My dissertation investigates the semiotics and politics of contemporary (Yucatec) Maya-language media in the Mexican Yucatán.* Page 99 appears in chapter two, which examines how announcers at a popular radio station in southern Yucatán employ their medium as a means for encouraging ethnic awareness and solidarity among the station’s Maya listeners. In the chapter, I survey programming content, analyze broadcast speech, and interpret the identity work of radio announcers in light of the perspectives of local Maya listeners. The chapter develops a portrait of the current state of Maya identity politics in Yucatán. It also reveals the state in Maya identity politics. That is to say, the chapter clarifies the role of the Mexican government as principal mediator of Maya ethnolinguistic advocacy in Yucatán. On page 99, having just summarized the missions of three national institutes that endorse and administer Indigenous culture and language within Mexico, I offer a claim about the governmental mediation:
The institutes and their organizational affiliates present their activities as fostering the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversidad (diversity) of Mexico. Yet, the work has consequential homogenizing effects in the domains of ethnicity, culture, and language. The cultivation of different archives—of language, history, material culture, and so on—renders distinct ethnolinguistic groups as tokens of the same Indigenous type. (99)
I then provide some relevant historical context, citing Ben Fallaw’s (1997) work on indigenismo ideology and national politics in Mexico in the 1930s. I believe that the empirical claim and historical contextualization illustrate the quality of the dissertation, and I was glad to see both elements when I revisited the page for this test! But my ethnographic and linguistic evidence for the claim (in other words, the homogenizing effects evident at my field site) does not appear until the following page, and for this reason I think that page 99 does not quite encapsulate the quality of the dissertation as a whole.
Predictably, certain other pages are more representative of the value of the dissertation as a linguistic-anthropological study. In chapter five, for example, I offer a variety of linguistic examples that demonstrate that the emerging Maya standard, despite its marked lexical purism, adheres to certain Spanish syntactic and pragmatic conventions (for example, see pages 183, 190–3, 199–204). And throughout the dissertation, I provide ethnographic descriptions, interview data, and analyses of mediatized texts that reveal and clarify ongoing changes in the social meanings of maaya ‘Maya’ and máasewal ‘Indian, Indigenous’ in Yucatán (for examples, see pages 60–4, 85–7, 155–7). Those pages shed more light on the basic tension or problem that I explored in the dissertation, namely, that while Maya advocates aim to maintain their language and culture, their work actually transforms both in different and important ways.
*Yucatec Maya speakers refer to their language as ‘Maya’ (maaya). I follow that convention here.
Bloechl, Christopher. 2023. Voicing the Maya: Media Technologies & Politics of Ethnolinguistic
Identity in Yucatán. PhD dissertation, University of Chicago.
Fallaw, Ben. 1997. Cárdenas and the Caste War That Wasn’t: State Power and Indigenismo in
Post-Revolutionary Yucatán. In The Americas 53(4):551-577.
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.
Hyemin Lee: Your book, Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau, offers an insightful exploration of the anthropological question of how senses of cultural belonging and identity are rooted in languages. You provided critical insights into this profound question by meticulously examining the language socialization trajectories of Amdo Tibetan children.
Hyemin Lee: Your book, Amdo Lullaby: An Ethnography of Childhood and Language Shift on the Tibetan Plateau, offers an insightful exploration of the anthropological question of how senses of cultural belonging and identity are rooted in languages. You provided critical insights into this profound question by meticulously examining the language socialization trajectories of Amdo Tibetan children.
Could you tell us about your research trajectory that culminated in writing this book? Specifically, I am interested in what “Amdo, Tibet” means to you and your studies as a research site and a place that holds meanings. What makes Amdo uniquely significant for conducting ethnographic research on childhood, language shift, and language socialization/acquisition?
Shannon Ward: Amdo is a borderland region characterized by long histories of migration and cultural flows that have contributed to evolving forms of language contact. While it sits at the easternmost end of Tibet, it also exemplifies the complex forms of movement that variously characterize “Tibet” as a cultural and linguistic region, an occupied country, and a diasporic homeland.
I first came to know Amdo as an undergraduate student in 2011, when I completed a senior thesis project with Tibetan women living in exile in Dharamsala, India. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the pre-eminent figure in Tibetan Buddhism and played a central role in establishing a sovereign Tibetan government-in-exile seated in Dharamsala. Although today, rural-to-urban migration arguably represents the most common pattern of geographic movement in the region, from the 1980s until 2008, many Tibetans arriving in exile in India came from Amdo. Back in 2011, most of the interlocutors who shared with me their journeys of traversing the Himalayas to reach the schools and monasteries supported by His Holiness the Dalai Lama were born and raised in Amdo. My experiences of learning to speak Tibetan alongside these interlocutors sparked my fascination with diversity within Tibet. Their reminiscences and hopes for return, either to visit their families upon acquiring valid travel documents or to see Tibet repatriated as an independent nation, motivated me to continue to learn about this region.
During my graduate studies, I was able to study the language and history of Amdo more thoroughly. The current 14th Dalai Lama’s migration from Amdo to Lhasa as a young child exemplifies the ways that Buddhist practices and governance have unified the Tibetan plateau, especially since the 7th century. The particular local histories of migrations within Amdo, such as that of the focal family described in Chapter 1, illuminate how place-based belonging is reproduced through language variation. The centrality of place in constituting linguistic differentiation, both in the Tibetan exile community and within Amdo itself, is an enduring pattern that I continue to encounter in my research and that frames this book.
Amdo is an important site for conducting ethnography with children, because children are at the forefront of change—both cultural and linguistic. Overlapping local histories of migration and language contact in Amdo provide us with a unique lens to examine how the creative forms of linguistic change that children enact also draw on longer-term cultural and linguistic histories that adults often overlook. For example, as charted in Chapter 1 and the Conclusion, I argue that even when children shift from speaking their native Amdo Tibetan to Mandarin, they are drawing on cultural logics that associate language variation with place-based belonging. The meanings of places within Amdo, and of Amdo as a place within Tibet, are co-constituted through children’s language acquisition and socialization.
Hyemin Lee: You discuss your methodologies on fieldwork and writing through the concept of “Ethnographic Narrative” (xxii). Could you elaborate more on this approach, particularly what you intend to convey to readers through it?
