous projects in a way that I found intellectually exciting.
Hyemin Lee: One of the central arguments of this book is how the legalization of aid in dying represents the cultural imaginaries surrounding “aspirational death,” where the expectations for “choice” and “control” impact how people imagine the experience of dying. Could you tell us more about how the cases of aid in dying described in the book offer broader and more instructive pictures of assisted death in America more generally?
Mara Buchbinder: Doing this research in Vermont was an amazing opportunity to return to a state that I loved, where I had spent large chunks of my childhood. But it was also challenging because it’s so small. The absolute numbers of medical aid in dying utilization in Vermont, while reflecting national rates, are rather small—just 52 patients filed paperwork to use it in the first four years after the law passed. So, while it is a fascinating case study, I understand why it may be tempting to ask why this case matters on a bigger scale. However, the themes that I elucidated regarding agency and choice at the end of life are relevant beyond the context of assisted death. In the Conclusion, I discuss how we are seeing these desires reflected in a variety of other end-of-life practices in the US, though typically they focus on burial and funerary practices. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s excellent book American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2021) shows similarly. Medical aid in dying makes it possible to realize a particular aspect of aspirational death—namely, control over the time of death. This enables one to eliminate certain types of suffering that often accompany dying from a prolonged terminal illness. But even if controlling the time of death is not possible, there are other ways in which middle-class people strive for aspirational deaths, within and outside the US. This is also demonstrated beautifully in Anne Allison’s recent book, Lonely Death (Duke University Press, 2023).
Hyemin Lee: Upon seeing the title of the book, Scripting Death, and reading your beautifully written Chapter 6, Choreographing Death, readers might be interested in the concepts of “script” and “choreography.” Both refer to certain modes of action but also entail significant social phenomenology of aid-in-dying deaths. How did you come up with posing these as key concepts for understanding human control over death and, ultimately, for portraying a bigger picture of aid in dying in the American cultural context?
Mara Buchbinder: The concept of scripting speaks to broader concerns about managing, ordering, and controlling death, as well as theoretical questions about human agency over death. Choreographing serves a similar function in Chapter 6, yet I see its analytic scope as more narrowly focused on the scene of death, as opposed to scripting, which encompasses all aspects of the process, including following the bureaucratical protocol to ensure compliance with the legal requirements, obtaining a lethal prescription, and regulating clinical communication. These were not emic terms; they emerged in my interpretive analysis. As I mentioned above, I came to scripting because I had previously engaged this concept in my work on abortion counseling. I was struck by its relevance to the case of assisted dying and I thought I could build on, and deepen, my earlier use of this terminology. The concept of choreography came to me, in part, because I noticed the ways that caregivers performed crucial social, emotional, and material labor to help their loved ones realize aspirational deaths. It occurred to me early on that they were essentially “stage-managing” these deaths, particularly because their loved ones eventually grew too sick and weak to carry out the necessary tasks on their own. The choreography I am concerned with in that chapter is very much a relational practice, which highlights the intersubjective nature of assisted death. It’s not a radically autonomous act, as people often presume.
Hyemin Lee: It is striking to find out the structural constraints that lead to critical access inequalities embedded in the legalization of aid in dying. Could you elaborate more on what your finding tells us about the larger patterns in US health care and the best path forward for improving the access issue?
Mara Buchbinder: It should not have surprised me to find that patients encountered significant barriers to accessing assisted death in legal jurisdictions. As you note, this pattern mirrors largescale, deeply entrenched access barriers that patients find across many sectors of US healthcare. On the other hand, these access barriers contradict the dominant messaging from advocacy groups promoting legalized assisted dying, which suggests that the primary barriers are legal ones. The access difficulties repeatedly surprised, troubled, and enraged patients and families in Vermont. This pattern is reflected in media reports supporting my findings from other permissive jurisdictions in the US. One of my major goals in writing Scripting Death was to expose the illusion of end-of-life choice. I wanted to highlight the gaps between advocacy narratives regarding patients’ rights to self-determination and autonomy at the end of life—which tend to make the option of assisted dying seem to be a simple matter of legalizing the practice—and the realities of access barriers, bureaucratic obstacles, and multiple forms of assistance from caregivers and clinicians that must be navigated to accomplish an assisted death.
