Grace East: Reckonings whisks us away on a journey through time and space and introduces us to how people engage(d) with numbers in a huge variety of socio-historical contexts. Put simply: you seem to ask, “How are numbers used and why?” Toward the end of the book, you provide a nicely crystallized sentiment that runs throughout the text: “I see numerals as representational systems, related to practices of literacy and writing, not as computational systems” (150). Can you elaborate on this central idea and discuss a few key takeaways you hope readers will leave with after finishing this book?
Stephen Chrisomalis: I’ve been researching the anthropology of numbers for over twenty years now and one of the things that’s been most consistent is that, whenever I talk to people about my work, regardless of their discipline or theoretical orientation, they conflate numbers and math. And as it turns out, a lot of anthropologists got into the field in order to run as far away from mathematics as possible. Frankly anyone who has read anything I’ve ever written knows that my work requires much more knowledge of linguistics, semiotics, and philology than it does mathematics – which should make a whole different audience run in terror.
There is a pervasive Euro-American ideology that almost values or privileges innumeracy, as stridently argued by the mathematician John Allen Paulos. This is seen in the sort of person who is vaguely proud of not being able to calculate a tip or manage daily finances. I see that too. But I also see the corresponding ideology that numbers exist in this strange realm of mathematics, far removed from all other pursuits, only accessible to a special type of person. But in reality, numbers are everyday things, used by everyone to manage time, to make a list, or as any sort of label for things. In other words, they act as semiotic resources for managing practical socio-cognitive problems. In Reckonings, I show that refocusing attention on what people actually do with the numbers they’ve got, rather than focusing on them as an object of awe, is absolutely imperative for a discipline like anthropology, that still avoids the subject of numbers to a large degree.
Grace East: The ways in which language universals and particulars appear cross-linguistically serve as a frequent touchstone throughout the text. You use numbers as a specific lens through which to observe the parameters of human cognition. What is it about numbers that provides such a fitting representation of the complicated nature of identifying language universals as well as cognitive affordances and constraints?
Stephen Chrisomalis: Like a lot of people trained in linguistics in the 90s (and earlier), I could hardly escape the massive, almost hegemonic, Chomskyan view of linguistics, which regarded universals as widespread and grounded fully in the brain. Against this, in linguistic anthropology of course we had a more culturalist view, which regarded variation as the norm and universals, if present, as generally uninteresting. Neither of these positions (extremes, even caricatures, of course) ever appealed much to me, but they were there nonetheless in the background.
I began my work on numbers more than twenty years ago with the insight that number has two distinct sets of representations: number words (one two three) and number symbols (123), each of which occur very widely cross-culturally. And among users of numerical notation, the two systems co-occur in the same individuals. While each system has cross-linguistic and cross-cultural patterns, their patterns, structures, and regularities are not the same. You can’t predict the structure of a numerical notation from its users’ languages. Nevertheless, you can say a lot about what doesn’t occur in numerical notations; there are some powerful constraints, in other words. But these can’t come from a purported universal grammar, because they aren’t the same constraints that operate on linguistic numerals, and, frankly, because numerical notation isn’t a universal, but a product of specific social, technical, and historical contexts – largely those associated with the state.
So where do these regularities come from, if not hard-wired (a bad metaphor, if commonplace)? The key is partly that numerical notations are visual notations rather than auditory ones; their (relative) permanence and their dependence on visual processing make them different than number words. So the brain matters, but also it matters for what purposes and for what audiences writers are constructing these representations. That takes us back to the insight that numbers are for being seen and read, more than they are being manipulated as arithmetical objects. Once we understand that, we can incorporate activity and behavior into our analysis of why the patterns and structures that exist are there, both in number words and number symbols.
Grace East:I really enjoyed your chapters seeking to uncover why we don’t regularly use Roman numerals anymore, I think because it felt like we were along for the ride on a historical mystery quest. In these sections, you explain that the decline of Roman numerals must be accounted for based not on a retrospective conception of their utility (or lack thereof) in comparison to Western numerals, but rather an acknowledgement of the “confluence of specific economic, social, and communicative factors,” such as the invention of the printing press and increasing literacy rates (116). What about this historical quandary compelled you to look deeper for an answer? How can the lessons learned from these findings be applied more broadly, both within anthropology and outside of it?
Stephen Chrisomalis: If I were to write an article and claim that Facebook is the best of all possible social media, I would be rightly laughed out of the academy. But the claim that our current (Indo-Arabic / Western) numerals 0123456789 are the best ones possible, and that they replaced Roman numerals in Europe through a sort of survival of the fittest, is so widespread that I would say that in some sense it is the central myth about numbers. It’s this still-vital vestige of unilinear evolutionism, deeply unquestioned and surely ethnocentric, that has retained its acceptability in otherwise serious historical and social-scientific work.
But it also makes no sense to pretend like nothing happened at all over the last five hundred years, during which many, many numerical notations – not just the Roman numerals, but dozens of systems worldwide, have ceased to be used or are retained only for vestigial purposes. Without fetishizing modernity or treating it as a special object of anthropology, I ask, in Reckonings, if the Roman numerals were so bad, why were they retained as long as they were, and why only in the 15th and 16th centuries did they lose this purported notational contest. This builds on classic social science – think Immanuel Wallerstein or Eric Wolf – as well as discourse analysis on the ideologies underpinning the myth – in a way that I hope complements rather than challenges the cognitive approaches I use alongside them.
So for instance, as it turns out, no one in Western Europe seems actually to have complained about the inefficiency of Roman numerals (at least not in writing) until the late 17th century – long after they had been replaced throughout the continent. In fact, not until the 19th century did this kind of discourse become commonplace. The Roman numerals were replaced quietly, slowly, not by imperial fiat or by some cabal of number experts, but through the transformations in education, commerce, and literacy that accompanied mercantile capitalism between 1400 – 1600. That’s a time period – whether we call it late medieval or early modern, I don’t care – that precious few anthropologists devote much time or energy to, which I think is a serious mistake.
Grace East:One of my favorite takeaways from this book is that numbers are not objective abstractions, but rather socially and historically contingent human inventions and practices. To this end, I was particularly struck by the distinction you make between numerical recording (a final representation, like a written numeral) and numerical manipulation (the tools to do arithmetic, like an abacus). Can you talk more about how you arrived at the relationship between these and how it serves to impact our ideologies and biases around computation and cognition both diachronically and synchronically?
Stephen Chrisomalis: There’s a very famous story first told by the mathematician G.H. Hardy, about a visit to his ailing friend Srinivasa Ramanujan in the hospital. Hardy, upon arriving, recounted that he had taken a taxicab whose number was 1729, which he thought was very boring, only to be told by Ramanujan that it was very interesting indeed – the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways. This anecdote was meant to impress the reader of the impressive intellect of Ramanujan, and while it may do so, it should also illustrate that for almost everyone else, including most mathematicians, 1729 is just the number of the cab, and its purpose is semiotic – a label, a name for the cab, whose purpose is to distinguish it from all others. It’s not that the rest of us aren’t doing anything with 1729 – it’s just that we aren’t computing with it.
The linkage between written numbers and arithmetic is a historically contingent one, dependent on widespread literacy and formal education and a social system that relies heavily on recorded computation. Most people historically who have had formal arithmetic education have separated the process of calculation – often with beads, boards, or other devices from the writing of results. There isn’t anything like Roman numeral ‘pen and paper’ calculation – although, for the record, I know of no fewer than five independent scholarly attempts over the past century to show how the Romans might have calculated using Roman numerals. But we know perfectly well how the Romans calculated – with the pebble-board abacus, just as the suan pan and soroban are still widely taught and used in China and Japan, respectively. The use of material engagement through these devices is ideologized as backward, although there is considerable evidence in the cognitive science literature for the inscription of abacus arithmetic in East Asia into powerful mental models – that is, algorithms.
What’s different about pen and paper is that your results (and your errors) have some permanence and can be scrutinized (by a teacher or supervisor), that makes it useful in a particular socioeconomic setting. The form factor of pen and paper (or chalk and board) arithmetic produces not simply a result but a means to a result, a written record. But in most historical settings, computation and recording have been separate activities, and so I want to make readers aware that this linkage is neither necessary nor inevitable.
