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.

Carrie Lane: If you were addressing an audience of new college grads about to begin their post-college careers, how would you describe your book and its argument?

Claudia Strauss: It’s funny how our research can resonate in ways we don’t expect.  I didn’t set out to write a book offering career advice when I studied contemporary work meanings in the US, but I’ve found that audiences are curious about the personal implications of my findings.  (I will use work as shorthand for waged work in a market economy, although we know it has other meanings cross-culturally and historically.)  My research is based on discussions with racially and ethnically diverse job seekers in a wide variety of occupations, from warehouse workers to corporate managers, in the early 2010s, when it was very difficult to find jobs.  Thus, I also learned about what being out of work meant for my participants.  Some were at the beginning of their careers; others reflected on several decades of working.

College graduates are often told, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  It is wonderful if you can make a living from your passions, but that advice can backfire if you don’t have a passion or if you can’t make a living from it.  (See also Gershon, 2017.)  What I learned from my interviewees is that you can still have a satisfying life if you have a good-enough occupation.   

A good-enough occupation was not what my interviewees had thought they would be doing when they graduated (whether from high school, community college, undergraduate, or graduate studies); instead, they fell into it.  For example, one woman eventually became a successful grant writer long after obtaining a master’s degree in English.  First, she sold textbooks, then she worked for a philanthropic organization, then she parlayed her writing skills and part-time student jobs at her colleges into a grant writing position at a local university.  A good-enough occupation does not have to live up to your highest ideals so long as you enjoy it and feel useful in some way.  Those who felt they were doing harm in their job were miserable, as David Graeber also found in Bullshit Jobs (2018).  Unlike Graeber, however, I spoke with people in a wide range of occupations who enjoyed their work.  Interestingly, there is strong cultural support in the US for other ways of choosing an occupation (find your passion, move up in a career, or take any job that pays well enough), but there is no comparable discourse advocating for a good-enough occupation. (See also Stolzoff, 2023.)

I also found, surprisingly, that almost a third of my participants unironically described at least one of their past jobs as fun!  It is surprising given our semiotic association of fun with leisure activities.  What made a job fun were small work pleasures: the social environment, the physical environment, and tasks they liked.  New graduates or those rethinking their career paths will appreciate Chapter Six, where I explain the four different approaches to choosing an occupation I found among my participants, as well as some of the overlooked aspects of a job that could make it enjoyable or drudgery.

Carrie Lane: What might a semiotic anthropologist find especially useful in your book?

Claudia Strauss: In What Work Means, I consider the meanings of key symbols.  Why fun, of all words, to talk about jobs?  Who used that word, who didn’t, and why?  Why is a white picket fence conventional shorthand for a good life in the US?   (I argue it resolves conflicting American discourses about consumption.)  

When I analyzed the comments of my participants, I considered not only what they said, but also how the speaker framed their comments to express the cultural standing of their views.  By cultural standing, I mean what they believe to be their view’s acceptance in their opinion communities as well as how they imagine I would judge it (Strauss, 2004).  For example, I was intrigued by a supply chain manager’s response when I asked if work was central to his identity.  First, he said yes, but then he quickly clarified his response: “Yes um…by saying—although I work to live, I don’t live to work.”   It was as if he worried that I would think less of him if he lived to work.  Several others expressed their rejection of workaholism in the same way, as if that were the shared view in their opinion community.   Through cultural standing analysis, we can see not only which views were frequently stated but also, and more importantly, which views they thought were widely shared in their social circles—or were so taken for granted that they did not need to be stated at all.

Carrie Lane: In What Work Means, you delineate four different, if overlapping, ways Americans think about the place of work in a good life. What are those four ways, and why is it important that we understand the distinctions and connections between them?

Claudia Strauss: One of my key findings is that only a minority of my participants live to work, meaning that their work is central to their identity and interests, and they willingly devote long hours to it.  What was far more common than a living-to-work ethic among my interviewees was a diligent-9-to-5 work ethic.  Those with the latter value believed they had a moral duty to be productive workers, but they also wanted boundaries for their worktime because it was only one part of a good life for them.  They believed it is neither healthy nor morally right to make work your highest priority. 

