CaMP Anthropology

Communication, Media and Performance

Category: Page 99 for CaMP Dissertations

Grace Cooper takes the page 99 test

October 21st, 2024

When offered the chance to take the page 99 test, I imagined that page 99 of my dissertation would have little to do with its core purpose—using anthropology as a tool to understand, honor, document, and share the experiences of patients whose access to healthcare in the US is stipulated by their im/migration status. I was pleasantly surprised when I turned to page 99 and read the following passage.

“Of the seven focal participants in this research, four were women and mothers. Flor and Esperanza had both come to the United States in their 40s and did not have children in the United States. However, both were grandmothers when we met during fieldwork and were well-experienced in the healthcare options available for young children and their mothers in Philadelphia’s immigrant community. In this section, I will discuss healthcare access in maternity wards for uninsured and, specifically, undocumented women through the stories of Evelin and Gabriela, two women from Honduras. Both were in their 30s when we met, and both were (and still are) in long-term relationships with undocumented Latinx men working in manual labor positions.

Evelin has seven children, and five were born in Honduras. She gave birth to her youngest son, Wilmer, in New York City in 2016. Evelin gave birth to her youngest daughter, Jessica, during my fieldwork. I was there with her and Antonio at Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital on
January 9th, 2019, when they welcomed Jessica to their family. Gabriela has three children, and one child was born in Honduras. Before we met, Gabriela gave birth to her two youngest sons, Augusto, and Bruno, at Einstein Hospital and Hahnemann Hospital, respectively. With pregnancy experience in both the United States and Honduras, Gabriela and Evelin had much to say about the healthcare systems in the United States compared to the healthcare system in Honduras.”

Looking at this passage, a reader can glean some key points about my dissertation. First, it focuses on the experiences of a focal group of undocumented and uninsured Latinx patients in Philadephia, and second, it offers insights from research done in medical settings. The reader would be right on both counts. My dissertation relies on ethnographic data collected during five years of Philadelphia-based fieldwork completed across medical and non-medical settings. It includes data from field notes, transcriptions of interviews, and a corpus of audio-visual materials. The reader can also estimate that my dissertation boldly underscores the knowledge and insights of the focal participants. Right again! My analysis revealed that undocumented and uninsured immigrants complete many valuable roles within our healthcare system beyond that of simply the patient. One example of this is the participation of undocumented immigrants in
Philadelphia’s 2020 census program known as “Philly Counts,” in which they served as trusted community messengers who helped increase Census participation, thereby increasing federal funds allocated to the city’s health centers, which remain major access points for uninsured and underinsured Philadelphians.

This page 99 passage, however, leaves out two crucial components of my dissertation:
the theoretical foundations and the wider-reaching contributions. Broadly, my dissertation uses frameworks from linguistic and medical anthropology, and more specifically, it utilizes Lynette Arnold’s (2016) concept of “communicative care,” which she defines as “all the ways that language functions to sustain human existence” (38). With this grounding in the excellent work of my predecessors, my dissertation aims to provide nuanced empirical evidence of the lived expertise of patients whose rejection by the healthcare system informs their strategic efforts for policy reform and their movement for the ratification of healthcare as a human right.

References:
Arnold, Lynnette. 2016. “Communicative Care Across Borders: Language, Materiality, and Affect in Transnational Family Life.” Doctoral Dissertation, University of California Santa Barbara.
Elliot Montpellier takes the page 99 test

October 16th, 2024

Page 99 of my dissertation offers only a half-page of writing. The top half contains a screenshot from YouTube of the original soundtrack (OST) for the Hum TV drama Aitebaar (trust) seen below. The page is near the conclusion of the (very long) first chapter, “Drama ascendancy: genealogies and dominance of remediated televisuality.”

The page nevertheless sheds light on an important example in the chapter and a jumping off point for considering the wider dissertation. The chapter that traces connections between print culture, television, and online video distribution in Muslim South Asian media economies. It theorizes ‘ascendancy’ in relation to interlocutors’ framing of their media traditions, lineages, and transmission as well as their labour in the context of ascendant.