Christopher Ball:Onscreen/Offscreen tracks Tamil film of the first decade and a half of the 2000s through analysis of different feature films, including interviews with actors, directors, and audience members, and ethnography of filmmaking and reception. This approach shows the intertextuality that ties together Tamil cinema, in spite of its own internal divisions between “class” and “mass,” “film” and “cinema.” At the same time, Chapters 1 to 4 deal, in turn, with the narrative figures “the hero,” “the heroine,” “the fool/jester,” and lastly “the auteur/director.” Can you say something about how as an author you discerned the presentation of your analysis and your interaction with, and presentation of, these characters?
Constantine V. Nakassis: Thanks for this question, Chris and for engaging with the book! This book is based on my work on the Tamil cinema of South India dating back to my very first fieldwork as a graduate student almost twenty years ago. But I didn’t want to write an ethnography of the industry per se. Rather, I had certain theoretical issues – for example, about the ontology of the image, its performativity, about spectatorship, the production format of images, realism – that I wanted to explore and elaborate on in each chapter of the book via the ethnographic analysis of a particular film or set of films. I also think having worked on Tamil cinema for an extended time gave me a longitudinal perspective that was invaluable in shaping how the book developed and how I came to think about its internal organization. From my first work in the early and mid 2000s to my dissertation work in the late 2000s to post-PhD work in the 2010s, I repeatedly encountered claims and desires for a “new” realist (“class”) cinema – and the announcement that it had (almost!) arrived – coupled with a lament about the untimely performativity of fantastical images of the industry’s larger-than-life “mass” heroes; as I came to realize, this ambivalence was a constitutive feature of the political field of images, despite whatever real changes there were across this time period (and before). Why and to what effects?
This question helped frame the book, specifically splitting it into two parts: the first (“Presence/Representation”) primarily concerning the presence of images and the second (“Representation/Presence”) their representationality. Each of those two parts then split into two chapters: Chapter 1 focusing on the performative presence of images of so-called mass heroes and Chapter 2 of heroines and dancers (whose presence manifests as a kind of negative, sexualizing stigma), and Chapters 3 and 4 focusing on attempts in the industry to create representationalist images, either in the mode of parody (of heroes) or realist, director-anchored films. But if Part I focuses on the insistent presence of the image, and how this traverses onscreen and offscreen (the image spilling beyond the screen, but also the social getting introjected into the film text), each of the cases also feature a countermovement, where such images get framed representationally by their directors, causing an interesting kind of friction internal to the image. Part II, by contrast, explores how filmmakers and other stakeholders to the image attempt to bracket and denude the image’s performativity, often by putting the hero under (narrative) erasure. But even in doing so, a certain kind of performativity bubbles through the citational frame. How is that managed? And to what ends?
While I didn’t know that the book would take this form when I was doing my fieldwork, I did know that there were certain incidents, or films, or industry dynamics that came up in my research that I wanted to understand and unpack: like in what became Chapter 1, where a slap in a film scene caused an uproar among fans because it involved a junior actor playing a character who slaps another character played by a huge hero-star, Ajith Kumar; or, in Chapter 3, the first full-on spoof in the industry, Thamizh Padam (‘Tamil Film’) or, in Chapter 4, the outcrop of small-budget “realist” films in the 2000s; or, in Chapter 2, the fact that most heroine-actresses in postmillennial Tamil cinema are not considered ethnolinguistically Tamil. As I worked through these various incidents and films and dynamics, I saw how they spoke to certain theoretical issues that I kept circling around; in particular, this issue of representationality and performativity.
This had another effect, which is that certain characters – the hero, heroine, the comedian, the director – came to the fore in each chapter. This wasn’t by design, but it had to do with the fact that each of these characters is a critical node on which semiotic dynamics/achievements like representationality/performativity are themselves reflexively centered in the Tamil cinema: the hero and heroine as sites of (positive and negative) plenitude and performative presence, the comedian as piercing that plenitude with parodic self-reflexive humor, and the director as an alternate site of authority over filmic and cinematic semiosis. Here, too, emerged something else that became a central preoccupation of the book, the question of who or what is responsible for the image (a Goffmanian question of the politics of the production format). In certain moments we see the actors – those animating heroes and heroines and comedians – held responsible for the images in which they appear (as presencing them in some way); but at other moments, it is the opposite, where the director holds the burden for the image (as representing their vision or agenda or whatever). So how and when does one or the other (or both or neither) happen? And what follows from this?
Chris Ball: As you were just saying, the play of representation and performativity is a central theme of Onscreen/Offscreen. In attempting to bring together linguistic anthropology and film studies, you wade into territory that is often characterized by a rejection of “linguistic” or “representationalist” accounts of filmic or other image texts. How did the framing of realist representation and performative presence as distinct but connected, indeed complexing mutually implicating, allow you to reframe such divisions or disciplinary impasses?
Constantine V. Nakassis: Yeah, it’s true that American cinema and media studies, but also visual and media anthropology, often pit “language” (or “representation”) and “image” against each other; and along this axis of difference (as Susan Gal and Judy Irvine put it) a whole host of other contrasts cluster: logic/affect, mediated/immediate, aural/visual, sensuous/abstract, and so on and so forth. In film studies, I think that this had to do with the limits and failures of structuralism, which invested so deeply in the notion of a “film language.” There is something so ironic in this, of course, since what such structuralisms-beyond-language did was to take what is unique about language and then ask how it could be used to illuminate other semiotic systems. But the whole thing was bound to fail, definitionally! In film studies, scholars like Christian Metz realized this contradiction at the very outset, but they gave it a try anyway and working through the failures pushed into new territory (for example, by coming to think with Benveniste on enunciation) that interestingly resonated with what was going on in linguistic anthropology (not that anyone realized this at the time, since they weren’t reading each other’s work).
In any case, and by contrast, in the US, this failure became a reason to throw the semiotic baby out with the semiological bathwater. But for me, the very division of image versus language is misguided from the outset; it’s a semiotic ideology, as Webb Keane calls it. The more interesting move, it seems to me, is to treat semiotic ideologies (like this one) as ethnographic components of how people experience semiosis, and thus how semiosis itself unfolds. If seen in this way, then we can start to ask, well, how and under what conditions does a film image represent and seem to stand apart from what it represents? And when does it performatively presence and act? When does the image seem to reach through the screen into the events of its happening and presence itself? And when is that possibility blocked, and the image and screen are kept “within” themselves via some proverbial fourth wall? Tamil cinema is rife with these performative perforations; but it’s also filled with realist representations too! And my point in the book is that an image isn’t necessarily one or the other but may be one or the other depending on the point of view, or maybe both at one and the same time, or at different times, and so on and so forth. And here is where things get interesting for me. Because what I found in the cases I looked at is that the image harbors both potentialities and tendencies, each brimming out of the screen, each in dialogue with the other, sometimes amplifying, sometimes dampening each other. So, there is a tussle and a multiplicity – a dialogism, indeed, a politics (and in the Tamil case, where actors often form populist political parties, a real electoral politics) – internal to the image. Yet when we try to study this, we realize that whatever is “inside” the image is the effect of semiotic processes (of entextualization and contextualization, in our technical jargon) that take place in a sort of constitutive “outside” to the image.
And this raised a further question for me: what kind of a thing is an image such that this is the case? And if this “is” – a question of “ontology” – is political, which it is (claims about “what is”are THE site of the political, aren’t they?!), then these semiotic questions take us directly into what I discuss in the book as an “ontological politics of the image.” Hence, to return to your question (sorry for the long tangent!), the book tries to provide a way thinking about cinema that allows us to get beyond the stale oppositions of image versus language, or of “film language.” Hopefully, this will resonate with folks in film and visual studies, and put them in touch with linguistic anthropology, and vice versa. It always struck me as a shame that there hasn’t been any meaningful traffic between these fields (since, at least, Sol Worth and Christian Metz), especially since both deal with the most complex of problems of meaning and each has developed incredibly sophisticated semiotic approaches to them. The book is trying to create that dialogue.
Chris Ball:I’d like to ask more about your concept of the “ontological politics of the image” and its potential links to debates in anthropology at large. You introduce the concept in the Introduction by questioning the givenness of the image as object, and by suggesting a pragmatic approach to the multiplicity of the image’s construction in varying sociohistorical and cultural contexts. The cross-cultural stability of the image, if we can hold on to something concrete, lies in its existence as a “political fact,” such that for filmmakers, critics, and viewers alike, in Chicago or Madurai, “Contestations about what an image is, is the very nature of images.”