Shannon Ward: I conceived of ethnographic narrative as a way to balance the need to convey linguistic details, while also thickly describing my subjective experiences of participant observation and preserving the confidentiality of participants. As a linguistic anthropologist, my fieldwork involves playing with children and actively participating in their conversations, and also meticulously transcribing and analyzing their talk. Both participant observation and careful transcription represent important pieces of the ethnographic record, an approach developed by Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin as an essential facet of the practice of language socialization research. As I demonstrate in the section “Narrative and Transcription Conventions,” transcription is not a transparent process of reproducing content from recordings to written form, but instead entails complex choices about how to interpret the literal and intended meanings of language, as well as the broader cultural meanings of the practices enacted through language. For example, during transcription sessions, adults referred to Amdo Tibetan sentence-final particles as having “no meaning” (36). Through participant observation, I also encountered adults who described these particles as “Chinese” when they were spoken by children (50). These interpretations of children’s grammar show how children are being identified as agents of language shift.
In my writing, I used two primary strategies of narration to achieve this balance between linguistic detail and thick description. First, I depicted transcripts as dialogues, with annotations in an appendix. With this technique, I hope that readers can appreciate both the unfolding social actions in the dialogues and the grammatical details of talk. Second, I created composite scenes and characters to support the narrative arch of the ethnography and to ensure confidentiality. While the decision to include composites has complex ethical implications, I felt it was necessary to demonstrate the significance of Amdo kinship structures without providing details that could identify individual participants. Ultimately, I aimed for composites to communicate the meaning of “real cultural events” (Clifford 1986, 98) that lead us to a broader understanding of processes of language socialization. That is, composites allow ethnographic narrative to highlight the most significant patterns of language use, which I derived through the analysis of fieldnotes and transcripts.
Hyemin Lee: I noticed that your book is in a dialogue with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) and his concept of colonial alienation. Could you explain how you came to integrate Thiong’o into your book? What do you see as the most critical dynamics and consequences of language shift in Xining, as they relate to “colonial alienation”?
Shannon Ward: I can thank Sonia Das for introducing me to this foundational work, which describes language is used in institutions that perpetuate colonial domination. I was inspired by this work because of its significance to understanding language and power, as well as its focus on childhood. While Ngũgĩ writes retrospectively about his childhood, I was curious as to how we could analyze colonial alienation during children’s everyday experiences.
In the context of Tibet, I see two primary dynamics of colonial alienation, which contribute to language shift to Mandarin in Xining. The first is education policy, which provides for bilingual education only in rural areas officially designated as autonomous counties or prefectures. In addition, shifting policies continuously redefine the scope of bilingual education, sometimes emphasizing the acquisition of Mandarin over Tibetan. Education policies in Tibet are similar to those that Ngũgĩ describes, because the acquisition of the dominant language through education outside of the village homeland is necessary for socio-economic mobility.
The second dynamic is the rise of a standard language ideology that privileges monolingualism. Tibet is a region with a deep history of multilingualism, but the politicization of language as a marker of political belonging has meant that children are encouraged to choose to speak a single language. As demonstrated in the ethnographic scenes in chapter 4, this ideology is re-instantiated in everyday interactions that shame children for their intuitive language practices, such as code-mixing, and discursively identify urban children as Mandarin speakers. I argue that the rise of a standard language ideology is linked to colonial alienation through colonial tools, such as censuses and schools, that associate ethnic groups with single written languages.
Hyemin Lee: Chapter 5 offers an insightful exploration of the possibilities of “urban belonging” (139) facilitated by the literacy activity “I Read.” Do you see literacy activities like “I Read” as a potential alternative practice (in contrast to (traditional) Tibetan language activism) for promoting ethnolinguistic diversity and inclusion, both within and beyond Tibetan contexts?
Shannon Ward: Chapter 5 is directly inspired by theories of the sequential unfolding of co-operative action, developed through the work of Chuck and Candy Goodwin. In “I Read,” parents and children created space for multilingualism through their conversations, which I feel is essential for the vitality of minoritized languages more generally. In my understanding, the parents conceived of this activity primarily to facilitate children’s social connections rather than as a form of language instruction. This framing allowed children’s creative uses of language to emerge more freely.
I feel that providing structured activity settings informed by goals for inclusion can promote ethnolinguistic diversity beyond Tibet. In Amdo, as in many settings, individual parents seemed to take primary responsibility for facilitating these activities. Community-based projects such as “I Read” represent a powerful form of activism, and they can also be supported by institutionalized programs. In my new research with children in Canada, for example, I found that government funding supports free preschool programs, such as Strong Start in British Columbia, to encourage new immigrant parents who speak diverse languages to engage in structured play together. Such programs support the efforts of local communities to facilitate inclusion.
However, communities facing language shift may also develop programs for explicit instruction in their language. In a society dominated by formal education and the commodification of language, this approach can elevate the status of minoritized languages. I think these different forms of language activism—overt efforts for language instruction versus community-based programs not explicitly focused on language—demonstrate the dynamic tension between language standardization as a form of reclaiming language and belonging, but also a potential contributing factor to the loss of internal linguistic diversity within communities. An approach to language activism that incorporates both forms of programming might be most effective for sustaining young children’s multilingualism.
Hyemin Lee: A key strength of your book lies in its contribution to language activism and language rights by representing and advocating for the voices of young children in minoritized language communities. What do you see as the broader implication of your book? How do you envision this book making its own ethical pathways to Tibetan language advocacy within academia and beyond?
Shannon Ward: The broader implication of this book is that children know much more than adults may recognize. In relation to language advocacy, this book has the potential to center the significance of everyday talk and young children’s social relationships in efforts to sustain linguistic diversity. For academics, it calls on us to bring critical perspectives on childhood into the study of language revitalization and language shift. For communities working to reverse language shift, it suggests the importance of including young children in language planning efforts.
Haeeun Shin: Could you share about your intellectual trajectory of Millennial North Korea? What triggered you to have an interest in North Koreans’ digital culture? How does this brand-new book relate to your previous works?
Suk-Young Kim: Millennial North Korea is a sequel to my first book, Illusive Utopia, which is a half a century history of North Korean state-produced propaganda performances. Encompassing a wide range of media such as live theater films or recorded live performances, and visual culture is so crucial for understanding theatrical strategy as operating principles of North Korean society. I accomplished an important historical overview of the cultural history of North Korea for half a century, from the post-war period, or 1948, to 2000 towards the end of the Kim Jong Il era.