The dissertation examines how the digitalizing of broadcast media such as networks’ simulcasting of shows on YouTube, the use of platform analytics, and Big Data audience measurement techniques have shifted the industry’s perceptions of its audience. Through a multi-sited and multimodal ethnographic approach based in Karachi, diasporic communities, and online, the dissertation argues that processes of audience appraisal, feedback, and the segmentation of viewership have not only generated new logics of economization, but also that these cannot be appreciated without contending with the industry’s representation of religiosity.

Screenshot of the Aitebaar OST on YouTube, approximately one year after being uploaded (accessed 7 February 2023)

Aitebaar is one of the drama sets where I spent time getting to know crews, production practices, and rhythms of creative spaces. I first encountered the OST at the headquarters of a major production house, just off Karachi’s commercial center along I.I. Chundrigar Rd. that was doubling as a set on that day. After filming, I went with the cast to a small office to view the completed OST before it was uploaded to YouTube. The OST reflects different ways that dramas extend far beyond the TV series alone, how these extensions generate the dramas’ intermedial power, and the mediatization of their religious vernaculars.

On p. 99, I highlight how lines such as the refrain that is superimposed on the video, meri wafa pe tujh ko, aitebaar na raha, (translates to “My faithfulness/devotion is no longer trusted by you”), contains multiple meanings. This devotion indexes both plot-specific romantic elements as well as metaphysical ones. Such heteroglossia is common in the verses of qawwali and other Urdu poetics. These are appeals to genealogies of musical practice and poetics that feature as central elements for the marketing and consumption of these televisual productions.

Montpellier, Elliot. 2023. “Mediatizing Islam: the digital turn and the promotion of piety in a Pakistani culture industry.” Ph.D. diss., Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Mariapaola Gritti takes the page 99 test

October 7th, 2024

I was hoping page 99 of my dissertation would include data documenting face-to-face interactions among children in Manu’a, American Samoa, from my 2015-2017 fieldwork. No luck. It only briefly completes the description of the framework I developed for analyzing these interactions and, with it, Chapter 2 of the dissertation. (Page 98 will thus have to come to my rescue.) As these pages explain, this framework was to enable me to account for the particular shape and feel of Manu’an children’s interactional universe, and specifically for how central bodily movement, and thus space, seemed to it. My observations here echoed Oceanic discourses about “space [a]s agentively involved in […] the enabling of sociality, and the organization of subjectivities and […] [about] places as caring.”

As I see now more clearly than while writing Chapter 2, a clue towards the framework had come from experiencing the cultural centrality of dance in this context. It dawned on me that the basic fact of dance—as patterned embodied movement that transforms space in meaningful ways—could be seen at work in daily interaction also beyond dance. That is, in daily face-to-face interactions, too, like in dance, participants’ actions were informed by overarching movement (or “choreographic”) logics that influenced how and how often and with what effects they used specific embodied resources—from gestures to speech (a kind of oral gesture) to whole-body motions. Different interactional resources—e.g., telling vs. gesturing each other off during games—afforded different transformations of collective space and the individual bodies in it, facilitating or foreclosing possible next moves and, thereby, possible interaction outcomes.

Across daily activities, I identified three preferred movement logics, which I dubbed staying, flowing, and resounding. As they stayed, flowed, and resounded, Manu’an children experienced interaction outcomes as resulting from their ways of taking up and moving in collective space. I argued that they thus also experienced self, agency, relationality, and power as issuing from embodied practices and as mediated by space. Tracing this space-centered ontogeny of psychosocial experience helped me understand what Manu’ans mean when they say that their island space—epitomized by their lands—is “who they are,” constitutive of both their physical bodies and their identities.

My analysis framed daily face-to-face interaction as a “movement system” embedding specific understandings of social life, to put it with dance anthropologist Adrienne Kaeppler (e.g., 1996), whom I wish I had cited on page 99. In doing so, it highlighted little-explored dimensions of interactional and semiotic practice and of childhood development. As page 99 concludes, foregrounding a key rationale of my dissertation, it matters that this approach was specifically built around indigenous understandings and practices: “this centering matters practically, given that it can yield understandings of child development aligned with Manu’ans’ experiences, and thus useful to support interventions targeting children’s welfare in American Samoa. It also matters in a broader political sense, considering the decolonizing import of understandings of human processes and of research paradigms grounded in indigenous ontologies and epistemologies (e.g., Smith 1999; cf. Watts 2013).”