Constantine V. Nakassis: Right, exactly, and this connects up with what we were just talking about, this question of whether and when an image is a performative act or a realist representation; these, of course, are just two very simplified ways of talking about the heterogenous being of images; as we were saying, they are dimensions or potentialities or tendencies that get actualized in particular contexts in particular ways. And if such actualization is up for grabs, as I found it to be, then we need to be attending to the “ontological politics” (this being Annemarie Mol’s phrase) that condition the being and becoming of images. This, it seems to me, is the nature of images as we find them: stakeholders to images (makers, audiences, various institutions, including various organs the state; in India, e.g., the Censor Board) contest and shape what images come to be, what they should (or should not) be, and so on. So, there is a kind of semiotic relativity at the heart of the question of being. And this itself requires that we take a particular ontological position, a semiotic realism (as you yourself have argued in other contexts) that insists on the reality of generals – in this case, semiotic-cum-social facts – but sees them as (the outcomes of) dynamic processes.
Chris Ball: So how does your approach to the contested construction of images and the possible multiplicity of their ontological status connect to wider trends in anthropological theory? I’m thinking about the Ontological Turn, obviously, but also about the general (post-)post-structuralist, post-colonial, post-modern, post-human, and so on, engagements with multiplicity, fractures, and frictions between worlds? What is your stake with this book in such conversations?
CVN: In this book, much more so than those trends in anthropological theory (e.g., the Ontological Turn), my discussion is in a direct conversation with the foundational film critic and theorist André Bazin and his “ontology of the photographic image.” This has and continues to be a central issue in film studies. So, my aim, in addressing the question of what an image is, is to reformulate the question of being through a pragmatist approach to semiosis, but also with attention to the open horizons of possibility, and relativity, as I was saying before, that ethnographic theory at its best can provide. To do so, then, I am thinking with, but also against, Bazin to ask, how can we reconceptualize the so-called “ontology of the photographic image” processually and ethnographically, from a disciplinary perch (linguistic anthropology) and empirical archive (commercial Tamil cinema) that has been very peripheral to these discussions?
Of course, the so-called Ontological Turn, among other movements in anthropology, has also tried to decenter certain philosophical positions that also animate the (Bazinian) questions in film studies (i.e., there are common touchstones). And insofar as this is the case, there is a resonance there. (And, certainly, my uptake of Mol’s phrase also connects this work to actor network theory and Latour, if indirectly.) But there are also major differences between what I am doing and the Ontological Turn. For example, there is a kind of relativism in the Ontological Turn that I find problematic. And, as you’ve pointed out in a recent paper at the 2022 AAAs, (semiotic) relativity is not the same as (cultural/ontological) relativism. In fact, a comparative account of the relativity of languages or images (or physical processes, for that matter) demonstrates that there are general properties that undercut the strong relativism in certain versions of the Ontological Turn. Indeed, the fact of the multiple ontic tendencies within images that we were discussing a moment ago implies a set of processes that traverse “worlds” or what not; as I argue in the book, it implies a politics of being that produces that very ontic multiplicity.
It’s worth underlining that an ontology is an account or theory (-logy) of being (ōn, ont-); it is a claim on being. And to say an account – or theory or claim – is to imply a plurality (hence the political aspect!): ontologies and modes of being (in a dialectical relation, of course). But it’s a mistake, in my opinion, to think that for every “world” (or every “culture” or “epoch”) there an ontology (or “worldview”), or that for every medium there is a different mode of being, like analogue versus digital images, as some people have suggested in visual studies. And again, this is because the multiplicity of being is intrinsic or internal, and yet also distributed, extimate. It’s not a pluralism, and that’s because being is a dynamic political fact.
Another implication of this is that while this book is about the Tamil cinema of South India, with a real serious consideration of its particularities, ultimately through theorizing those particularities the story is about much broader features, relations, and processes of images (and semiosis more generally), whether in film or otherwise, whether in Tamil Nadu or elsewhere.
Chris Ball: You talk about realism throughout the book but approach it most directly in Chapter 4. You end up mostly agreeing with Bazin on cinematic realism, though you qualify that it is not because of an indexical trace of light between reality and (celluloid) film, but rather because the connection to the real is political. Realism is an achievement, an effect rather than a cause in this formulation. I’m struck by the similarity of this move to that which linguistic anthropology has been articulating with respect to language for a long time. Rather than starting with the assumption of language as an ontological object that is given, analysts have turned increasingly to articulate how multimodal communicative practices and their politics, together with their (metapragmatic) frames of interpretation, effectively yield familiar domains we label as grammar, or discourse, or language writ large. Does that analogy make sense, and did you think about that sort of cross modal iconicity, either taking a set of analytic tools from one domain such as linguistic anthropology to another like film studies, or claiming that language and image are after all similar, in writing the book?
Constantine V. Nakassis: Yes, it definitely makes sense! I am a linguistic anthropologist and Onscreen/Offscreen is a book of linguistic anthropology. In the book I call this a “linguistic anthropology of cinema,” and some amount of discussion is devoted to explaining what that phrase means. So, in one sense, I am treating cinema in ways similar to how linguistic anthropologists have approached “language,” and precisely how you characterize it. Part of what that means is transferring advances and tools made in one domain (“language”/discourse) to another (film/cinema).
But I’m not sure if we should see this as an analogy, as if cinema was like language (or discourse), and thus one can extend linguistic anthropology outwards, as if its center was always and only language. Part of my discomfort with this way of stating it is that I don’t see my work as an application of linguistic anthropological tools to something else that is not proper to the field, as much as I see this as linguistic anthropology, period. And part of the reason I insist on this is because to not so insist (and to take the book as an application) would reinscribe a certain center of linguistic anthropology as the study of “language” “in” …, and then you can fill in the blank with all those substantives that we are familiar with (“culture,” “society,” “interaction,” “use/practice,” or whatever). Doing this recapitulates a picture of language—a formalist, referentialist, structuralist vision of language as autonomous, sui generis “system”—that the very move of adding the “in culture/society/interaction” is meant to deconstruct! So, part of what I try to show in Onscreen/Offscreen, and in other work, is why this is ultimately an unproductive gesture. Of course, it’s not untrue historically, since much of the field has been concerned with language in culture, society, and so on. But, as I’ve tried to argue, even when this seems to be the case, what we are studying in such cases is not language as such, but rather the limits of the very construct of language to capture semiosis in (and across) its contexts of happening; and further, that by pushing through language we open up all sorts of interesting horizons beyond where we started. And those horizons are what ground us (even if we always start from where we came). Hence my claim that Onscreen/Offscreen is a book of linguistic anthropology even though – and maybe especially because – what I am focused on is cinema (and not language, or speech, in films).
But interestingly, what this also means is that this is a book that is not only about cinema. Rather, as you point out, and as I was saying earlier, it is trying to get at certain semiotic dynamics that are not medium-specific. I have come to realize that thinking in terms of medium specificity is a cul-de-sac. It is, at best, self-limiting and, at worst, reductive and essentialist. It may be productive for disciplinary political projects (to zone off some domain of study, say, language for linguistics, film for film studies, and so on and so forth), but intellectually it narrows thought. So I am absolutely not interested in purifying the (film) image and trying to define its uniqueness, or definitional specificity. That would just reproduce the very problematic, blinkered mode of inquiry that linguistic anthropology, in its critique of that very form of thinking as concerns language (focusing on what makes it peculiar and unique: its essence as a system for denotation), has rendered unstable and untenable. So, in moving outwards from the yoke of language to images, my aim is not to suggest that we rest there and call it a day. Rather, I would endorse Peirce’s metaphor for scientific inquiry as walking through a bog. We must plant our feet somewhere, but only to always have to pick up and move, for if we stand content too long in one place, we sink. We have to move forward and explore, in this case, looking for what traverses what has been categorized as film and language. Now, I don’t mean to collapse each to the other, or to deny that there may be specificities; rather, my aim is to open up a clearing for thought in ways that propel us forward and make connections with other fields.
For me, this general attitude toward inquiry implies an open vision for the field, for a linguistic anthropology of …, where that ellipsis is to be filled with as many possible possessors of the genitive that we can find, from cinema to spam filters to painting to ethics to cryptocurrency to … . It can all be linguistic anthropology. And it is: our wonderful colleagues are already pursuing all these things and more! So, that ellipsis is an invitation for us to open up and for others to find their way in. From my point of view, we should be pitching a big tent, not policing the borders or redoubling on the centers. This book is an effort to that end.