We academics may see the living-to-work ethic in ourselves or among our colleagues and other professionals and thus overlook the way most Americans relate to their jobs.  Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has had a lasting influence on descriptions of American culture, especially among critics of what he and they consider the irrational goal of living to work.  I share their admiration of Weber’s brilliant description, but he privileges the ideal type of business owners, who profit from long workdays, over the outlooks of ordinary workers.  The United States is the only wealthy country in the world without federally mandated vacation pay or holiday pay, perhaps due to the misconception that true Americans live to work.

A living-to-work ethic and a diligent-9-to-5 work ethic are two versions of what Weber called a Protestant work ethic or, as I prefer, a productivist work ethic.  The two productivist work ethics focus on the moral value of waged work.  Of course, people work primarily to earn an income.  In What Work Means I also discuss what my participants mean by working to live (What are life necessities?  If you cannot afford necessities, where can you turn for help and retain self-respect?) and working to live well (What kinds of consumption did they desire?  What ambivalences did they reveal about their consumption desires?)

Carrie Lane: One important point you make in the book is that when we talk about work, we often fail to distinguish between different types of jobs, as work is always experienced within specific contexts, never as an abstraction. What do you see as the dangers of this tendency toward abstraction?

Claudia Strauss: There is too much social commentary about people’s “work ethic,” which is imagined as a willingness to take any job regardless of the assigned tasks or pay level. This bolsters the tendency of conservative politicians and policymakers to blame poverty on low-income people’s work ethic instead of paying attention to the pay and working conditions in the kinds of jobs available to them.  The new catchphrase in the US is “Nobody wants to work anymore.”  The truth is that the US is experiencing a labor shortage, not a work motivation deficit.  Over the last fifteen years, we’ve gone from six jobseekers for every opening to less than one due to declining birth rates, Baby Boomer retirements, and immigration restrictions.  “No one wants to work anymore” really means that when workers have a choice, they will quit jobs with lousy pay and working conditions and look for a better opportunity. 

I realized my own tendency toward abstraction late in my research.  For example, one question I asked was whether work was central to their identity, when I should have asked if their job was central to their identity.  As Marx explained, seeing labor as an abstraction is a product of a capitalist economy.

Carrie Lane: In your concluding chapter, you outline two competing visions of the future of work: one in which all adults are able to (and indeed must) support themselves through waged work, or one in which people are liberated from the requirement to work (or work so much) in order to survive. How do you position your own findings with regard to these imagined narratives?

Claudia Strauss: There is an interesting divide on the Left between laborist and post-work politics.  

I take the term laborist from Kathi Weeks (The Problem with Work, 2011).  As Weeks explains, laborists “celebrate the worth and dignity of waged work and . . . contend that such work is entitled to respect and adequate recompense.”  Because laborists stress the centrality of paid work for a meaningful life, they worry that if advances in AI and robotics create mass unemployment, the result will be not only widespread poverty but also lives bereft of purpose.

Post-work advocates like Weeks disagree that waged work is necessary for well-being.  Drawing on the theories and politics of autonomist Marxists like Antonio Negri, who sought to expand the revolutionary class beyond workers, they call for shorter workweeks and more generous government support.  For example, Weeks questions why so many feminists have fought for women to have equal opportunities for waged work instead of demanding more free time.  From a post-work perspective, advances in automation that reduce the need for human labor could usher in a utopia of expanded leisure, if there are adequate social welfare programs to provide a decent life for all. 

My findings overlap with both visions but do not line up exactly with either of them.  Like the laborists, my participants did see working as one part of a good life and certainly wanted adequate compensation for it.  However, in agreement with post-work perspectives, most of them did not center their identities or interests on their jobs and would welcome shorter workweeks.  What both perspectives miss is that under the right conditions, jobs can bring pleasure.  I would like labor organizing to advocate not only for better pay but also for improving jobs to make them more enjoyable, and planning for the future to compensate for the loss of social relationships at work as more jobs are remote and short-term.

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501776465/throw-your-voice/#bookTabs=1

Alex Warburton: Your two main sites, a puppet theater and a children’s group home, aren’t obviously connected, yet you weave the worlds of the puppet theater and the children at Hope House together beautifully, not least through the book’s figurative backbone, a Chekhov tale performed by the puppet theater (“Kashtanka”). All three are imaginatively drawn into a shared narrative. Can you say more about your process designing the project and choosing your ethnographic sites, as well as putting them together—how initially were you thinking these sites together, and where did your research lead you?