Kaeppler, Adrienne. 1996. “Dance.” In Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, Volume 1, ed. by David Levinson and Melvin Ember, pp. 309-312. New York: Henry Holt.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. London: Zed Books.

Watts, Vanessa. 2013. “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 2(1):20-34.
Anita Zandstra takes the page 99 test

September 9th, 2024

When I took on this challenge, I was hoping that page 99 of my dissertation would happen to contain some brilliant insight of mine, or at least some fascinating material from my topic of study: a Bolivian comedy series that first appeared on television in the early 2000s. Comedy sketches from this series were later posted to YouTube, where they continued to attract views and comments throughout the Evo Morales presidency (2006-2019), a time of major social and political change in Bolivia. As I show, Bolivian viewers drew on these sketches to discursively construct their sense of regional and national identity and to engage with the social and political processes unfolding at the time.

What I found instead was a page from my second chapter, in which I review the literature on humor, social identity, and social difference and apply insights from previous studies to my analysis of one comedy sketch. After introducing ethnic humor as a means for social groups to construct their own identities and to differentiate between themselves and others, I wrote on page 99, “As ethnic humor shifts over time, it both reveals and contributes to changing configurations of social reality. For these reasons, humor about social identity and social difference can be studied as a way to trace boundary shifts that [take] place in society over time.”

My analysis of this chapter’s comedy sketch bears out this observation. The choice of the sketch’s two protagonists, one of whom is a Camba from the Bolivian lowlands and the other a Colla from the Andean highlands, attests to the salience of these two social groups in Bolivia during the Morales era. At the same time, the ways in which the characters relate to each other point to shifts in popular understandings of what it meant to be Camba in the early 2000s, reflected in viewer comments debating who could claim this locally important social identity.

Considering the place of page 99 in my dissertation has allowed me to reflect on the twists and turns of the writing process. Except for my conclusions, Chapter 2 was the last chapter I wrote and was probably the one I struggled with the most; I had originally planned to include the literature on humor in Chapter 1 and save all sketch analysis for later chapters, but what eventually became Chapter 2 kept demanding a place of its own. In the end, this chapter turned out to be the heart of my dissertation—my tentative answer, to be drawn out in the chapters that follow, to why comedy matters in the serious work of navigating social change.

Anita L. Zandstra. 2024. Identity and alterity in a comedy series from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, during the presidency of Evo Morales. Western Michigan University Ph.D. https://www.proquest.com/docview/3052976852?sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses
Tim Loh takes the page 99 test

July 22nd, 2024

The page 99 test suggests that the core of a text might be found on one of its pages. After I submitted my dissertation to MIT Libraries and turned to page 99, I had to laugh. Page 99 falls smack dab in the middle of chapter two of my dissertation, which examines deaf Jordanians’ engagements with new assistive technologies that have emerged in Amman in the last two decades and the biomedical imaginaries, language ideologies, and religious commitments that shaped these engagements. During my fieldwork from 2021 to 2023, I focused on the cochlear implant—a medical device implanted via surgery that provides its users with electronic access to sound, distributed to eligible deaf Jordanians through a state-affiliated initiative beginning in 2014—and a sign language-centered mobile application—designed by young Arab entrepreneurs in 2019 in conjunction with vocabulary cards to improve literacy among deaf children. That page 99 is in chapter two feels particularly apt because it was the first chapter I began writing while I was still in the middle of doing fieldwork, when I was not yet sure if I had a dissertation in me.