Onscreen/Offscreen is open access and available here.
Page 99 of my thesis opens with an evocative image:
‘Sleepy Cloncurry, the scene of more unfulfilled promises than any other town in Australia, clung to its horses and its camels’.
This quote from the historian Geoffrey Blainey about the mining town of Cloncurry in Outback Australia suggests an affective entanglement between place, ideology, and the more than human. Here Cloncurry is both a ‘scene’ and something agentic in its own right, something that ‘clings’: it is where the modernist and capitalist promises of taming the wilderness and striking it rich through mining remain unfulfilled, but it is also that which persists in sticky relation to these dreams through the companion species that were first brought to Australia to assist in realising those promises. Later in the page, I add to Blainey’s description:
“During the economic downturn of the 1920s and 1930s, when the price of copper fell by nearly fifty percent, most mining hubs quickly became ghost towns, houses were moved whole to new places, and settler-colonial hope for the region’s expansion remained tentative”.
And yet, through this and many cycles of boom and bust that followed, a sense of optimism—perhaps a ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant 2011)—remained. In these precarious conditions, people did and still do build lives, wage politics, and dream of futures.
My PhD, based on fieldwork conducted in the Cloncurry region in 2017, charts such cruel optimism and ideology in relation to narratives of place and belonging. In particular, I am interested in the affective and material afterlives of modernist narratives of ‘taming the wilderness’ and ‘closing the frontier’ in settler-colonial states. Thinking with the rubble of ghost towns, the vacant places where homes once were, changing approaches to economic development, and the introduced species that now run wild in the landscape, I suggest that settler colonial visions of closing the frontier in Outback Australia failed. I ask what that means for settler descendants living in the region today and their claims over Indigenous lands. I focus on how non-indigenous settler-descendants express and legitimate their affective and economic relationships with place in relation to contestation over land use for conservation and Native Title.
By pointing to a long history of the ‘unfulfilled promises’ of settler colonial ideology in Outback Australia, my page 99 suggests something of the problem of non-indigenous people’s belonging in settler-colonial states when that belonging has historically been predicated on ideologies that manifest in violence against indigenous lands and peoples. It also implies the question of how one might draw from new narratives and engage in new affective relationships to construct new belongings.
Works cited: Berlant, L. G. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Alana Brekelmans. 2021. Out There, back then: chronotopes of presence and absence in Outback Australia. University of Queensland, PhD Thesis.
Jeremy Rud: Linguists have long called out the language attitudes that perpetuate the myth that racialized, regional, and gendered dialects are supposedly bad English. What does your book add to this discussion? How does your work expand or complicate our understanding of English language variation in the United States?
Lindsey Clouse: My research shows how deeply entrenched these language attitudes are in popular culture, and how they, in fact, have become shortcuts for characterization in film. If a character speaks with a stereotypical blue collar Southern dialect, for instance, it signals to the audience that this character is uneducated and probably racist and/or misogynist. We see an example of this in Four Christmases (2008), in which the main character’s father and brothers are loud, drunk, and misogynist, and all speak blue collar Southern dialects despite the film taking place in San Francisco. The main character himself is smart and likable and, naturally, speaks so-called standard English. And because the U.S. is still very segregated, many Americans are exposed to these stigmatized dialects primarily or exclusively through the media they consume, so it’s no surprise that these language attitudes persist when mainstream film is perpetuating them constantly.
It’s also important to note that the dialects we hear in movies are not, for the most part, true to life. Instead, Hollywood has created mediated versions of these dialects that draw upon their most well-known features, a process known as iconization. The movie version of Black English, for instance, tends to overuse features like habitual be (as in “He be late,” meaning “He is frequently late,” not “He is late right now”) and omit features like questions with no subject-auxiliary inversion (as in “What that is?”). Thus the Hollywood version of Black English doesn’t represent real speech particularly well, though most non-Black audiences perceive it as authentic.
Jeremy Rud: After systematically analyzing nearly 500 films, yet devoting individual chapters to only five dialect groups, what conclusions can you draw about intersectionality from the data set? What is the relationship between visual and oral/aural representations of diversity in contemporary American film?
Lindsey Clouse: First, although improvements are slowly being made, Hollywood still has a serious diversity problem. In the 493 films I examined, women make up less than a quarter of protagonists, Black women make up only 1.4% of protagonists, and Latinx characters make up only 1.5%. And perhaps even more concerningly, there are no queer protagonists at all. And these are the top-grossing films of the last 20 years—the films that are getting seen by the most moviegoers. The stories that Hollywood is telling are still by and large the stories of White, cishet men. Characters with intersectional identities are almost nonexistent in the most popular films and when they do appear, they rarely have major roles.
Some films do make obvious efforts to include visual diversity, but linguistic diversity is completely absent. Shazam! (2019), for instance, features a diverse coalition of orphans-turned-superheroes (though the protagonist is an able-bodied White male), yet these low-income inner-city kids all somehow speak “standard” English. We see something similar in The Matrix franchise and a number of other big-budget franchises including, I’m sad to say, Star Trek.
Speaking a stigmatized dialect will relegate you to a very narrowly defined set of roles in film. Black English, for example, is used almost exclusively by comedic and criminal characters and minor characters with small parts. Will Smith code-switches into Black English to deliver jokes in films like the Men in Black and Bad Boys franchises, and when playing a criminal in films such as Suicide Squad (2016), but uses “standard” English for serious roles such as I Am Legend (2007) and The Pursuit of Happyness (2006). With very few exceptions, Hollywood simply does not allow serious protagonists or even serious secondary characters to use stigmatized dialects.
Jeremy Rud: What was one unexpected result of your analysis? What most shocked, surprised, or inspired you? Considering each film’s linguistic representations of minorities, what films do you now appreciate more and what films soured on you and why?
Lindsey Clouse: I was expecting stereotypes to be present in the data, but I was surprised by just how prevalent they turned out to be. For instance, almost a quarter of Spanish-accented and Spanish-influenced English speakers in the filmset are inmates, ex-cons, or criminals. I was also caught off guard by the link between grammar and morality in White Southern speakers. White Southern-speaking characters who use “nonstandard” grammar features are almost twice as likely to be bad people in their films, to engage in unambiguously immoral behaviors like murder, rape, adultery, and so on without showing remorse or being redeemed. And this is a trope separate from the stereotypically racist Southern character; White Southern speakers who use supposedly nonstandard grammar are only slightly more likely to be racist than those who use the grammar of the dominant culture.
I was also pretty horrified by the amount of blackvoice and other kinds of mockery that show up in these films. Mainstream Hollywood clearly still considers it acceptable for White standard speakers to use mock versions of stigmatized accents and dialects to mock or harass those speakers or simply to make jokes or elicit a laugh. The Other Guys (2010) contains several scenes in which Will Ferrell’s character flashes back to the time he spent working as a pimp in college, and in these flashbacks he uses Mock Black English, because the stereotype of the pimp is that of a flamboyant Black man, and filmmakers apparently consider it funny to see this White man behave in this way.
There is also a running gag in a series of Adam Sandler films in which Rob Schneider plays a character of another race—East Asian, South Asian, indigenous Hawai’ian, indigenous North American—complete with yellowface or brownface make-up and a correspondingly exaggerated accent and stereotypical characterization. For instance, his indigenous Hawai’ian character, Ula of 50 First Dates (2004), is constantly drunk or high, has numerous children, and is riddled with injuries and scars from his absurd and buffoonish behavior, and his accented English is peppered with gibberish that is meant to represent the Hawai’ian language. Characters like this are shockingly common in the filmset.
I’ve developed a lot of appreciation for those filmmakers who pay attention to language and use it in thoughtful ways. So many filmmakers rely on these stale and inaccurate tropes: White Southern speakers are taken to be backward rednecks; women who use gendered speech patterns are vapid and self-absorbed; Spanish speakers are either drug dealers or maids; and so on. After seeing hundreds of examples like this, those films that subvert the tropes or that use language for more subtle and interesting types of characterization really stand out. Legally Blonde (2001) and Freaky Friday (2003) come to mind as examples that defy the tropes about gendered speech patterns. Straight Outta Compton (2015) is the rare film in which a majority of characters use Black English both authentically and consistently. And over 13% of total Spanish and Spanish-accented English speakers in the entire filmset appear in one film, Coco (2017), which actually presents a rich diversity of characterization of these speakers and is also just a beautiful, gorgeously animated film.