My findings tell us, perhaps not surprisingly, that relatively affluent people who are better connected to physician networks will have more options at the end of life, including medical aid in dying. Constrained access to medical aid in dying presents a conundrum for both scholars and practitioners, however, because it is a medical service that is death-producing rather than health-producing. For many physicians, access to assisted dying should be hard; they see access hurdles as a safeguard against abuse or coercion. We don’t want to improve access to a swift death for people who cannot access good care. For this reason, I think that improving access to palliative care is much more of a priority than improving access to medical aid in dying, particularly for socioeconomically marginalized groups.
Hyemin Lee: As a concluding question, I would like to ask about your method–doing ethnographic research that documents, broadly, death. Could you speak more about your research design for ethnographically investigating death and dying? Did you encounter any challenges and questions when you first designed your research on this research? How did you manage your positioning as a researcher and a person with your own stance, values, and views?
Mara Buchbinder: One challenge I encountered was that it was very hard to identify patients to follow prospectively who were willing to speak with me about their desire to use medical aid in dying. I understood and deeply respected the fact that few people close to the end of life would be willing to share some of their limited time with a stranger. I decided to lean heavily on retrospective accounts from family members and friends when it proved difficult to recruit many terminally ill patients. An unexpected advantage of this approach was that I was able, in several cases, to interview multiple people about a specific individual’s death. This enabled me to triangulate accounts across multiple sources and identify areas of converging and diverging understandings, a strategy that proved analytically fruitful.
With regard to my own positioning, this really evolved over time. When I started, I told everyone I met that I was approaching this project from a position of neutrality. I found my views repeatedly challenged as I sympathized with perspectives that I had not anticipated sympathizing with—such as a pro-life advocate who explained to me that she was not afraid of death because she had been exposed to it from an early age. Over time, I began to reframe my “neutral” perspective through the lens of ambivalence. (I write about this in the Introduction.)
I am frequently asked how I experienced this fieldwork on a personal level, often by people who assume that it was difficult to hear stories about death and bear witness to survivors’ suffering. This research was certainly sad. For the most part, however, I did not find it personally challenging. My overwhelming feeling was one of gratitude for the connections I formed with my interlocutors and the stories they shared with me. I deeply appreciated the intimate encounters with research participants and all that they taught me about living well while dying. I felt like this project—more than any of my previous projects—had taught me something that would be valuable on a deeply personal level, rather than just an intellectual or scholarly one.
References
Buchbinder, Mara. 2016. Scripting Dissent: US Abortion Laws, State Power, and the Politics of Scripted Speech. American Anthropologist 118(4):772-783.
Eléonore Rimbault: Much of the energy of The Globally Familiar derives from your candid and involved focus on the young b-boys and rappers you worked with in Delhi. Their everyday experience is a point of departure that leads you and the reader to engage with many longstanding lines of anthropological research. It also informs the concept of the globally familiar that is the central analytic of this book. In a few words, could you explain why the globally familiar emerged as a central idea for this book, and how it reflects the practices and experiences of the youths and artists you spent time with?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Thank so much for engaging with the book and for your thoughtful questions! I first started to think about what familiarity and the familiar might mean for my project in early 2013, when I spent time with a couple of branding consultants who were hired by global multinationals interested in cultivating India’s enormous youth market segment. Drawing from 21st century marketing discourse that has increasingly moved away from marketing products towards inculcating lifestyles, these self-styled experts were charged with fostering the nascent and globally wired youth scenes in the country by curating a series of events in major cities across India (Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi) that featured local b-boys, skateboarders, BMXers, graff artists and so on. In our conversations, the consultants repeatedly used the term familiar to describe the desires and aspirations of young people across the world in relation to consumption, urban space, and practice, specifically youth cultural practices like b-boying or skateboarding.