Chapter two examines two contrasting characterizations of Jordanian Sign Language (LIU, from the Arabic lughat al-’ishara al-’urduniyya) among my deaf and hearing interlocutors as either the mother tongue (al-lugha al-’umm) of deaf children or as a kind of broken Arabic (‘arabi mukassar). I move beyond characterizing these discourses as either supposedly positive or negative to argue that they should be understood as forms of rhetoric that must be analyzed in the contexts in which they are strategically deployed. Very early drafts were workshopped with very supportive audiences—as I hope my work will always be!—at the Language and Technology Lab at MIT and the Graduate Student Research Workshop at NYU Abu Dhabi, and a much more polished version went on to win the 2023 Gumperz Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Page 99, in particular, situates the discourse of “LIU as mother tongue” within academic scholarship on language deprivation that has proliferated among researchers of deafness in recent years (psychologists, linguists, cognitive scientists, and others in addition to anthropologists) which names the phenomenon that many deaf children around the globe, especially those given hearing technologies like cochlear implants, are not getting access to normative forms of language and are experiencing the consequences of such deprivation. Because this is happening in Jordan as well, calling LIU “al-lugha al-’umm” in some ways obscures the dismal status quo, which is that many deaf children in Jordan do not in fact have access to the language. In this part of the chapter, then, I wanted to think about the stakes of labeling sign language as a mother tongue (as I also do here and forthcoming in American Anthropologist) and to call attention to considering how we frame why deaf children need access to sign language.

With its explicit focus on language ideologies, this chapter is a microcosm of the larger dissertation, a central theme of which is how ideas, beliefs, and practices around language shape how assistive technologies for deaf Jordanians are used and produced. At its core, it became a study of language in culture (as pointed out by my advisor) in a way that I did not expect until I had the final product in my hands. It strikes me as funny because, when I first began doctoral study at MIT in 2018, I thought I had left linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics (which I had studied as an undergraduate) behind and was going to work only in medical anthropology and science and technology studies. But language—sign and spoken—kept returning in my fieldwork, both as ethnographic concern and theoretical concept and, as it happens, I now situate my research primarily at the intersection of those three (sub)fields. I have never been happier to have been so wrong.

Loh, Timothy Y. 2024. “Entanglements of Language, Religion, and Disability: The Politics of Assistive Technologies for Deaf People in Jordan.” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
David Griffin discusses page 99 of his dissertation

January 29th, 2024

Members of the Sovereign Citizen conspiracy movement have been described as “paper terrorists” because of the way that they attempt to intimidate their enemies with mountains of nonsensical, legal-seeming paperwork. The documents they produce often feature bizarre elements such as atypical spelling and punctuation (names, for example, are often styled “FIRST-MIDDLE: LAST”) and mysterious arrays of postage stamps and thumbprints, with the latter sometimes made in the author’s own blood. For my PhD, I compared a corpus of documents filed by Sovereign Citizens in an American courthouse to a corpus of documents written and filed by actual attorneys. While I found thumbprints aplenty, page 99 has nothing to do with that; in many ways, in fact, its topic is just the opposite.

Page 99 contains two tables relating to the use of explicit negators (i.e. words like “not” and “no”) in the two corpora. I found that these words are used at statistically similar rates and in qualitatively similar manners in Sovereign Citizen texts and legitimate legal texts. While this may not be as attention-getting as the inclusion of actual human blood in some of the texts I examined, it is one of the more important findings of my thesis. Frequent negation is generally held to be one of the more distinctive features of legal English and Sovereign Citizens’ ability to accurately mimic this and related features in their own writings shows that they can’t simply be dismissed as being “bad” at writing legal texts. Instead, those who study the Sovereign Citizen movement should understand that they’re doing something purposefully distinct.

Whether consciously considered by the Sovereign Citizens or not, the animating principle behind their documents seems to be that there is power in the language used by lawyers, and that Sovereign Citizens can not only claim but enhance that power by taking the linguistic features of legitimate legal filings and making them, essentially, stranger. It is my hope that approaching Sovereign Citizens and members of other related conspiracy groups from this perspective will lead to more effective strategies for dealing with the harmful effects of contemporary conspiracy movements. Page 99 might not be the splashiest page in my thesis, but at least in this way, it gets to the heart of the matter (and for the thumbprints and postage stamps, see pages 200 to 211 instead).
Hannah Foster takes the page 99 test

December 18th, 2023

Page 99 is found in my second chapter where I discuss how English becomes iconized (Irvine and Gal 2000) as an elite index through practices of learning English at private educational centers in Astana, Kazakhstan. Page 99 includes an ethnographic example of what I characterize as an ostentatious display of English—the head of a small company, a woman I call Raushan, contacted the educational center that served as my primary field site to ask about private English lessons. Raushan’s request was considered ostentatious because she wanted private (and therefore more expensive) English tutoring that would take place at her office during her lunch break. To demonstrate its ostentatiousness, I recount the educational center director, Zhibek’s, response which was to laugh at how ridiculous it was that “even the heads of tiny companies think they’re so important that everyone should accommodate their schedule and needs.” This page describes one experience of learning English at private educational centers that I try to capture in my dissertation—that of the elite, upper middle class. The remaining content chapters explore other experiences connected to English such as entrepreneurial self-development and aspirations for class mobility.