And of course I have to mention the filmography of Quentin Tarantino, who always makes interesting choices with language and who never goes for the easy joke. Django Unchained (2012) was the film that originally started me on this project; the character of Django may be the only serious Black English-speaking action hero in modern film, and the secondary hero, King Schultz, has a German accent—another total anomaly in American movies.
Jeremy Rud: Who should read this book? What do you want academics to take away? What do you want filmmakers to take away?
Lindsey Clouse: The book is designed to be accessible to non-linguists, so anyone with an interest in American English dialects and the unconscious biases that we attach to them should read it, as well as anyone who enjoys thinking critically about popular media.
I hope that academics will take away from this book that although we might think and talk about institutionalized prejudice and unconscious biases all the time, we might not notice the degree to which popular media are reinforcing these things, and they’re particularly easy for middle class White people to overlook. And you can point to a few recent films that have had some success, like Moonlight (2016) or Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) (both of which are incredible and you should watch them) and say, look, Hollywood is working on fixing its diversity and intersectionality problem. But then look at what’s playing at your local theater right now and you will still see a long list of films starring straight, White standard English speakers.
To any filmmakers who read this book, I would ask just that you think a little harder about language in your films. Just as the cishet White male doesn’t have to be the default, nor does supposedly standard English have to be the default. Ask yourself: what kinds of messages is my movie sending about people who speak a certain way? And, can I make a better and more interesting film by making more thoughtful, nuanced choices with language?
Page 99 ends my verbatim account of broken dialogue in an anti-gentrification rally in Leimert Park, Los Angeles in 2017. This third of a page consists of three references to Marilyn Strathern’s work, only one of which is found in my list of references!
First, I make use of Strathern’s (2011) language to describe the relation between two parties brought together in a small classroom for a breakout session titled “Fighting the New White-Washing”. Strathern helps me to speak of the young activists protesting against art galleries in Boyle Heights and the elderly homeowners from Leimert Park who had gathered to hear them as “embedded in analogous moral contexts of support” without falling back on questions of ethnic or racial unity and division implicit in the context of anti-gentrification campaigning Los Angeles.
The second reference shows Strathern (1998) commenting on ownership and social relations and more or less states the obvious: both the young activists in Boyle Heights and the elderly homeowners in Leimert Park wanted to pass houses on in the family. In the historically segregated Los Angeles this simple observation ties together intimate moral obligations, expectations, and family wealth with the full weight of structural racism. This “breakout session” chapter cuts the thesis in half and connects housing questions to an ethnographic account of people doing art and culture. Thus, the second reference suggests that people’s readiness to “organize relations to one another as a matter of control” in housing also extends to artistic creations and notions of culture.
The final reference situates these social worlds into the larger network of relations in the city. Borrowing Strathern’s (1996) authority again I say that ownership was a means to cut the network, to mark boundaries, and this is how I make a full circle back to the segregated geography of Los Angeles. Built into the city the Euro-American hegemonic logic of perceiving relations meant that discussions around gentrification had the tendency to revert back to questions of ethnic or racial unity and division. Strathern’s work helps me to speak of racial hierarchy and domination in a less familiar language and page 99 is a fittingly clumsy example of this Brechtian distancing effect at work.
Strathern, M. 1996. “Cutting the Network.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2, no. 3 (1996): 517–35.
Strathern, M. 1998. Divisions of interest and languages of ownership. In: Property relations: renewing the anthropological tradition. Hann, C. M., ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2011. Binary License. Common Knowledge 17(1): 87-103.
Page 99 of my dissertation begins with a passport photograph taken of me in 2016, juxtaposed with a purikura photograph taken in the same year.
Purikura, a colloquialism for “print club” (purinto kurabu), are photo booths that allow users to take photographs, edit the photographs using a stylus and touch screen, and receive instant prints of these photographs. The term may also refer to the instant prints themselves. The image caption reads:
“Standard passport photograph of the author taken in 2016 (left), juxtaposed with a purikura photograph taken in the same year (right). The purikura photograph was taken with its default filter and editing options. Note that the author’s skin has been lightened, her curls have been smoothed, her eyes have been enlarged, and her facial and bodily features have been slimmed down.”
In the paragraph that follows the images, I propose that smartphones and Social Networking Services (SNS, the localized term for social media) such as Instagram constitute portable purikura:
“Smartphones and visual-centric SNS such as Instagram constitute portable purikura. The filters, stickers, and editing features on Instagram are not unlike those found within the process of rakugaki. Most importantly, smartphones and SNS have become enveloped in the media ecology of purikura. Manufacturers of purikura such as Makesoft offer their own smartphone apps that ease the process of saving digital copies of purikura and sharing these copies on SNS. In conversations with young women, I learned that it was not uncommon to ‘research’ potential poses and editing strategies for purikura on Instagram. This saves stress and time during the actual practice of taking purikura. The prevalence of hashtags on Instagram such as #purika pose (#purikura pōzu; #プリクラポーズ) and #purikura editing (#purikura kakō; #プリクラ加工) demonstrate reliance on user-created content as a source of information and inspiration for creativity. Purikura is becoming even more convergent.”
Page 99 embodies one central argument of my dissertation: while digital technologies offer different and “new” modes of being social, this “newness” is not always “new.” Chapter Two, where page 99 is located, demonstrates how “new” mediatic assemblages involving SNS and smartphones are extensions of past and ongoing forms of gendered socialities and economies. I draw connections between historical and contemporary forms of consumerist play among Japanese girls and women: purikura culture, instabae (Instagenic) culture, the Discover Japan tourism campaign of the 1970s, and contemporary “photogenic travel” campaigns.
The intersections between “old” and “new” media constitute only part of the larger story of my dissertation. While page 99 focuses on play, my dissertation also discusses themes such as intergenerational tensions regarding the (mis)use of digital technologies. My dissertation, Mediating Me: Digital Sociality and Smartphone Culture in Contemporary Japan, examines the intersections of SNS, smartphone ownership, and shifting notions of sociality and selfhood among young people in Japan. I ask: How can the digital serve as a lens for understanding change and continuity in contemporary Japan, especially with regards to gender and identity? I conducted fieldwork in Japan between August 2019 and August 2020, and remotely between August 2020 and October 2021. Through an integration of interview data, media and literary analysis, and ethnographic vignettes called “Mediations,” I emphasize that perceived norms and moral standards centering on digital embeddedness are constantly (re)negotiated. In each chapter, I examine particular user groups and moments, such as digital activism among Black Japanese youths during the global Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. The process of (re)negotiation became especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, which coincided with my fieldwork. My dissertation also highlights the indispensability, promises, and ethics of digital ethnography.
While page 99 only captures one practice within the fabric of digital sociality in contemporary Japan, it highlights an important reminder: the dynamics that accompany digital sociality can be applicable to past, present, and future technologies, practices, and visualities.
Volha Verbilovich:Emergency media are cultural and temporal. In Case of Emergency develops these definitions, revealing the history and modern practices of emergency media use. Why did you choose this object of study?
Elizabeth Ellcessor:I wrote my first book [Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation, 2016] about digital media accessibility, particularly the legal and bureaucratic context for things like alternate text and accessible forms. I’ve written on closed captioning, the forms of accessibility that are fairly well known at this point, if not always implemented. But one thing I just totally left out of the book was that regulations for disability access are treated differently in emergency contexts than in normal media production. For instance, we don’t have sign language interpreters for pre-recorded hour-long dramas. However, we do have live sign language interpreters for something like a press conference about evacuation in the path of a hurricane. Right? When you have an emergency situation, the legal requirements shift. You have to have access at these moments. In my first book, I just put it in a footnote like “nothing I’m talking about applies to these other situations”. So, I had it in the back of my head anyway. One thing that really propelled it forward was when they started rolling out “text to 9-1-1 services”, initially in Vermont, and Indiana, where I was living at the time. What was interesting about that rollout was the way they promoted “text to 9-1-1” as primarily an accessibility feature. You can imagine lots of people wanting to use it, right? For example, young people who are more comfortable with text than voice calls. The ability to send a picture to 9-1-1 seems useful, the ability to send your location via text seems useful. But instead, we were seeing this real emphasis on treating text messages as if they were an assistive technology to replace phone calls. That raised many questions for me about how these lines between “access for some” versus “access for all” are being drawn. And also, how disability and accessibility were being used as, not exactly excuses, but as displacements, preventing the kinds of critiques of an emergency media system that is, in many cases, pretty far out of step with consumer technology. So, I started there with one specific case study. And I published that in the International Journal of Communicationbefore the book. And then I just started digging into it. What are other sorts of emergency media out there? How are they technologically situated? And how does that reflect certain cultural assumptions about the way the world works?