Meghanne Barker: Ending up with two sites seemed random, during my fieldwork. I knew I wanted to work with children, and that access to a group home such as Hope House would be difficult to obtain, so I found the puppet theater as a kind of backup. But then, when both admitted me, I could not give up either. In hindsight, I can see that I came to the field with a curiosity regarding government-run, postsocialist institutions and a fascination with children’s fantasy worlds. In both sites, I found the surprising coupling of these two elements. 

They also balanced each other out, somehow. When I was planning a simple ethnography of children living in postsocialist institutions, people’s reactions tended towards, “That’s sad.” I sensed they felt sorry for me, and that they felt they could already imagine the orphanages I would find. When I started telling people I was researching puppet theaters, I received cheerful remarks such as, “That’s random!” And the truth is that childhood in Kazakhstan, as in many places, often contains hard realities mixed with playful activities that might get dismissed as trivial, but that I find wonderful.

Upon defending my dissertation, a committee member (whom I love) congratulated me on herding cats. I was encouraged to make the research into two books. At first, this two-for-one deal struck me as extremely convenient.

However, keeping the sites together for the book seemed like an opportunity to try to make something surprising and beautiful. Both sites created fantasies that had social significance. Instead of alternating between sites, as I did for the dissertation, I wanted to frame them in the book as components of a single story. “Kashtanka” struck me as a tale that resonated at both sites. For the puppet theater, it was the play where I saw the most lucid discussions of puppetry. By coincidence, Kashtanka’s story, of getting lost and eventually finding her way home, mapped onto the children’s own trajectory.

Alex Warburton: Your book focuses on what you call the familiarization techniques used by these institutions of childhood to generate affect-laden relationships. A primary technique is what you call the animation of intimacy. Why think about animation and intimacy together? 


Meghanne Barker: In common uses of puppetry as metaphor for social relations, there is an idea of total control, with one party completely passive to the whims of someone more powerful. I wanted to show how play and performance helped to hold together the institutions themselves, while also contributing to a larger ideology of childhood as the responsibility of the state. For this, I needed to move beyond an understanding of animation as some mechanical exertion of will over another body. Issues of affect were essential to the process.

I first got interested in questions of animation when reading literature on materiality. It was the doll that first got my attention in a course taught by Kriszti Fehérváry, when we read Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency. Then Alaina Lemon, my advisor, led me to work by Paul Manning and Teri Silvio on animation, and all of this blew my mind! They have been invaluable interlocutors as my work has progressed, along with other writers on animation such as Ilana Gershon, Molly Hales, and Shunsuke Nozawa.

When it comes to animation, two aspects that resonated with my sites were 1) a distributed participation framework (of a principal, animator, author, and so on housed in different bodies) that disturbs the neatness of a singular subject (which is useful for thinking both about the agency of objects and of children) and 2) the slippage between the animate and the inanimate. A distributed participant framework brought me to examine animation as an act of intimacy, while the slippage between the animate and the inanimate highlights the risks of bodies putting themselves in positions of dependence on others.

When I started my fieldwork, I planned to connect the two sites primarily by comparing the way children played with their toys to the ways adults brought puppets to life for the children. As I spent more time with both, I saw that the adults at Hope House also treated the children a bit like puppets or dolls, dressing them up and calling on them to perform for visitors. This initially struck me as an interruption to the children’s “free” play. However, the children sang and danced for one another during their “free” play. I came to see the teachers’ work with the children as an act of love, as a way of ensuring that care for them would continue when they left the temporary home.

Alex Warburton: Most anthropologists primarily work with adults. In addition to taking into account adults’ beliefs about children’s experiences, you also talk about the children’s lived experiences themselves. Why take the everyday world of children and their creative play seriously? How do you theorize the role of fantasy in producing and maintaining social relations, through what you call the creative chronotope?

Meghanne Barker: I think for many readers these two questions may not be obviously connected at first. However, if we change the questions and ask, “Why don’t many anthropologists take either children or their play as central objects of inquiry?”, one might argue that children are less interesting to anthropologists than adults because it is hard to disentangle what scholars understand to be psychological from cultural issues and because children are typically less consequential, politically, in many societies. And regarding the triviality of play and fantasy, these are by definition not real, so why should we study them? We put these together in children’s play and such a topic seems hardly as important as something serious like adults fighting over money and power, for example.