There have been so much seismic transformations taking place in Korea in the past two decades. So I wanted to write a sequel that updates the current state of the society, the widening gap between the state and the people, and various economic classes emerging, especially in regards to accessibility to new media technology. Millennial North Korea is a sequel to Illusive Utopia.
Additionally, between 2010, when Illusive Utopia was published, and 2018 when I started writing this new book, I was heavily immersed in researching K-pop and youth digital culture. I thought Hallyu does not stop at DMZ. While I was writing very directly about South Korean pop culture, I had a parallel thought that this is also impacting North Korea.
In particular, I focused on the youth culture, which is deeply embedded in the sense of mobility and breaking away from legacy media. The cell phone is a key player in this and is the main star of the book among all other electronic devices. While other forms of media such as films and TV require a sense of community, cell phones allow you to consume mobile digital culture in a very private setting. Also, people take their media anywhere they want through cell phones. I latched onto this idea when I wrote K-pop Live, which came out in 2018, and I’m somewhat influenced by that vision when I think of North Koreans as well. As cell phone comes in, North Korean youth have an easier time accessing forbidden media and consuming it. The act of consuming forbidden media with mobile devices confirms the individual assertion of a subject that declares resistance against state directives.
Haeeun Shin: Could you say a little about the North Korean Millennials whom your book addresses?
Suk-Young Kim: I clearly say that North Korean millennials are defined by their performative identity. It’s a multifaceted identitarian construct. It is not something that is just defined by your gender or your age. It is not the biological construct by any means, millennials, but it’s that performative identity.
One big part of it is curiosity – intellectual, cultural, or economic curiosity about reality outside of this failed state system – and daringness to explore. That is a very key word for me. In North Korea, it requires tremendous courage and rebellion to watch something from South Korea. It does come from your intention of wanting to know and wanting to take the risk outside of this draconian surveillance state system. So, curiosity and daringness are very important identitarian layers of who North Korean millennials are, at least the ones that I addressed in my book.
The second layer is tech savviness. If you want to have a glimpse of the outside world, you have to have some platform or some media to have a glimpse and explore. A lot of it is their exposure, and accessibility to technology, especially cell phones.
The last one I consider together is their economic status because having smartphones costs you money. Of course, cell phones are widespread in North Korea but I mean it’s not for everyone. According to the latest data before COVID, roughly one out of four had cell phones nowadays, which means not everyone has cell phones like in South Korea or elsewhere. It does claim a certain economic status.
To recap, it is the kind of performative identitarian construct that prioritizes the subjects, courage, willingness, and daringness to take risks and explore. Secondarily, to enable that, you need to have access to technology and you have to have certain economic means. They are North Korean millennials that I addressed in my book.
Haeeun Shin: The idea of reactive creativity is essential in your book. What messages do you want to convey to readers about the relationship between North Korean millennials and the state using this concept?
Suk-Young Kim: I made a claim that North Koreans are not just passive victims of a repressive regime, but they are very smart, creative, and resourceful. How does that manifest in their lives? That’s when the concepts of reactive creativity and the hidden script come in.
First, I point out that creativity is not just a domain of liberal Western society. In academia, especially, in anthropology and sociology, there’s a lot of resurging discourse around creativity and creative economy, which is in large part related to the rising tech industry in Silicon Valley and major cities. In those studies, an alternate kind of political system is never their consideration. I think that is wrong because people even living under unimaginable circumstances, human rights infringement, and economic hardship, also exercise creativity. That’s why I put reactive creativity as a modifier to specify the specific conditions of North Korea.
By reactive, I don’t necessarily mean passivity or negativity. Reactive means that they can react in response to this constant oppression, but they can act upon it by walking on a very tricky terrain while dodging the surveillance system. They can still communicate and express the degree of their self-expression, their place in the world, and their ways of living and realizing their dreams without being detected to the point of self-annihilation. Hidden scripts and all kinds of coded language that I described in the book are crucial ways of living this dual life of being a compliant political subject or performing it in daily life, while also realizing to a very limited and reactive degree, their sense of desire to know more, beyond what is fed by the regime. It’s a very dualistic, ambivalent way of living.
Haeeun Shin: I enjoyed reading how you highlight the uniqueness of North Korean millennials’ digital culture with the concept of blockchain and platforms. Could you elaborate further on your choice to use these two concepts to comprehend millennial North Korea?
Suk-Young Kim: In today’s world, everyone uses platforms and blockchain as an important concept. I strategically use those buzzwords to show the reversal of how we normally understand it and what that word could mean in a case like North Korea.
Platforms, in a way, create new digital tribes who fall deeply into their rabbit hole. People who get to stick to one platform, go deep with it and stick with that community, are likely to have narrow-mindedness, which I think is a huge irony in today’s technologized world. In North Korea, platforms don’t emerge online, which is the number one difference. Also, while Western platform society tends to make your vision very narrow, in North Korea, it’s somewhat similar, but the platforms are to expand your vision rather than narrow it, which is the second difference.
When we think of blockchain, transparency is a key idea. There is a transparent ledger so we know how funding, like Bitcoin, was transmitted without revealing the identity of the participant. In North Korea, when hidden media circulates, they also have to go through that transmission. But again, in North Korea, it’s all offline, person-to-person transmission, not a transparently recorded ledger that people can trace online. In this circumstance, transparency in blockchain, in the North Korean sense, is not something similar to what you normally see in how blockchain works in our society. Transparency in North Korean blockchain transactions means credibility and trust. You have to trust the person to whom you’re giving this forbidden media and the person who is giving it to you. When that transaction chain somehow is revealed, then all of the participants can face grave consequences. I cite some of those instances in my book. So it’s a very different idea of blockchain, but some principles are retained in North Korean case.
Haeeun Shin: In anthropology conducting research on North Korea has been challenging due to restricted access for visits. Can you provide any advice or suggestions for people conducting research on North Korea without visiting?
Suk-Young Kim: We can research North Korea far from it. I think my discipline of performance studies is the right place as it specializes in the performance of memory and trauma and the strategy of narrating the story. What people tell you for a reason, whether that is subconscious or a construction of yourself through your narration that comes into play, and how they present themselves is a valid subject of research.