My dissertation proposes that learning English in private educational centers offers students an opportunity to take up different subjectivities, not just opportunities for finding employment or accessing higher education. I show ethnographically how learning English is one practice among many that enables students to take up elite or entrepreneurial ways of being in the world. I also argue that students’ experiences in the English language classroom reflect broader cultural and ideological shifts that are reshaping contemporary Kazakhstan. Though my interlocutors’ experiences are not unfamiliar to English students living in other areas of the globe, what makes learning English in Astana (and its many frustrations) unique are the private educational centers in which most students encounter English. My dissertation focuses on these centers and the students who frequent them in order to present an ethnographic portrait of those in the middle class in Astana. Page 99 is then one piece of that portrait and reflects a partial but relevant portion of that overall goal.

References:

Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, edited by Paul V. Kroskrity, 35–83. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.
Jonathan A. Gómez takes the page 99 test

October 9th, 2023

From my first steps towards considering how Black Americans hear and represent themselves in musical sound, I have wanted to address the question of how Black musicians can effectively organize around the idea of shared musical histories and practices without straying into essentialist discourses. My goal has been to work towards understanding how sounds recognizable as Black emerge, develop, and transform over time, simultaneously offering a challenge to Blackness(es) as purely biological rather than cultural. Page 99 of my dissertation, “The Way We Play: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical identity,” is a critical point at which I make an intervention into anti-essentialist discourses. Roughly a quarter of the way through my second chapter, a case study of vocalist Alberta Hunter (1895-1984), in a sub-section titled “the qualia of Black voice,” I argue:

While Hunter foregrounds race-based suffering as a component for “authentic” blues performance, her earlier claim that Black performers possess little “tricks” of performance that others frequently overlook, situates blues performance in practice rather than biology. The instability of these tricks from performance to performance, modified intentionally (as Hunter did to avoid a stable model for [vocalist Sophie] Tucker’s mimicry) or not, further marks an underlying improvisatory aesthetic which makes a singular set of performance characteristics difficult, or impossible, to grasp. I further argue that Hunter’s understanding does not reflect a biological notion of race but rather one socio-politically and culturally rooted in the particular experience of Black Americans within the racial hierarchies of U.S. society. (page 99)

The culturally-rooted practices to which I refer function semiotically as indexes of Blackness for those who hear them, commenting metapragmatically (cf. Silverstein 1993) on Black musical history through the act of performance. I reframe these practices as “musical qualia of Blackness,” sonic embodiments or manifestations of the quality Blackness, shared and transformed between and amongst Black American musicians across time and space.

Page 99 is a point of transition in my argument made via Black feminist scholar bell hooks’s thinking on “strategic essentialism” in her oft-cited Teaching to Transgress (1994). She argues that adopting an essentialist position may function as “a strategic response to domination and to colonization,” (hooks 1994, 83), offering an important lesson for the study of music. For Black musicians whose histories and culture are so frequently stolen, appropriated, or “silenced” (Trouillot 1995), music has been a critical site for the development, maintenance, and transmission of this historical and cultural knowledge. Such processes of knowledge production and sharing are accomplished via a kind of musical interdiscursivity (cf. Silverstein 2005), connecting Black musicians in the present to performances and performers from Black musical history. In that way, I pose a challenge to anti-essentialist considerations of Black music, by augmenting hooks’s argument, insisting that Black musical identities are historically-grounded and carefully “curated,” to borrow form Daphne Brooks (2021), within Black communities. Page 99 is a useful window into the thought process behind my desire to understand to offer an alternative to essentialist understandings of Blackness, taking seriously the histories, experiences, and choices made by Black musicians across time and space.