The notion of the creative chronotope as a space or activity that constantly moves between the fantastic and the real is one way of arguing for the consequentiality of fantasy. Because many children such as those at Hope House are constantly creating fantastic frames for themselves and others, we can treat them as experts in such endeavors. This helps me justify why children should be more important to anthropologists who do not have an immediate interest to them.

It is my hope that the theoretical frame outlined in the book will serve anthropologists of art and anthropologists of childhood. I would love to motivate anthropologists of non-children to read more ethnographic work on childhood. There is a rich tradition of anthropology of childhood, but these works are usually read and cited primarily by other anthropologists of childhood. Linguistic anthropology is perhaps an exception to this, in that the work on language socialization by key figures such as Bambi Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, along with ethnographic work done in educational settings, have become somewhat canonical.

Sometimes, activities we associate with children only become interesting to anthropologists once they find adults doing them. In the twentieth century, when performance studies and anthropologies of performance emerged, this was influenced by theorizations of play and its transformation into art and ritual in adulthood. In the twenty-first, as interest in animation and new media has emerged, anthropologists of animation (including work on video game culture and related industries) are mostly focusing on adult consumers and users of such cultures. Again, many of these scholars have been incredibly generous and supportive as my research has developed. But there is still much room for expanding empirical and theoretical work in anthropology regarding children’s participation in various gaming cultures, in the consumption and re-animation of various animated entertainments, and so on. Much of children’s pretend play in contexts where they are exposed to screen cultures is COSplay – there are children who literally put on Elsa dresses every day for years on end, and yet this is seen as unremarkable.

As anthropological interest in animation develops – and I hope for sustained or renewed interest in performance, but this is another topic – there is room for greater conversation between scholars of childhood and anthropologists not particularly interested in children to explore the full range of possibilities of animating, of creating diverse participant frameworks, and of voicing. I hope this book offers some tools for constructing that space.

In the case of this ethnography, I try to show that by following the play of children at Hope House, we can understand the world in which they live and the government-institution in which they are growing up. I also argue that their performances have political consequences, as they become public figures animating an ideology of Kazakhstan in which society holds up children as the nation’s future. That is, in the very act of their being animated by the adults who have them sing and dance for government and nongovernment sponsors, they are nonetheless participating in public and political life.

Alex Warburton: Your book has a number of ambivalences, wherein rupture and loss provides the possibility of new connections and reorganizations, from broken children’s toys to Kazakhstan’s history of forced deportation and displacement under Stalin. Can you say more about the productive use of ambiguities you found in your research? Does this have anything to do with your interest in literatures on developmental psychology (especially on attachment) and psychoanalysis?

Meghanne Barker: The slippage between animate and inanimate first drew me to attend to dolls and puppets, but I eventually found such ambiguity in children’s status. People handled the children at Hope House as if they were objects, dressing them up like dolls and puppets. While Ernst Jentsch’s original essay on the uncanny stresses the ambiguity of animate/inanimate, Freud’s essay seems productive in opening the repertoire of experiences that could produce this feeling and in highlighting the slippage between the familiar and strange. I found this intriguing, alongside theatre theorists’ interest in estrangement, for coming to see relationships not simply as unclear, but moreover as dynamic. I saw the puppet theater exploiting the movement between animate and inanimate. In examining global portrayals of institutionalized children, I found a more pervasive image of the creepy child, so badly socialized as to end up wild or dangerous.

I remain ambivalent about psychoanalysis and about attachment literatures. On the one hand, these are literatures that take seriously childhood and children’s social relationships as central to understanding society. At the same time, such literatures often posit a normative trajectory that imagines children growing up in an institution like Hope House as inevitably damaged. A second issue is their ethnocentric focus on the dyadic bond between mothers and children, a focus that I found insufficient for understanding children’s relationships with adults at Hope House and other institutions. I found that children made productive uses of ambiguity around adults’ statuses – in their play and in their understanding of social relations.

A friend, a while back, complained about the popularity of ambivalence. I think her problem with it was that people seemed proud to admit to having mixed feelings. I believe this friend felt it would be more interesting and useful if people just made up their minds whether they liked a thing or not.

If we look at literature on children and childhood, and based on my experience teaching childhood studies, I find that it’s hard for people to take a neutral stance when looking at children’s lives. When we read about children growing up in different historical and cultural contexts, my students want to know – or decide for themselves – which practices are good and which are bad. For me, the moments of studying children that are the most interesting are when they are hard to pin down, when they are “queer” or “sideways,” as Kathryn Bond Stockton writes, when they are weird and surprising and puzzling.