For these branding consultants, producing the familiar through the events they curated and the digital traces of them that circulated in social media was a way to signal the kind of always already global connectedness between metropolitan centers across nation-state boundaries that has only intensified through digital connection. They did so by mobilizing youth cultural practices and amplifying their aesthetics in the events they curated as well as introducing new ones, hoping they would stick. Something clicked for me in these conversations. I realized the hip hop practitioners in Delhi I spent time with, albeit in a different register and towards different ends, were also producing the familiar through their online and offline practices in ways that put them, their city, and their neighborhoods on the map, so to speak, as global subjects.
Once I got hooked on the concept, I couldn’t stop thinking with it! It did, however, take me a while to write about it as I couldn’t wrap my head, at the time, around how the different spatial and temporal scales these young people traversed – the local, national, the transnational, the past, and the present – coincided and informed one another. I also felt uncomfortable, early on, with utilizing a synthetic term as an explanatory analytic when it wasn’t a term that my hip hop interlocutors were using or a concept within the broader global hip hop lexicon. I finally came to terms with theorizing the familiar, partially because I couldn’t unthink its explanatory power but also and importantly because I felt that it resonated with my experiences in Delhi in ways that were respectful of my youthful participants self-making projects.
Eléonore Rimbault: I was struck by the way your writing about hip hop in Delhi conjures up a portrait of the city that includes so many of the intimate, idiosyncratic, and perhaps, globally not-so-familiar features of this city. Whether it is the transformation and gentrification processes in the Khirki neighborhood, or the routine ways in which people of different class backgrounds have made Delhi’s malls or the metro their own, or the kin networks of hip hop artists and their anchoring in specific neighborhoods of the city, your work is an invitation to think about urban space through people’s engagement with the city. Do you think that the book’s attunement to Delhi can be explained by the street-focused character of hip-hop, or does it have more to do with your approach and your commitments as an anthropologist?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: I knew, early on, that I wasn’t interested in writing a book that focused on hip hop cultural production in Delhi in ways that, for instance, narrowly focused on one of its elements (b-boyin’ or MCing, or DJing) or that thought through the media histories between Indian popular cultural forms and the emergent practices of the young men I was getting to know. More to the point, I didn’t want to write a book that either obscured hip hop or over-invested in the micro-specificities of its practice in Delhi and India. I was more interested in how my participants’ mobilization of hip hop’s artistic practices and their media making endeavors for online circulation offered a lens to carefully think about their lives within the changing contours of the city.
Hip hop, of course, lends itself to an engagement with the urban. As a musical, poetic, visual, and kinesthetic genre and discourse of practice that was born in the tumult of structurally produced economic inequality that engulfed the South Bronx in the 1970s, it has been long engaged with the politics and poetics of street life with depictions—both realistic and fantastic—of classed, racialized, and spatialized struggle and projects of emancipation. My participants’ hip hop experimentations—as rappers, graf writers, and dancers—took me metaphorically and physically into Delhi’s intimate and idiosyncratic topographies. Our meanderings through the city offered me an opportunity to think about and, ultimately, write about their vision of and for the city that at once celebrated its particularities even as it strove to make these very same features familiar.
Eléonore Rimbault: The Globally Familiar pays great attention to the technological mediation that conditions the aesthetic of hip-hop in India. Your portrayal of groups of young people hanging out and gathered around their phone screen, for instance, is striking, but your attention to fieldwork-like interactions occurring through social media long after your fieldwork was over is another reminder of how the anthropological method is evolving. As you point out in the book, these moments and modes of sociality are familiar much beyond ethnographic work. Do you think some of your findings on the mediation of a hip-hop aesthetic in South Asia are applicable to other domains of our lives and to professional cultures, such as our own as anthropology professionals?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Absolutely, although application can be a tricky thing. I hope the familiar, as I have theorized it in the book, invites engagements within other social domains in ways that recognize and attempt to broadly and specifically think through the profound ways that communications technologies are shifting how we interact with each other and how we imagine the world. To specifically engage with processes of inventive mediation, however, requires a careful appraisal of the particular material, social and political stakes of online/offline participation within designated communities of practice.