Volha Verbilovich: Thank you very much for the rich overview of the different types of emergency media: alarms, alerts, maps, 9-1-1 calls, and reports, that was really amazing to read. Speaking about access as a category and an experience, what could ethnographers and other scholars learn from the disability studies’ accounts about access?
Elizabeth Ellcessor: I think disability studies perspectives on access, or what Aimi Hamraie describes as “critical access studies”, are interesting for a range of fields. I assume that treating access as a self-evident, good thing like “oh, we need to increase access to XYZ” which also often means everything will be sort of “solved” is a techno-solutionist perspective at the best of times. But it also fails to account for access as more than just having something. When we talk about access, we often need to be talking about skills and contexts. And that often gets left out if access is talked about at all. We have scholarship that often glosses over this experience of access entirely. Film studies, for instance, have traditions of scholarship in which we talk about spectatorship or reading the film without acknowledging that how we watch the film matters and that not everyone is watching it the same way. I think it opens the door to bigger conversations if we don’t take for granted that everyone is doing this task in one way. Then it becomes easier to ask questions: what does it encompass? what has to be there? what is sort of flexible? I think it opens a lot of interesting possibilities. Access is a moment where we really see just tremendous variation.
Volha Verbilovich: Considering the limitations of access, you speak a lot about the racialized discourses, sexism, and ableism of the emergency media. How do the different types of emergency media create these discourses? Could you mention the examples you address in the book?
Elizabeth Ellcessor: I’ll talk about one I didn’t expect to write about, which was maps. Maps weren’t something that I had in mind at the beginning. It came from doing the work and talking to people about what kinds of safety technologies they were using or were familiar with. And then thinking backward from that: “oh, a lot of people are using “find my phone” to see where their family members are. A lot of college students are using Snapchat to see where their friends are and make sure everyone gets home safe at night.” So, then I started thinking about other ways that we use maps to understand issues of safety and risk, which are tied into ideas of emergency. Talking about weather maps and COVID maps grew out of that. So, there are two other ways in which we use maps to understand whether or not we’re in an emergency situation and how does that kind of graphical representation of the world influence our decision-making?
One thing about what we could think of is the rise of maps in the GPS era, seeing maps used in all kinds of apps and safety features. Uber has something where you can now ask someone to watch your ride on a map, so they know if your Uber gets waylaid. These features are really interesting. They promote a kind of ubiquity that we should always know where something is, and we should always be able to double-check and have that information available. It actually has the effect of making the lack of information interpreted as a sign of danger or emergency. So, if you become accustomed to relying on these features, know where things are, what is happening, where your friends are, and who got home, and you suddenly don’t have that? It creates a really different emotional stake than we would have had 20 years ago, and no one had this information. My mother never knew where I was at college! And it didn’t worry her because that wasn’t a sign of potential danger. But when we interviewed current college students, many of their parents are using maps to see where they are and to ensure they are okay. And when they can’t or are not where they’re supposed to be, they get phone calls because parents worry. It’s a really different mediation of risk and danger that I don’t think was on my radar before this.
Volha Verbilovich: In the book, you address the surveillance of care as a category that describes these developments. And you also reflect on the infrastructural media activism practices. To what extent do you think the infrastructural media activism could mitigate data-driven surveillance of care?
Elizabeth Ellcessor: I think that there’s a way in which we equate surveillance with care. Thinking through intentional ways to care about people in our lives without subjecting them to constant surveillance is something that we can do. And I give the example of college students seeking their friends on Snapchat. Some don’t do that, and they only text each other at a set time. So, they have moments of contact but not constant tracking. It also cuts out, in many cases, the third-party technologies that are doing the mapping and tracking. Rather than hand over your location data to Snapchat, you’re texting your friend: “I will text you at 1 am, letting you know”. So, you have some intentional moments like that. And then you also have people who are, in some cases, using mapping to highlight other kinds of needs and emergencies, taking this representational system that we’ve come to understand, and using it to map things like safe spaces, trans bathrooms, housing markets. I saw one project essentially based on the idea that the emergency was not simply COVID; the emergency was the housing crisis as rents were raised and people were struggling. Therefore, they had mapping of average rents and changes in rents in various locations as a way of signaling that something was happening. So, here’s the map that will produce some of that effect of emergency and maybe draw attention to an issue.
Volha Verbilovich: One of the key findings of your research is that emergency and emergency media are fundamentally racialized. To what extent is this argument specific to the United States cultural context?
Elizabeth Ellcessor: It’s a good question! I’m very much an Americanist. So, I certainly know the US context best. And I do think that some elements are specific to US history and the way that the legacies of slavery impact the legacies of the prison system and impact the way that we think about emergency and policing. These things are all part of the same story. I would be surprised if you don’t see similar historical dynamics playing out in other countries. The various racial or ethnic divides might look different, but I think you do see a similar kind of valuation at play in a discourse of emergency where some people are constructed as the core of the nation and the most valuable, and some people are not, whether that is a matter of ethnic minorities or immigrants or both. People who are intended to be protected by emergency systems are often those who are most privileged and centered within the given context. I use my colleague Jennifer Rubenstein’s definition of emergency in the book pretty heavily. She is a political scientist who studies international development and peacekeeping. She was writing about the emergency in the context of global human rights violations and how, in those moments, receiving aid becomes a matter of being intelligible to the institutions that provide that aid. So if you want to look into that in a more detailed way, I would absolutely recommend her work as a jumping-off point to very different contexts.
Volha Verbilovich: What was the most challenging part of doing emergency media research? How did you find ways to fix those challenges or take a lesson from them?
Elizabeth Ellcessor: I think my biggest challenge in this project was, honestly, the scope. It could have been about many different things. And it is, like you mentioned, full of many different examples. I was trying to pull together something that was broader than a simple case study. And that addressed a lot of common-sense things that people would expect from a book about the emergency. So, I wanted to ensure that some of the things that we all, in a US context, expect to be there were there while still being able to include interviews with users of these systems, with workers. We didn’t get to talk a lot about this. But I find that talking to people who work in emergency media was central to my understanding of how it functions, whether those were 9-1-1 operators, emergency managers, or scholars of disaster. Focusing on how people who are “in the weeds” with this understand it, versus how a broader culture understands it, was very helpful in finding key dynamics and pressure points. I’m obviously situated in media studies, so I’m going to write a book about media. But a crucial part of the book for me was coming to understand that media are literally mediating the circumstances between the emergency and the resources at stake. And in that process, the media systems become a kind of pressure point, they become a place where small changes have big effects and where the agency of workers can actually also have big effects. On the one hand, it should lead us to value their work, and, on the other hand, it should lead us to think more intentionally than we often do about what those jobs are, who is doing them, and how they’re valued or not valued, and how they are being changed. As we see AI technologies brought into these systems, what are we losing when we lose that expertise?
My answer left you like a glutton without food—unsatisfied. Before you could request thick ethnographic details, I handed you page 99 of Endangered Words and Invulnerable Worlds: Spatial Language and Social Relations in Cheran, Michoacan, Mexico.
The text appeared straightforward about general trends in Cheran. Still, you couldn’t shake the notion of being stranded in an ethnographic labyrinth. So, you read it and reread it. Being the scholar you are, you decided to immerse yourself in Cheran’s P’urhépecha. Only there was no rabbit hole, just the whole text—Endangered Words and Invulnerable Worlds.
In the text, you found that theoretically, I argued a spatial language-based cultural model explains many of the properties of social relations. The part-whole model is simple like a slice of pizza out of a pie, a cigar from a set, or birds of a feather flocking together. After reading the ethnographic evidence—from emic sociological characteristics affecting face-to-face communication to people ascribing behavioral patterns onto families to large-scale ritual events of greater complexity—you remembered page 99.
Nodding in deep thought, you began repeating like a mantra, “part-whole.”