In this context, it’s very valuable to speak to resettlers who have more freedom to narrate and construct their stories. They still deal with a lot of degrees of limitations as to what they want to say and what they can say, but they have a much higher degree of freedom compared to the degree that they dealt with draconian surveillance in North Korea.
Number one advice: We have to be honest about our limitations that the stories we’re going to hear come from a certain perspective. It doesn’t represent the entirety of the possibilities in North Korea.
Number two, when people narrate their past, as much as they want to be factual and reality- based stories that they want to share, we should understand that memory is largely made of imagination. It’s never a pure recalling of the past but made of some virtual dimension. Through imagination of what the past was, sometimes what they narrate is filtered in. Also, you have to be fully aware that many resettlers are traumatized by leaving the country, which we seldom experienced. So when you want to cite something, you have to double-check to decide whether to quote or not. If you were interviewing one subject over a sustainable time and there’s a very sensitive subject you want to verify again, ask the person, but in a slightly different format. Also, cross-check across two different subjects. Ask another interviewee and if they confirm the same fact, then you feel confident quoting it.
Lastly, as an ending remark, I want to say that I am very humbled to be the person who is a channel through which my interviewees can speak and voice themselves. I hope I did some justice to their lives and stories. I think that’s the role I play as an author of this book.
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.
AI anxieties are widespread today. But how new are these concerns?
Generative AI technologies have come on the scene relatively recently, via large language models (LLMs) and associated chatbots like ChatGPT or image generators like DALL-E and Sora. However, the fears and narratives surrounding these technologies have deeper roots. While fear narratives might appear to point unequivocally toward the properties or effects of a feared object, this is only part of the picture. As scholars of modernity and psychosis have long known, fear narratives point back toward the narrator as much as—if not more than—the object or focus of anxiety.
To critically engage with and reflect on this anxiety, our blog post begins by revisiting the central thesis of Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. While Hofstadter located the paranoid style firmly within the McCarthy-era American right, we show instead that, when it comes to outlets’ political leanings, the paranoid style is highly malleable regarding AI. Regardless of the outlet, in other words—whether Fox News or The New York Times—authors consistently narrate the impacts and functioning of AI in a profoundly paranoid way.
Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay begins by discussing three newspaper articles from 1951, 1895, and 1855. Drawn from a “Texas newspaper article of 1855,” the final excerpt sounds the alarm about a supposed plot by the Catholic Church to “[bring about] our [i.e., America’s] destruction and…the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions” (78). Read alongside quotes from Senator McCarthy and the Populist Party Manifesto, the supposed Pope-led conspiracy seems less like a laughable, distant relic of outdated U.S. Protestant fears. Instead, the texts together reveal the continuities of paranoia as a “strategically-deployable shifter” (Urciuoli 2003) in American politics, a transposable “frame of mind” always in search of “a different villain” whether that be Catholics, Masons, or generative AI.
We revisit the “Paranoid Style” to track its continued resonances in the present, but it is important to distinguish the terms “style,” “stance,” or “reading” from identities imagined as fixed, individual essences or sorting hat-style labels, as linguistic anthropologists and critical sociolinguists like Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall have argued. We here find it instructive to turn to Eve Kanofsky Sedgwick. In her provocative introduction, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” Sedgwick points out that “the paranoid” is not a pointed label for a specific political or personal demographic, “and certainly not [a] stable personality [type],” but a “changing and heterogeneous relational [stance]” that is fluid and open to change (128). Sedgwick further argues that due to the normalization of paranoid thinking “at every point in the political spectrum” (143), to hold “anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant” (126). Far from an exclusively right-wing or historically particular framework, in other words, paranoia has become broadly and deeply entrenched across seemingly “normal” (Hofstadter 1964, 77) political positions.
Media Reportage as Analytic Object
In this blog, we don’t attempt to argue about or explain the technical workings of AI. Instead, we explore the paranoid social stances surrounding AI.
To do this, we input a selection of articles from both Fox News and The New York Times into ChatGPT and asked: what is the author of this article afraid of? This move has, of course, become a well-worn, often unmotivated trope in commentary on generative AI. However, we employ this technique neither to treat the chatbot as an unproblematic analytic tool nor to assert that it is designed using questionable underlying assumptions about fear, subjectivity, and interiority—facts a critical observer is prepared to accept even without the analysis. Rather, we started here to open up the possibility of something genuinely new, unexpected, or surprising—for Sedgwick, a defining characteristic of reparative reading—in the encounter among us (the researchers), the written texts, and the AI language model.
And something new did, in fact, emerge for us. After querying the articles individually, we pasted each of the AI-generated paragraphs back into Chat GPT and asked for some repeated keywords. ChatGPT responded with: artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition, political orientation, societal implications, discrimination, privacy, democracy, control, surveillance, regulation, existential threat, unpredictability, and human intelligence. When asked for the most highly repeated adjectives, ChatGPT identified: deep, truly, really, genuinely, potentially, uncontrolled, existential, responsible, profound, widespread, unforeseen, dangerous, and significant.
When asked “What are the author’s emotions behind the articles I pasted today?” ChatGPT responded:
The emotions behind the articles you provided today range from genuine concern and fear to apprehension and worry. The authors express a deep sense of unease about the potential consequences of various technological advancements, particularly in the realm of artificial intelligence. They convey feelings of dread regarding the erosion of privacy, threats to democracy, societal upheaval, and the loss of human relevance in the face of advancing technology. Overall, there’s a palpable sense of alarm and urgency in addressing the risks associated with these developments.
The term we emphasized above—erosion—was not one that had immediately stood out to us. Seeing it here, we knew we had to probe further.
As we turned our critical attention both to ChatGPT’s responses and the articles themselves, themes of erosion, especially “erosion of democracy” and “erosion of authentic human connections,” were indeed salient. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued long ago in Metaphors We Live By, metaphors take on a life of their own by smuggling in additional layers beyond what’s featured, denotationally, on the surface. As a description of a natural process, “erosion” carries a sense of inevitability and irreversibility that terms like “disregarding” or “attacking” don’t.