For the working-class young men that I worked with in Delhi, producing the familiar was and continues to be a way to stake a claim to the city they grew up in and, crucially, a means to create local and transnational relationships through these claims. An integral part of the individual and collective claims they make through hip hop’s practices is that Delhi is part of a global network of capital that locates racialized, classed, and gendered bodies in ways that are at once recognizable, legible, or familiar, even as they are particular. This process of claiming through creative mediation is generative and, as I show in the book, creates economic, political, and social possibilities for these young men. It might be the case that the familiar, as I have developed the term, doesn’t quite offer the conceptual framing that is required in other worlds of practice and exchange. In that case, new conceptual language needs to be developed. Regardless of the conceptual language we use to theorize processes of digital mediation within specific communities, what I think is important is that we—as ethnographers—attend to the material, political, and social underpinnings and consequences of online communicative and creative practices.
Eléonore Rimbault: From a regionalist standpoint, your attention to the digital mediation of hip-hop sociality and your development of the idea of the globally familiar resonates with previous works conducted in India on mediation and on the global as a scale, including the works of some of the scholars that you cite, such as Arjun Appadurai, Arvind Rajagopal, William Mazzarella, and several others. It seems like the conceptual work on the global in India closely tracks the transformation of the media through which ideas, politics, and aesthetics are produced and reproduced. How do you position your book in relation to these other ways of articulating the immanence of a global scale, and do you think there is something about Indian cities as locales that prompts this form of theorization?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: I would caution against approaching a particular socio-historic context, in this case India, as more conducive to theorizations of global mediation than other places in the world. This sort of approach reminds me of a bit of apocrypha that I first encountered in graduate school many years ago and again, in the British social anthropology worlds I traversed when I was based in London. In this 20th century anthropological formulation young, enthusiastic anthropologists from across Europe and North America were encouraged to study certain themes or topics in certain parts of the world – hierarchy in South Asia, exchange and gift economies in the Pacific, political systems in Africa, and so on. One’s theoretical interests, in short, determined where one went to do fieldwork.
Perhaps another way of framing this discussion – rather than thinking about how particular places are more amenable to certain theoretical potentials— is to think carefully about the relationship between fieldwork and citation. Undoubtedly, before and during fieldwork I was influenced by reading all the tremendous thinkers you named who, together, have developed a rich media anthropology of global India. In addition, there were many other media/visual anthropologists working in India that also shaped (and continue to influence) my thinking. For instance, Chris Pinney’s work on visual cultures in India, Frank Cody and Sahana Udupa’s work on the news, AmandaWeidman’s work on practices of distinction amongst Carnatic musicians, and Teja Ganti’s careful and sustained work on Hindi cinema worlds have all pushed me to broaden and specify my thinking around my encounters in Delhi. However, I couldn’t solely engage and carefully think with these scholars who have worked in India or the region around questions of mediation and cultural production.
My unique challenge and responsibility, given that I was trying to understand why young racialized men in Delhi were somewhat suddenly picking up digital hip hop to create new self-descriptions, social worlds, and economic opportunities, was to carefully engage with hip hop scholarship, specifically, and Black Atlantic scholarship more broadly, particularly the work that has focused on the African diasporic arts and its spread across the globe. For me what was at stake in my book project centered on bringing these distinct bodies of scholarship into conversation in a carefully calibrated relationship to what I was witnessing and participating in on the ground in ways that animated the otherwise obscured colonial underpinnings of the global in India. So, while all of the scholars you mentioned were incredibly important, particularly in the years before fieldwork where I was voraciously reading everything I could to prepare myself, my fieldwork demanded a different engagement with immanence that put race, gender, and place across colonial geographies at the forefront of my thinking.
Eléonore Rimbault: Finally, I am wondering if you had some thoughts you’d like to share on the way hip hop has developed more recently in Delhi and/or India. Do you see the affirmation of caste, class and ethnic identities in South Indian hip hop (for instance) as re-articulation of the Hip-Hop ideologies you identified circa 2012? More broadly, what are your thoughts on the current circulation of desi hip hop outside of Delhi, for instance, in South India, or on Punjabi hip-hop produced in Canada?