Alex Warburton: Videoed interactions play a large role not just in your data but in your analysis, in which you foreground the frame (your role as videographer, the presence of the camcorder, and your [re]watching of the videos). In lieu of stills, artful illustrations of scenes from Hope House and the puppet theater, as well as from the Kashtanka story, figure prominently in the book. I couldn’t help but think of how drawings lie at the heart of what we vernacularly call animation. Can you tell us about why you chose drawings versus other illustrative media, and why video turned out so methodologically important to you? 

Meghanne Barker: I wanted to make a film during my fieldwork, but I had no idea how, and everything turned out insufficient for this purpose. The videos turned out to be extremely useful for me, nonetheless, as they helped me attend to fleeting moments that would have gotten lost. Watching them a hundred times helped me understand what was happening. The camera’s constant presence added an additional framing device to worlds that were already full of frames of performance and of fantasy, so I felt this was important to theorize in the last chapter.

When writing the book, I wanted it to feel, at least sometimes, like a fairytale. A fairytale with too many footnotes. My brother Justin happens to be a brilliant illustrator. I wanted to offer illustrations that might remind a reader of a children’s book from the early twentieth century, a book for children who are old enough to read Peircian semiotics but young enough to appreciate the illustrations. I sent my brother stills from the videos to use as references, along with illustrations of various versions of “Kashtanka” that I liked. Yet he has his own style and genius, so while the illustrations based on the video stills are quite faithful, the illustrations of the Chekhov story are entirely his own. The dog Kashtanka bears some resemblance to Justin’s own dog, Toby.

Alex Warburton: What do you hope people take away from this book?

Meghanne Barker: I want readers to cry!

What I mean is, I understand that I need to make an argument and a contribution to literatures, but if my own familiarization techniques have worked at all, they will make readers care about the children (and the puppeteers, caregivers, and puppets). They will recognize the beauty and value in the children’s play and in adults’ endeavors to give them joy. They will recognize, by extension, the everyday aesthetic choices we make to hold one another’s attention, to keep one another close.

Tarleton Gillespie: This book is so many things, and I’m really excited that it’s out and can now be taken up in so many conversations – about the circuits of digital culture, about recommender systems and the politics of attention, about music and the evaluation of taste, about the particulars of information labor. But I want to start with a particular note you make in the introduction: “in algorithmic systems, these “cultural” details are technical details” (7). What does that mean, for you, and how does that principle guide your study of music recommender systems?

Nick Seaver: Thanks for the great question. This gets at the heart of what I’m trying to do in the book, and what I’ve argued for in most of my writing about algorithmic systems. There’s a prominent discourse out there that imagines “algorithms” as being essentially inhuman, pursuing some kind of uniquely technical, economic, or mathematical goals. Many people would suggest that this is what makes algorithms harmful to “culture”—all those antihuman logics chop culture into little bits, distort it, and feed it back to us in grotesque form. What I’ve argued is that this does not really account for how algorithms exist in practice: especially in the case of recommender systems like we see in the book, there are humans all over the place deciding how things work, choosing between different options, setting goals, and actively worrying about their cultural role. In contemporary software development, algorithms change all the time as a result of these interventions, and these interventions are shaped by all sorts of “non-technical” ideas held by people. So, as I write in the book, “the way an engineering team thinks about their work is as significant to the functioning of the system as the structure of a sorting algorithm. If we tried to look past all the people to find the algorithm, we’d miss a crucial part of how and why these systems come to work as they do” (7).

So, that idea is what motivates the rest of the book: If the cultural theorizing of engineers matters to how their algorithms function, then what’s in that cultural theorizing? The following chapters work through some of it, talking about how my interlocutors thought about listeners, genre, musical sound, their own influence on the world, and so on.

Tarleton Gillespie: Well, then I want to know what’s in the cultural theorizing of these engineers, around one concept in particular, the one you chose for the title of the book: “taste”. What do the engineers who serve up my music streams think taste is when you ask them, and what does it seem to mean to them when they implement it into their recommendation systems?