Despite this supposed naturalness and inevitability, however, “erosion” is a cause for alarm in mediatized discourses because it is supposedly new. It almost goes without saying that AI is not exceptional in this regard, but is just one point in a repeated pattern of moral panic over the supposed “erosion” of society and democracy brought about by the latest new technology (Thurlow 2006), from video games to the internet to the invention of writing. Even not-so-new technologies like smartphones recur as objects of paranoid reflection on “erosion”: as the Family section of The New York Times warned in 2023, “Ignoring a partner in favor of your phone, or “phubbing,” can lead to feelings of distrust and ostracism. Here’s how to stop.”
Anxieties focused on the experience of being “existentially threatened” and getting “outsmarted” by a nebulous, machinic enemy further rehearse long-standing fears surrounding human relevance and agency. In line with Hofstadter’s argument that “what is at stake [in paranoid thinking] is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil” (82), the paranoid notions of “existential threat” and the potential to be “outsmarted” by AI take on a moral dimension. The human vs. technology trope is neither new nor unique to journalistic, mediatized discourses, of course. A 2021 children’s movie called The Mitchells vs. the Machines—where “A quirky, dysfunctional family’s road trip is upended when they find themselves in the middle of the robot apocalypse and suddenly become humanity’s unlikeliest last hope” (from IMDB)—brings life to the paranoid’s greatest fear: an “uncontrollable” AI monster disrupting our otherwise “controllable” and “controlled” human society.
Sometimes, the moral binary within the paranoid style of AI discourses places fears of human interference at the heart of the matter. In addition to discourses about AI’s highly calculated behaviors, there are also claims that bad individuals and foreign nation-states are the underlying sources of “threat,” and not, for instance, AI companies.
As we hope is clear, AI is not unique in kind from other new technologies, even if it is commonly described as wholly unprecedented in human history. New technologies, in other words, have always shocked the current environment and challenged the perceived boundaries of reality. PhotoShop altered the previous notion of photos as pristinely accurate snapshots of time (notwithstanding the manual/analog photo-manipulation techniques that have existed almost as long as photography), and the invention of the camera permanently changed the concepts of memory, truth-to-nature, and objectivity. We here return to Sedgwick, who argues that “Paranoia is anticipatory” (130), “blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131). This has the potential to block the goals of positive change (136). Importantly, however, the blockage is never total. Restorative reading is always still possible.
Conclusion
While Sedgwick had a lot to say about paranoid reading, she was admittedly sparse when it came to its alternative: reparative reading. Yet to expand on what we foreshadowed earlier, she does spell out the crucial features of reparative reading in this passage:
“[T]o read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises…there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.”
It is in this spirit that we suggest novelty, surprise, letting go of totalizing desires, and indeed, allowing ourselves to hope. In doing so, we aim to open this space of hope up for others, too, if only in a small way.
While the paranoid style embodies a generalized proposition that “things are bad and getting worse’’—a proposition that Sedgwick points out is “immune to refutation”—it also fails to render any specific predictive value or direction for oppositional strategy (142). Of course, “paranoid people or movements can perceive true things” (142). Yet this is where reparative reading comes into play. By locating the effects of AI firmly within interactions that always involve human agents, we can better keep in view the role played by fear narratives that get projected onto new technologies by individuals and groups. We can also work toward genuine accountability for AI companies—and the actually-existing people who manage and profit from them—rather than continuing the paranoid acceptance that the nameless, faceless “Amoral Superman” (Hofstadter 1964, 85) of AI is real in exactly the ways that anxious discourses claim.
About the Authors
Elina Choi is a junior at Brown University studying English and Entrepreneurship. Interested in the intersections between business, written communication, and AI, she began researching the linguistic implications of AI through Brown University’s UTRA award and has since conducted culinary economics and IP law research for Liberation Cuisine. Elina is from Seoul, South Korea.
Joshua Babcock is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Brown University. His current book project explores how technology, language, and race co-naturalize one another across scales and shape the conditions of possibility for belonging to the image of Singapore. In his other work, he studies the Singapore Sling, U.S. school board politics (with Ilana Gershon), and a ghost town called Singapore, Michigan. Josh is also the Communications Director for the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: The book TheUnnaming of Kroeber Hall states that its focus is not on whether Kroeber Hall should have been unnamed or not. Referring to Yurok chief Robert Spott’s words quoted in the book, “Every story should have a foundation,” what is the foundation for writing a book about Alfred Kroeber’s work and advocacy for Native Californian people and the request to unname a hall bearing his name? Specifically, what key themes or events does the book explore to build this foundation?
Andrew Garrett: The University of California’s unnaming of Kroeber Hall in January 2021 provides the book’s frame (and, of course, its title), but mainly it is about what Kroeber’s most important work was and how to assess his twenty-first-century legacy. He was exceptionally prolific (with over 500 publications), but I argue that it is not Kroeber’s theories of culture, culture areas, or culture change or other general theories in anthropology that are his main legacy today, but rather the records that he created (and sometimes but not always published) in collaboration with Indigenous people who wanted to document their languages and stories. In The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, my main goal was to make visible the language and text documentation done by Kroeber and those in his circle, especially including the many Native people whose work he supported.
When Kroeber’s Yurok friend and collaborator Robert Spott said that “every story should have a foundation,” he was referring to one genre of Yurok story: the chpeyuer’ or creation story (another translation is myth), which explains how and why the world is as it is, based on what happened in specific places during the era of creation. The landscape itself is explained by events from the creation time, as are the behaviors of animals, birds, and fish, the appearance of animals and plants, and the practices of humans. Yurok creation stories are anchored in the specific places on the land where the events they record happened. Without such an anchor or foundation, Spott said, a story is an ’er’gerp, literally a telling or tale.
I quoted Spott for two reasons. The first and more important was to emphasize the link between places and stories, between land and culture, for Yurok people and indeed throughout Indigenous California. The second reason was to show that much of what was said in public about Kroeber during the unnaming fracas of 2020-21, including much that was said by university leaders, was unanchored or unfounded. In my book, I returned to the various documents (correspondence, notes, photos) that Kroeber and his colleagues and students created in the first decades of the twentieth century, in order to understand better what their goals were and what they accomplished (and failed to accomplish).
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: You describe Kroeber’s language documentation legacy on Native Californian languages in detail, emphasizing his personal engagement with Native American people and their mutual appreciation. How does Kroeber’s engagement with Native Californians deepen our understanding of his language documentation legacy and its potential impact on language revitalization efforts?