Reflecting on your initial impressions, you realize what you perceived as a tortuous reading experience was a plunge into ethnographic clarity—a simplified diagram of a complex phenomenon. I saw it in your eyes and asked, “Now do you agree with my answer?”
“Yes,” said you.
…He is like that, so all Santiagos are predisposed to behave in such a manner. They are like that…
While thinking through the ways people in Cheran identify individuals as recapitulating kin or groups as possessing traits displayed by individuals, it helps to consider emic conceptualizations of kinship dynamics…the people of Cheran view individuals as intimately tied to their kin groups. The link between an individual and a family is inextricable. One cannot exist as an atom who makes herself or himself independently of background. When someone encounters an individual…others generally explain that individual’s behavior as recapitulating a family trend. It is quite common to find people explain this dynamic along the lines of “they are like that.” The “they,” generally, refers to the house ergo nuclear family, which in turn, often reflects the patrilineal lineage.
The aforementioned kin dynamics make sense when considering folk views of the town’s composition. Most people claim that they all know each other. The elderly restrict themselves by qualifying their statements along the lines of “I know those of my generation but not younger folks (of various generations).” Even this statement might be an exaggeration. Cheran has a population of over 20,000…
Niku T’arhechu T’arhesi. 2021. Endangered Worlds and Invulnerable Worlds: Spatial Language and Social Relations in Cheran, Michoacan, Mexico. University of Michigan, PhD.
Jessica Winegar: The study of sports has been somewhat marginal in the field of anthropology. Why do you think that is, and in what ways does your book show its importance to understanding major social events such as revolutions?
Carl Rommel: This is an intriguing question, because in many ways, sports is really a total social fact. Huge spectator sports, such as football (soccer), bring together a range of sociocultural spheres, including economy, ritual, performance, religion, emotion, gender, global media, mega events, and politics. Still, with the exception of a small number of recent works (such as, Guinness & Besnier 2016, Kovač 2022, Carter 2008), sports has indeed been marginal in the field of anthropology.
Now, I am not exactly sure about the reasons for this marginalization, but I have a few ideas. First, I think that spectator sports for a long time came across as too modern to a discipline primarily interested in the primitive and exotic. Hence, while Clifford Geertz went to thickly describe the local practice of cock fighting on Java (1973), it was left to sociologists to analyze spectator sports as an exceptional realm of excitement in bureaucratically organized western societies (Dunning & Elias 1986). More recently, as ostensibly modern social phenomena such as mass media, science, and development have been made central foci of anthropological exploration, sports might instead have looked too ordinary: a popular pastime for the masses without any true epistemological or aesthetic depth. I would also not rule out a measure of latent snobbism. At least in some contexts that I know, academics self-identify as ‘people who don’t like sports.’ Anthropologists with such opinions might not only opt to research more supposedly worthy topics. They also do not possess the background knowledge necessary to penetrate the world that a huge spectator sport assembles. To be able to properly discuss the game with one’s interlocutors, one needs to master information about a large corpus of players, coaches, clubs, matches, and tournaments. While that is no easy task for any anthropologist taking on a whole new sports universe (as I did in Egypt), it is likely even more daunting for a scholar who is not a sports person in the first place.
As for the second part of your question, I think that my book shows that sports can provide unique anthropological angles on a revolution’s who, when, where, and what. First, my story about Egypt’s Football Revolution introduces a completely new cast of revolutionary characters: television pundits, players and coaches, club officials, representatives of the football association, and more or less organized supporters. Second, my study of football gives the revolution an alternative timeline. It shows how supposedly non-political football events (matches, tournaments, television talk shows) constituted key moments in a revolutionary transition that began to take shape already before January 25, 2011. Third, my story recasts the revolution’s spatiality: the football revolution that I chronicle took place at stadiums, in television studios, and in coffee shops just as much as in Tahrir Square, the Egyptian Parliament, or the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood. This shift of focus, finally, provides an alternative account for what the revolutionary struggle was all about. I analyze the revolution first and foremost as a contest over how Egyptian football men – and Egyptian men more generally – should feel, act, and behave. My ethnography of the world of football recasts the revolution as a revolt that set out to transform emotions, masculinities, and ultimately the Egyptian nation.
Jessica Winegar: Taking football seriously has indeed given us a better understanding of the depth and breadth of the revolutionary process in Egypt, and the important ways that this process was gendered through notions of masculinity as related to politics and nation. I would love to hear you riff on how these insights from football in Egypt could be useful to those studying protests and revolutions of the past 15 years – which have seen an intensification of such political action worldwide.
Carl Rommel: I’d like to answer this question by returning to the revolution’s who, when, where, and what. The way my book suggests alterative answers to these questions could arguably be useful in other settings ripe with protests and revolt too. Because, a truly revolutionary situation is never merely a moment when activists raise demands limited to representational politics and try to push them through the vested institutions of the nation-state. When studied carefully, a revolution always reverberates in spaces that might look somewhat marginal, and through events that both precede and succeed canonized timelines. You might also find actors who may not come across as political at first glance, but who are actually key players. And you might identify a revolutionary battle over whom the taken-for-granted and normal we are or should be. In my Egyptian case, this contested normal we was a national and gendered we. Football provided a central stage for carving out normal Egyptian masculinities before, during, and after the 2011 Revolution. In other situations, the established we that the revolt has to take on could just as well be a classed or racialized we. For instance, who is the normal and white middle-class woman?
What my research illustrates – and what could be useful to consider elsewhere – is that processes that define who are normal and who are not are complex and a long time coming. Normalized subjectivities surface at the intersection of media, popular culture, spectacle, investments, legislation, and more. For a revolt to be truly revolutionary, it has to provide alternatives to such entrenched scripts. My ethnography illustrates both how and why this is possible and why it is difficult to pull off. Because processes of subjectivation are long-term and multidimensional, they take on an inertia that is difficult to fully obliterate. The counterrevolution is always likely to gain momentum from never fully eradicated ideals for how to be, feel, and behave normally. In Egypt, as elsewhere, revolutions are fragile projects, and they most often fail. One reason is that they are up against potent powers vested in distributed assemblages of institutions, discourses, ethics, pop culture, and media technologies.
Jessica Winegar: Do you think that fun can be a revolutionary practice? What would your soccer fans have said at the time, and what would they say now?
Carl Rommel: Oh yes, absolutely, this is one of the central arguments that I make in the chapters that deal with Egypt’s so called Ultras supporters. The Ultras were a new type of football fans who started to appear at Egyptian stadiums in 2007. Inspired by Ultras groups in North Africa and southern Europe, they introduced a new style of fandom that grew influential in the years leading up to January 2011. As the ethnographic research that I conducted with the Ultras shows, the new fan groups’ success was to a large extend a result of the fun and freedom that they generated in the stands. Through bold chants, flags, choreographed displays, graffiti, and firework, their novel way of supporting their teams attracted tens of thousands of young men. Almost immediately, this subculture was spotlighted as a security threat by the Egyptian police. Consequently, the Ultras found themselves forced to confront the security forces and defend their right to do their thing – that is, having fun in their own way – inside and outside the stadium. In 2011 and 2012, this experience of taking on the security state through organized violence proved vital for the revolutionary struggle. The Ultras’ subculture of fun and freedom became a central force in clashes and street fights.
But the Ultras new way of having fun was also subversive for another reason. As I discuss in the book’s first two chapters, Egyptian football had constituted a realm of fun also before the Ultras entered the scene. To make a long story short, Egyptian football experienced an unprecedented boom in the late 2000s. Fueled by victories, media, and popular culture, the nation was swept away by a football craze that was mobilized successfully by the Mubarak government in a pretty classic bread-and-circuses manner. Rather than a fight for or against fun, therefore, the revolution inside Egypt’s national game was at the heart a conflict between two different ways of having fun: one older, media-driven and closely related to the political and economic establishment; one younger, more international, and vehemently opposed to the media. As such, while my book demonstrates that fun can be a revolutionary force, it also shows that fun is not revolutionary by default. Football’s unmatched ability to generate fun could just as well be reactionary. It all depends on the context, and how the fun is mobilized and by whom.