Jonathan A. Gómez. 2022. “The Way We Play”: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical Identity. Harvard University, PhD diss.
Dillon Ludemann takes the page 99 test

October 2nd, 2023

The subject of my dissertation, the anonymous image-board forum called 4chan, is a space that, while many who know of it often have a very strong, negative reaction to (and usually for good reason). My project showed me overwhelmingly that 4chan is a space that defies categorization, which I have taken to heart within my dissertation and the research that followed.

Simply, my dissertation examined what many would consider to be some of the worst parts of this website (yes, there is a hierarchy!). That is, I looked at what is widely recognized as a politically incorrect subforum, known colloquially as /pol/, and how users on this particular board talk about politics.

On page 99 of my dissertation, one particular statement sticks out to me:

“Given the continued description of the board throughout this project, one may wrongly infer that talk on this website is always one hundred percent wild; that discourse on this website is always incredibly visible, violent, and chaotic, with all capital letters and exclamation points deriding all manner of politics and practices. While these types of display are still obviously present in this space, there is generally just as much dialogue that appears in a more tempered or even-keeled manner.”

While I cannot speak to the quality of work this page represents for my overall work (I’d like to think I did a solid job), this statement speaks to some of the way that I was drawn to studying 4chan in the first place. This is a digital space that, for many anthropologists and others not within the field, is considered lawless, chaotic, and almost impermeable for scholarship. 4chan, and /pol/ more specifically, exists as a digital boogeyman, a place by which many have heard of, but few well-meaning folk ever explore, or in some cases, is seen as the entrance to the dark web. My work has sought to complicate this notion and legitimate exploration of this space as a linguistic anthropologist. Not as a way to condone the actions and discourses that occur within /pol/, but rather to offer an examination of digitally located, far-right political discourses, such as the alt-right (which will no doubt resurge this upcoming US presidential election cycle) that does not outright dismiss, but instead highlights the important of studying these spaces, and the impacts that it has on other social media platforms, and beyond.

Dillon Ludemann. 2022. ” And Their Name was Legion: Discourse and Politics on 4chan’s /pol/ Board.” SUNY Binghamton Phd.
Eléonore Rimbault takes the p. 99 test

September 18th, 2023

No matter the size of shows, and the actual count of the public, the Indian circus works hard to appear larger-than-life. The image of the circus, in other words, is in many ways larger than the show itself, the publicity that fuels it traveling ahead and enticing expectant crowds before a company’s arrival. The circus and its image bleed into each other, they exist symbiotically; when one is attacked, the other suffers with it.

In my dissertation, I track the ongoing disappearance of the circus in India as performances get associated with accusations that prove increasingly difficult to shrug off, including charges of animal mistreatment.

On P. 99, I locate one such shift in the public’s perception of the circus to a period from 1988 to 1998. Drawing from reports and opinion pieces appearing mainly in the Times of India, I track animal rights NGOs’ strategies as they shifted from earlier suits against individual street performers and animal tamers to large-scale reports and rescue operations targeting itinerant circus companies. Because the public did not tend to differentiate between one company and another, these strategies ultimately led to the entire profession being seen as complicit, at all levels, in the mistreatment of animals.

Caption (translated from Malayalam): This circus bear rides a motorcycle by himself

Source: Mathrubhumi weekly, January 1955.

P. 99 also notes the class disparities that mark the stark divide between the ideals of interspecies ethics that exist among circus practitioners and the more abstract notions of humane treatment and harm stipulated by members of animal rights organizations removed from the material conditions of work with animals.

Interestingly, both sides play upon the image of animals and humans working side by side in the circus foregrounded by circus publicity: one in the name of sociality, the other in the name of exploitation. Both also invoke the motif of the circus’s disappearance to their own end—one to harken back to the circus’s former glory and bestow upon it the mantle of an expiring art form, the other to look forward to a future in which its practices have been definitively relegated to the past.

Ironically, I claim, both sides, in insisting on the circus’s disappearance, have contributed in their way to sustain the ongoing presence of this performance, whose survival now seems predicated precisely on its being an object of dispute, always disappearing, yet never out of view.

Eléonore Rimbault. 2022. Disappearance in the Ring: The Perpetual Unmaking of India’s Big Top Circus. University of Chicago Phd.