Andrew Garrett: I stress in the book’s concluding chapter that Kroeber himself did not appreciate how the language documentation that he helped create would be used. He held on to a humanistic (and, as such, perhaps old-fashioned) conviction that people broadly benefit from the intellectual, artistic, and literary heritage of all cultures; he seems for this reason to have been dedicated to recording stories and the languages that encode them. This humanistic perspective is of course extractive insofar as the beneficiaries of Indigenous cultural knowledge are outsiders. But what Kroeber did not realize was that after his death, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Indigenous people throughout California would use these records to relearn languages, retell stories, and reconnect with families and communities.
One important critique of Kroeber, Boas, and others who engaged in research in the same mode is that they were interested only in what they viewed as traditional expressions of culture: they ignored or in some cases even suppressed evidence of adaptation to Euro-American society, cultural hybridization, and the like. This critique is valid (and I add evidence of Kroeber’s own suppression of linguistic hybridization or compromise). But a focus on presumed authentic Native cultural expressions sometimes also now suits puristic ideologies in Indigenous cultural reclamation. In some contexts, that is, what activists seek to recover are precisely the words and stories around “traditional” ceremonies, songs, and the like. Thus Kroeber’s own bias sometimes inadvertently suits today’s needs.
But I also show in the book that Kroeber’s overall project included documentation created entirely by Indigenous people based on their own wishes. One example of several I discuss: Kroeber taught his friend and colleague Juan Dolores, an important Tohono O’odham intellectual, to write in his language and supported his work over many years to create the first extensive corpus of written literature in the O’odham language (amounting to thousands of manuscript pages), also including sound recordings. I also discuss the Northern Paiute language work of Gilbert Natches, similarly supported by Kroeber, as well as community-centered documentation programs he organized in several parts of California.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: In the book, it is suggested that Kroeber, whether consciously or not, acted as an intermediary. People shared stories in their languages with him, trusting that he would preserve them for future generations. To what extent was this role predetermined, and to what extent did it emerge through his interactions with these communities?
Andrew Garrett: I think this role was very much emergent; in some ways, it is still emerging six decades after his death. In my book, I cite an anecdote told in 2000 by one of Kroeber’s students that seems revealing about the whole Boasian project as it was implemented by “the first Boasian” (to use Ira Jacknis’s term for Kroeber). George Foster reports that when he was working with Yuki in the 1930s, elder Eben Tillotsen told him, “I want you to make sure you get this right because my children and grandchildren are going to know about this only if they read what you write.” Foster then added, “I thought he had a very far-reaching view of the role of the anthropologist.” I think this dynamic, where an Indigenous participant understood what was at stake in language documentation and what is now often called “salvage ethnography” and the anthropological outsider didn’t appreciate this, was probably typical. Kroeber, like Foster, would have had no sense that the greatest beneficiaries of his work would be Indigenous communities and families themselves.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Chapter 7 is entirely dedicated to Ishi’s experiences immediately before and after he arrived at the University of California’s anthropology museum. How does the provided evidence show Ishi’s choices and shed light on our understanding of his life story?
Andrew Garrett: Ishi’s choices were constrained by many factors; a common narrative is that he was like a “prisoner” or “indentured servant” living in the museum. In chapter 7, I was interested in trying to understand Ishi’s agency — difficult as this is made by the fact that all records of his experiences are from those around him. But these records are from numerous sources, from the anthropologists and linguists who worked with him professionally (whether as his colleagues in the museum or in other, more paternalistic or extractive roles) to the many friends in San Francisco with whom he regularly socialized in the city or on weekend outings, and certain commonalities emerge. One throughline, I argue, has to do with his interest in articulating cultural values through narratives and other pedagogical practices. It can be hard for us now to see this in retrospect, but Ishi’s “academic” work with university researchers was actually of a piece with his “social” work with youths and other friends who were drawn to him and whom he taught about the world.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Finally, why is describing the Kroeber era’s blind spots in the book relevant for a deeper understanding of the decision to unname Kroeber Hall?
Andrew Garrett: As I show in the book, some of the blind spots or unexamined presuppositions of “salvage anthropology” and linguistics (as they are now often called) contributed both to the need to unname Kroeber Hall and to the documentary resources that many Indigenous communities rely on every day. For example, the vanishment assumption that prevailed in U.S. public discourse in the first decades of the 20th century — the idea that Indigenous communities, their cultures, and their languages were on the verge of extinction — motivated collaborations by Kroeber and his students with Native people throughout California (and beyond). These collaborations created archival resources that are now in constant use for cultural and linguistic renewal. But the same vanishment assumption also led to a sense of Indigenous invisibility in public spaces such as universities. As the most prominent early anthropologist working with California’s Indigenous people, Kroeber himself became a symbol of such perceptions and of their many negative consequences. The decision to unname Kroeber Hall was made to ameliorate that symbolic impact.
My dissertation analyzed the work of self-described Thai “design activists” who designed a building’s form, programming, and materiality to curtail corruption, encourage social justice, and improve political representation for their polity. Page 99 describes an encounter that is key to understanding why, during a very liminal moment in Thai history, architectural representation became political representation. The scene takes place in a design workshop for Thailand’s third parliament building, and the largest parliament ever built. At this workshop, three of the principal architects were reviewing a prototype of a desk they designed for the Senate’s assembly hall. Having already attended dozens of design workshops, I was startled when the soft-spoken senior architect became incensed at the sight of a green electrical socket, which his drawings had specified as blue. Given the enormity of a complex that was 11 times larger than the US capitol building, and that included spectacular features like an 11-story gilded tower glorifying the monarchy, this reaction appeared disproportionate. But this marks that coveted ‘aha!’ moment in an ethnography when phenomena in the field illuminate epistemological lacuna. What I saw as an inconsequential detail, my interlocutor understood as the materialization of political corruption, a material flow of the sovereign agonism and corruption that had prevented Thailand from approximating democratic governance.
…The parliament’s sprawling layout and labyrinthine layers of internal, multistoried courtyards comprise over five kilometers of surfaces: three times longer than the combined facades of the Palace of Versailles. Never mind the proverbial tree, I felt as if the architects were failing to see the forest for a bent needle. Why did something so relatively small become such a big issue?