As for what Ultras would say about this today, it is difficult to know as the supporter groups are currently in disarray. In the years since the 2013 Military Coup, the Ultras (like most revolutionary groups in Egypt) have been crushed by the counterrevolution. Many leaders are or have been in prison. Others live abroad. While Egypt’s biggest group, Ultras Ahlawy, was formally dissolved in 2018, other groups still exist, but their activities are scattered. When talking to (former) Ultras today, they tend to look back at the revolutionary years with a great deal of nostalgia. They tell me about a period when they had an incredible amount of fun at the stadium. And they tell stories about demonstrations, clashes and sit-ins that all but revolutionized Egypt. Whether Ultras connect these stories about fun and revolution, I am not sure. Possibly such an analysis is more exciting for an anthropologist than for the people who live the (counter-) revolution’s twists and turns. Still, everyone knows that one reason for why their revolution was crushed is that the regime has banned fans at most Egyptian football games over the last ten years. As a result, it has been impossible to keep generating fun at the stadium. And without fun, there has been no way to recruit new members, and hence no way to keep the revolutionary momentum going.
Jessica Winegar: And it is hard to keep revolutionary momentum going within the straitjacket of proper nationalism that requires a kind of seemingly apolitical stance. I think readers would be especially interested in your argument about that bind in the book, in part because I see it playing out in other contexts. Can you briefly recap that central theoretical point?
Carl Rommel: So, the notion of siyasa (politics in Arabic) pops up in several chapters in the book. Overall, I show that while siyasa comes with many different connotations for my interlocutors, it almost always elicits a sense of unease. One reason is a long-standing tension between siyasa and idealized notions of Egyptian nationalism. To put it brief and simple, we might say that whereas a true nationalist works for the common interests of the whole people, being political (siyasi) by definition means serving partial group interests at the expense of some other citizens. Since the foundation of the Egyptian nationalist movement in the late 19th century, therefore, nationalism and siyasa have been understood as inherently antithetical. One telling example is the way nationalist leaders, such as President Gamal Abdel Nasser, have strived to appear non-political (Roussillon 1996).
Being Egypt’s indisputably national game, football is a realm where this tension is particularly recognizable. In my book’s chronology, it surfaces for the first time in the wake of two World Cup qualifiers between Egypt and Algeria in November 2009. I portray these matches as the culmination of the football hysteria permeating late-Mubarak Egypt. This was both the moment when the regime used football most actively to shore up support and the time when things began to crack. After Egypt lost the second game and missed the 2010 World Cup, criticism against the sport’s ‘politicization’ proliferated. Instead of bringing people together, commentators argued that the national game was breeding fanaticism and politics. After January 2011, such ideas became even more commonplace. Football now looked like the cause of a range of problems grouped together under the rubric of siyasa. In the final chapters, I examine ethnographically how these debates impacted on supporter attachments. As the national game became mixed up with politics, many Egyptian men found it increasingly difficult to care about it.
Tensions between siyasa and nationalism play a key role in my story of the Ultras too. Journalists, club officials and people in the football association recurrently blamed the new fans for being political, that is, for serving their own interests rather than those of the whole people. The Ultras were well aware of these labels. In 2011 and 2012, the fans were keen to prove that they were properly nationalist, for example, by not taking parts in supposedly overtly political demonstrations and street fights. Indeed, I argue that the Ultras’ football revolution was most powerful precisely when it came across as respectable, nationalist, and non-political among the general public. Paradoxically, their political success was a consequence of their ability to stay outside the realm of putative politics. In the long run, however, it was not possible to push for revolutionary demands while at the same time maintaining an apolitical profile. From early 2013 onwards, the Ultras were caught up in events that made them look increasingly political, and which saw them lose a great deal of popular support.
The book’s conclusion suggests that this double bind faced by the Ultras was an impasse plaguing many revolutionary factions in Egypt. To understand this point we must first realize that the Egyptian revolution was a nationalist revolt first and foremost. Nationalism constituted a taken-for-granted meta-framework; liberals, Islamists, socialist, and the Army all claimed that they were fighting for the true interests of the whole people. While this was no doubt a reason behind the revolution’s initial success – appeals to nationalism could be recognized and supported by millions of Egyptians – it also imposed limitations. As the Ultras exemplify, it can be difficult to combine being a proper nationalist with fighting for the interests of particular subsections of the national collective, for example, a particular class or gender. I am convinced that this is a factor to consider when we try to understand why the Egyptian revolution was stifled. It is not at all easy to stay strictly non-political in a revolutionary situation that by its very essence requires bold action, violent resistance, and demands calling for radical transformation.
Jessica Winegar: This working with and through local conceptions of politics (siyasa) is fascinating. What advice would you give junior anthropologists working on politics in other contexts, then?
I guess my suggestion would be to be a bit less concerned with how anthropology defines politics and a bit more interested in what the people we work with understand to be political and not. In my analysis of siyasa I take cues from an article that Matei Candea wrote in 2011. Candea notes that while anthropologists since the 1960s have been very good at discerning politics in all thinkable sociocultural fields (the politics of gender, the politics of the body, clothing, taste, language, knowledge and so on), politics itself has rarely been examined. Candea proposes that anthropologists should study the political as an ethnographic category. His ethnographical material from schools and educational administrators on Corsica analyses in detail how politics is understood locally, how the political and non-political are divided up, and how such boundaries become an important part of reality.
My book demonstrates the potential of studying politics as an ethnographic category in revolutionary situations. Conducting my research in a period when siyasa seemed to be everywhere in Egypt, I documented how football people understood and delineated the political, as well as how it generated a visceral sense of unease. This empirical focus facilitated an analysis of the variegated work that the political does. It allowed me to pinpoint how too much politics forecloses previously strong emotions. As one interlocutor expressed it, ‘everything has become politics; there is no fun left.’ It also made me show how the political functions as a derogatory label: how it could discredit and marginalize actors from the national we; and how it could render a whole sport suspicious and problematic. I would imagine that similar analyses would be of interest in many contexts around the world. Which phenomena or individuals are political or not can never be known in advance. It is a fluid field ripe with contestations that must be studied ethnographically. Such ethnographic attention to emic notions of politics does not only provide valuable insights about what the political is, how it is debated, and how it feels. As I hope that my book demonstrates, it could also provide a fresh entry point for analyzing conflicts over resources, power, and hegemony, a ‘politics of politics,’ as I call it at one point in the conclusion.
On page 99 of my dissertation, I end a section that traces a series of Chinese newspaper reports on a pregnant woman’s long-winded quest for the so-called “birth permit.” It is then followed by a new section that reflects on how the media represents her experience as a sign of bad bureaucracy.
There is very little novelty in complaining about bureaucratic red tape in China. Yet, I was compelled to create a whole dissertation chapter titled “Documentation and Its Bureaucratic Discontents” for the following three reasons. First, the pregnant woman’s story was just one example of countless media reports that raised the “documentation difficulty” issue at the time. If frustration about bureaucratic paperwork is old news, why was the media churning out this old news at that specific moment? Second, Chinese news media would normally avoid directly criticizing the Party-State government. Then how and why were the media openly criticizing the bureaucracy in these reports? Third, I wanted to understand the implications of problematizing documentation issues as specifically a bureaucratic failing. Provided that these legal documents are consequential for urban lives well beyond the realm of bureaucratic spheres, what discourse and practices does such problematization enable and/or foreclose?
Page 99 addresses the second question by underlining how the Chinese media, which strives to meet demands from both the Party-State and the commercialized media market, “assumes itself to be the mediator between the state and the public” (p. 99). Ultimately, this chapter argues that this role is one reason why the media is able to criticize the bureaucracy: by domesticating documentation practices as sites of bureaucratic reform, it creates the representation of a nation-state that is moving forward. In doing so, the media “mediates the imagination and legitimacy of the state and its bureaucracy” (p.99).
Overall, I do not think page 99 meets Ford’s test. My dissertation traces how people speak of and handle the banal and copious evidentiary documents (for example, ID card, certificates, and permits) in their everyday lives. In doing so, it demonstrates how such documents critically condition people’s mobility and their understanding of urban citizenship in contemporary China. Even though page 99 maps out key discourses through the lens of institutionalized media, it does not leave space to consider how such institutionalized discourses might unfold in the realm of everyday speech and practices. In fact, most of what became page 99 of the dissertation was written before my extended dissertation fieldwork.
Dodom Kim. 2022. Documenting Uncertainty: Bureaucratic Evidence, Media Practice, and Migrant Citizenship in Southern China. University of Chicago, PhD.
CaMP Anthropology 