E. Gabriel Dattatreyan: Thanks for this question. There is a lot to say on this but try I’ll keep my response concise. There have been enormous shifts and changes in what can now be described as an Indian hip hop scene since I finished fieldwork in 2014. First and foremost, mainstream hip hop music production has exploded in the last several years as Indian diasporic entrepreneurs, transnational media conglomerates, and more recently, big players in Indian popular cultural worlds, have invested in its potential. As a result, several of the MCs I met in Delhi who were just getting started when I met them and whom I helped produce their first YouTube videos have been catapulted to fame. Their rise to stardom, of course, has had a direct impact on their younger peers who see and want to emulate their success.
With the release of Gully Boy in 2019, a blockbuster production from Zoya Akhtar, the aspiration for hip hop fame across the country has increased ten-fold. Set in Dharavi, Mumbai, commonly referred to as the largest slum in Asia, Gully Boy narrates the coming-of-age story of Murad, a young Muslim man who rapidly transforms from hip hop enthusiast to local hip hop sensation. Gully Boy, with its constant referencing and aestheticization of music and video production for social-media circulation as key aspects of hip-hop potentiality in the contemporary moment, captures, albeit in clichéd ways, some of the affective sensibility of the globally familiar. The film’s success in India and globally also offers an example of the ways in which marginalized masculinities and the spatialities they index in India are currently being imagined and mobilized by mainstream media interests to produce capital and cultivate desire.
With the commercial success and increasing visibility of Indian rap, there has been an explosion of MCs across the country who hone and practice their skills in local ciphas while producing content for social media circulation. What I have been most excited about is how these emergent rappers have embraced the poetics of hip hop as a modality to be explored in their local languages. When I first arrived to Delhi in 2011 to check out the scene, the rappers I met were trying to rap in English and, at best, were switching between Hindi and English in their raps. Since 2013 there has been a decided move towards rappin’ exclusively in Hindi, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu and so on. The move towards rappin’ in regional languages has opened up new and exciting opportunities to bring together localized musical and poetic traditions with hip hop which, of course, opens up new intellectual and ethnographic projects. I’m really excited for the work of Pranathi Diwakar, for instance, who has explored how young people have combined Gaana musical traditions preserved by Dalit communities in Tamil Nadu with hip hop to produce a new sound that elucidates the politics of caste in a contemporary frame. For Dr. Diwakar, that has offered opportunities to theorize caste, race, and the politics of space in Chennai in ways that are productive and grounded. It’s worth mentioning there was a precedent for hip hop’s linguistic localization in the Punjabi hip hop/bhangra scene, which has a longer relationship – through its diaspora – with Atlantic world cultural formations. But that story, like the work by Dr. Diwakar, is for another time and for another scholar!
The point that I suppose I’m trying to make is that even as hip hop has become a commodity form in the subcontinent, it has also continued to be a viable vehicle for political and social expression that is cognizant of and takes up older cultural forms. As such, hip hop continues its fifty plus year career of unashamedly taking up a capitalist hustle while offering opportunities for its practitioners to explore and critique the normative order while voraciously reanimating and remixing locally available sounds and images. Of course, political expression, critiques of power, and inventive cultural bricolage are not always something to be celebrated. Over the last several years I’ve been tracking the shift in tenor and tone of several of my participants, who have turned towards the so-called decolonial promise of Hindutva. I’m currently writing a piece with my long-term collaborator and friend, Jaspal Naveel Singh, about how the elections in 2014 that brought the BJP into power at the national level have impacted in the nascent Indian hip hop scene. Over the years, some of the key figures in the scene have begun to celebrate a Hindu centric right-wing aesthetic and political sensibility in their creative endeavors and public engagements. This has, unsurprisingly, created rifts amongst practitioners. We are grappling with how to tell this story in a way that elucidates something about how ideology inculcates itself in peoples’ world views in real time and the multiple effects of these shifts in perspective and stance. All this to say, what I gestured to in the book as hip hop ideologies – specifically focusing on the ways external and often diasporic actors shaped, in the early days of the scene, the ways in which social difference should be approached and represented through hip hop – has become multiple and localized in ways that are complex and require further attention and study.
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.
CaMP Anthropology 