Having practiced architecture for almost a decade in Thailand already, I was neither immune nor deaf to the fetishization of the perfect architectural detail among architects, mythologized in stories of Tadao Ando punching a mason for dropping a cigarette butt in his concrete, or Mies van der Rohe spending weeks examining the grain of every travertine slab he installed in the Farnsworth house. But this controversy was different. The design’s flaw was not a material property, or the sign of class tensions between an elite architect and a mason. Bad design manifested bad politics. Detached as the prototype may be from any circuitry, the plug entangled its supplier, its supplanted supplier, politicians, STECON, the Secretary of the parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister into what designers recognized as infrastructural corruption. I failed to see, as they did, the plug’s “totality” (Lukacs 1972), the underlying network of interrelatedness condensed into a coin of miscolored plastic, that allowed the design activists and government brokers to draw the scalar connection of a plug to a polity.
The plug’s polemics is what Barthes would call a ‘punctum:’ the disorienting detail “that pricks me” (Barthes 1980, 25). To its observer, the punctum is the detail that derails orthodoxy and confounds formulaic thought. It is a tiny element that unravels any tidy presupposition of a whole. Or to adapt Mary Douglas’s conceptualization of dirt, it is the detail indexing matter out of place, the threat that catalyzes systemic reterritorialization (Douglas 2002). Thus, to answer my question, and to understand how one plug within a spectacular parliament complex can provoke opprobrium, and how violations of the design are signified as violations of the political system, will be the horizon of this chapter. The short answer is the most obvious: the controversy cannot be reduced to a plug as such, but to the plug as a representation. For their interlocutors, an erroneous hue of a socket or the token of frailty in a sovereign’s body are symptoms of disorder, indexes of systemic derailment…
The plug controversy from page 99, I argued, constituted a cosmopolitical conjuncture of Thervadan, capitalist, design, democratic, and royalist cosmologies. For the parliament architects, the design’s corruption indexed and entailed political corruption: the green plug was provided by an unsanctioned supplier with connections to a member of the military junta. The lamination of political and architectural representation that undergirds the plug’s offensiveness led me to formulate the primary theoretical intervention of the dissertation, which I call ‘design-ification.’ Design-ification refers to the discursive framework that enables design activists to capture political problems as matters of design, a reframing that locates political problems as solvable within the reformist, progressive telos of the design process. In design-ification, activists configure the transformation between the citing de-sign and the cited sign as an ameliorative process with positive entailments for the future interactions that the designed citation will (re)mediate. The plug controversy of pg. 99 underscores how design activists leveraged the play of design’s citationality to propose agentive forms, materials, and spaces capable of acting within the ambiguous political tensions of a transitional moment in Thai history.
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.
What do folklore, folklife, folk music, folk medicine, folk belief, and folk horror have in common? Apparently, something, although just what is open to debate. It all hinges, of course, on that crucial four-letter word, folk.
My colleague Michael Dylan Foster coined the term folkloresque to refer to new forms of expression that invoke “folk” materials in some way, investing the media in which they appear with special meanings (Foster 2016). Our first edited volume on this topic, The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World,explored these understandings of folklore from the perspective of disciplinary folkloristics. Earlier approaches to this topic tended to be negatively coded—with folklore-like materials in popular contexts treated as inferior, to the point of being labeled “fakelore”—and excluded from full consideration as expressive culture by scholars concerned with policing the boundaries of their subject matter. By contrast, The Folkloresque celebrates the creativity of folkloresque media-makers, aiming to reincorporate these materials into the study of culture more broadly.
The concept of the folkloresque has proven useful to folklorists interested in popular media, but we wanted to expand the conversation to related disciplines. Our new collection Möbius Media: Popular Culture, Folklore, and the Folkloresquebroadens the discussion, demonstrating the relevance of concepts like tradition and authenticity in historical, anthropological, and literary contexts, in addition to folkloric.
Creativity, Authenticity, Value
Möbius Media is guided by the assumption that representations of folklore and “folk-ness” in contemporary media matter beyond the analytic concerns of scholars. When something is felt to be folk, we argue, it is valued differently from other things. The volume’s contributors demonstrate the wide range of such values deployed by folkloresque products and performances. Thus Susan Lepselter writes of the aesthetic of “hominess” achieved by a YouTube cooking channel and how the channel engages with regionally-specific ideas of cultural authenticity, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes subverting them. She explores the way notions of regional cultural purity and authenticity are jettisoned in favor of a different kind of “realness,” one that combines the intensely local and the undeniably global (83-84).
In contrast to the intimate, unpolished “hominess” Lepselter describes, Anthony Buccitelli considers the antimodernist ethos expressed through highly-produced “cottagecore” and related media on online platforms like Reddit and TikTok. Such references to idealized rural (and also fantastical) life serve a potentially important critical purpose: “Against a backdrop of troubled modernity, anti-modern constructions of an imagined past—in this case a largely domestic but also potentially magical one—offer an opportunity to celebrate the comfort of routine while still finding a way out” (105).
Claire Cuccio discusses the transformation of an object of practical household use—the Nepali theki, a butter churn and storage vessel—and its reconstitution as a symbol of cultural and personal authenticity. Receiving a miniaturized souvenir theki prompted Cuccio to explore both its prior history and its new role as an emblem of the ambivalent relations of past and present. “As with other cultural objects that have become obsolete,” she writes, “the theki today signifies an increasing array of meanings that embrace the past while speaking to new experiences in the present” (128).
The folkloresque is also often deployed in world-building. Timothy Gitzen and Ilana Gershon discuss this in the context of a popular television series and video game, both of which are set in “our” universe and make reference to real-world folklore while simultaneously weaving their own bodies of diegetic folklore. The presence of this diegetic folklore drives the action of the narrative and provides compelling commentary on the value of esoteric knowledge. By contrast, Debra Occhi focuses on a locally-produced Japanese television/film series featuring figures from Japanese myth and legend depicted as tokusatsu superheroes and supervillains. Here, the contemporary media form uses familiar folkloric characters and themes to tell new stories, which in turn serve promotional purposes for the region where the show is produced.
Paul Cowdell, Craig Thomson, and Paul Manning, in separate chapters, each deal with the role of the folkloresque in the construction of horrific narratives. Cowdell locates certain episodes of the long-running BBC science fiction program Doctor Who (Newman, Webber, and Wilson 1963-present)within the folk horror subgenre, itself a highly folkloresque construct. Craig Thomson argues that vernacular perceptions of werewolves in the contemporary world have been influenced by folkloresque depictions of the creature in popular media. And Paul Manning outlines the ontological and epistemological strategies of the “weird” fiction of Ambrose Bierce, noting that appeals to folklore-like framing and structure imbue such stories with a sense of closeness and potentiality.
Romance, Longing, and Belief
That the folkloresque registers a specific complex of cultural values—tradition, authenticity, heritage, and so on—suggests a positive coding in performance and use. Folkloresque materials are valued specifically because of their ability to embody and express these concepts, and focusing on this positive dimension is one way the folkloresque sidesteps the problems with earlier scholarly ideas like fakelore. Conversely, folkloresque media also has the potential to shore up and celebrate hyperconservative ideals, and several of the chapters in Möbius Media take a highly critical stance toward such uses of traditionality.
One common issue in folkloresque media is the phenomenon I call the “folkloresque regress,” discussed in the volume’s introduction (7-9). This is when popular invocations of folklore cast “folkness” into a flattened, monolithic, collective, and often idealized cultural past. The folkloresque regress is of course closely related to the primitivist discourses that Marianna Torgovnick (1990) identified. The main difference is that the “folk” comprise the culturally and geographically proximate equivalent of the primitive, albeit somewhat higher on the cultural evolutionary ladder that still informs much popular thinking on the subject (Dundes 1980, 2). While this regressive tendency may have positive implications for the creators and audiences of folkloresque products (as in the cottagecore media Buccitelli describes), it can also crystallize problematic assumptions about both past and present people(s). The antimodernism that Buccitelli so effectively highlights can serve, as he suggests, as an effective coping mechanism for people suffering from modernity’s perceived depredations; but it may also lead to ahistorical claims, negative stereotypes, and marginalization.
For example, the regressive practices of the African safari industry are the focus of Lisa Gilman’s chapter. She notes how tourist facilities sell a highly constructed, and deeply artificial, model of “African” culture. The folkloresque functions in this context to mask its own artificiality: crafts, foods, and experiences all create a sense of “real” African experience, even as they fail to connect with or represent the actual lives of local people. Instead, they deploy an illusionary, exoticized version of what she calls “an imagined pure, precolonial, primitive ‘Africa’/‘African.’”
Kimberly J. Lau’s chapter discusses an immensely popular series of vampire films and novels. Lau argues that the Twilight series encodes a particular model of white male identity and expresses a longed-for return to white patriarchal values. The “monstrous longings” that Lau reads in these stories articulate in devastatingly critical ways with the rise of Trumpism in the US.
Another dimension of the folkloresque is its power to shape belief and discourse in the present. Catherine Tosenberger’s chapter, for example, discusses how Modern Traditional Witchcraft “engages with the folkloresque on several levels: not only by directly invoking folklore to lend authenticity to its practices and through replication of traditionalist folkloristics but also through the use of recent non-folklore scholarship that itself engages in folkloresque argumentation” (265). David S. Anderson, meanwhile, tackles the problem of Atlantis, the legendary lost continent, and specifically the pseudo-archaeological claims used to propagate belief in it. Originally a literary flourish of Plato’s, “a folkloresque creation serving as a parable to remind the rulers of Athens that they must not succumb to hubris” (277), Atlantis nevertheless emerged as a site of real longing and spiritual questing for thinkers who saw it as, among other things, a way of accounting for similarities in ancient cultures.
The Power of the Familiar
To a large extent, the folkloresque is about invocations of the familiar. As we argue in both The Folkloresque and Möbius Media, following S. Elizabeth Bird (2006, 346), folkloresque media depend for their success on the ability of their audiences (in the broadest sense) to recognize their cultural referents, whether real or imagined. Without such recognition, the appeals to tradition, authenticity, and identity embedded and embodied in folkloresque products and performances would fail to resonate.
The power of familiarity is visible in the explicit repetition in both folkloric and folkloresque performances. Ron James illustrates the power of repetition in his discussion of Mark Twain’s clever use of an oft-retold legend about journalist Horace Greeley. In a speaking engagement, Twain exploited the “tiresome repetition” of the story (309), telling the now-banal narrative again and again until his audience erupted in laughter. And Foster, in his concluding chapter, notes the importance of mimesis in both folkloric performance and folkloristic scholarship. Foster discusses images of a traditional Japanese monster called Amabie that circulated online as memes during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the daily Instagram posts of Japanese diplomat Hisao Inagaki during the same period. The title of his chapter, “Nothing is Original,” is not, perhaps, as provocative as it may seem (or perhaps it is): Foster’s argument is that “the copy itself is a critical (if not the most critical) mode of creativity” (331).
Unpacking this sense of the familiar, exploring the power of repetition and the recognizability on which it depends, is the goal of scholarship on the folkloresque. Familiarity and recognizability de-center problematic ideas like authenticity (on which, see Bendix 1997) while recognizing their importance to the people whose cultures, whether mediated or commoditized or not, are under discussion. While the specific meanings attaching to “folk” media necessarily vary from product to product and person to person, the folk qualifier is nevertheless a hint that what is being invoked operates on a familiar cultural level.
Despite the longstanding and oft-lamented marginality of folklore studies, the material of folklore continues to be of great interest to non-specialists (Tolbert 2015). We hope that this new exploration of the folkloresque will invite interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. And we hope that the chapters and ideas in Möbius Media will be of relevance to scholars working in any field who seek to understand cultural production and consumption.
References
Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bird, S. Elizabeth. 2006. “Cultural Studies as Confluence: The Convergence of Folklore and Media Studies.” In Popular Culture Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction, 344–55. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Dundes, Alan. 1980. “Who Are the Folk?” In Interpreting Folklore, 1–19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Foster, Michael Dylan. 2016. “Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque.” In The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, 3–33. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.
Foster, Michael Dylan, and Jeffrey A. Tolbert, eds. 2016. The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Newman, Sydney, C.E. Webber, and Donald B. Wilson, dirs. 1963. “Doctor Who.” BBC.
Tolbert, Jeffrey A. 2015. “On Folklore’s Appeal: A Personal Essay.” New Directions in Folklore 13 (1/2): 93–113.
Tolbert, Jeffrey A, and Michael Dylan Foster, eds. 2024. Möbius Media: Popular Culture, Folklore, and the Folkloresque. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Torgovnick, Marianna. 1990. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
CaMP Anthropology 