Nick Seaver: This is something I only really figured out as I was pulling together the last stages of the book. I had gone into the field with a pretty simple idea about what I was looking for: people building these systems to model taste must have some theory of taste, and that would influence what they built. Or maybe, the tools available to them would influence their theories of taste. So, for example, if you think that people like the music they like because of how it sounds, then it would make sense to build a recommender that relied on audio data; if you thought that people liked the music their friends like, then you might do something with a social network. But I never really found anything that straightforward. I asked everyone I interviewed, point blank, “Why do you think people like the music they like?” And no one really had an answer; usually, they just laughed and said something like “Who knows?”

There’s a bit about this in the book, where I realize that what’s happening isn’t really the building of a particular theory of taste into infrastructure, but an effort to produce what I describe as an open plan: a kind of infrastructure meant to facilitate growth and exploration, which tries to be rather agnostic about the reasons why a person might like what they like. But, as we’ve seen in other domains, efforts to be open always have their limits; they facilitate some actions and not others. And this openness ended up manifesting as a hugely omnivorous data collection apparatus: Who knows what signal might end up being useful? Might as well collect everything. The more open the plan, the wider the net.

Tarleton Gillespie: This open plan approach definitely resonates with other instances of data science and machine learning — visualizing the entire corpus of content or the entire collection of data points about user preferences as a vast, flat landscape to be wandered. But that doesn’t sound much like how taste works, which by definition implies discernment and evaluation, i.e. not everything, and it doesn’t sound much like recommendation, which generally is a this-not-that offer. I imagine they see themselves as building an open plan such that each listener, millions of listeners, can find a path through it that’s to their own taste. But still, that sure does downplay their agency, very much gets them out of the way. What is it that they are attempting to do with their recommender systems? Who are they imagining they’re doing it for?

Nick Seaver: There’s this tension at the heart of algorithmic recommendation: it’s predicated on the idea that you might like anything (certainly more than you realize right now), but that you won’t like everything. So recommender systems are always caught up in this paradoxical position of trying to help people “break out of their boxes” (as it’s often put) while also profiling them to figure out where they might want to go once they’re out.

Now that’s a very sympathetic picture of what recommender systems and their developers are doing. Most critics would focus on the second part: recommender systems profile you, they box you in, they limit your view of that otherwise open cultural space. It’s not too hard to find arguments that these systems are about cultivating certain kinds of desire in users—to make a streaming music catalog more valuable by getting people to listen more (to more stuff, for a longer time). And that’s not wrong, but it’s only half of the story. A lot of the book is dedicated to describing how people working on these systems navigate that tension, between facilitating exploration and modeling preference.

I think the “this-not-that” reading of recommendation makes a lot of sense in the present moment, where recommenders are really everywhere and can meaningfully shape the entirety of what you encounter on a given platform. But it’s easy to forget that not so long ago, algorithmic recommendation was this little side feature—a thing in the corner that was only ever going to be a supplement to whatever else a user was doing. In the early days of these systems, in the mid-1990s, they were quite explicitly aimed at people who were already enthusiastic about music, willing to mess with new technologies, and happy to fill out lots of ratings. But since then, music recommendation (like most other kinds of recommendation) has shifted to target less enthusiastic listeners, to encourage them to listen more. This has happened at the same time that recommender systems have started to envelop platforms, such that people can start to talk about “Facebook” or “Spotify” or “Netflix” as almost synonymous with their recommendation algorithms.

Over the last decade or so, there’s been a major shift in the power of recommendations to really exclude stuff; we like to think of these systems as being widely influential, but (if that’s true) it’s only fairly recent. At the end of the book there’s a epilogue where I interview one of the major figures from the field, and this change comes up: I don’t think many people working on recommender technology were really prepared to succeed to the degree that they have.

Tarleton Gillespie: This idea of the open plan, this sense that recommendation was a curious add-on, both fit with a sense of modesty you note in the way these designers describe their role – often using pastoral metaphors, they characterize themselves as “park rangers,” “farmers,” “gardeners,” and occasionally “bushwackers… making this overgrown musical jungle navigable.” What do you think of this modesty? Do you think they are right to diminish their role, less powerful than public worries might suggest? Or do they need to tell themselves this, because they are embodying a powerful role in the current cultural landscape?

Nick Seaver: I think this is a really important question that we can’t entirely answer from an ethnographic study of this particular group. People often ask me about the consequences of these systems for music, listening, and culture more broadly; my first somewhat negative popular review of the book focused on precisely this issue and how it’s not addressed in there! But there’s a good reason for this: the kinds of cultural consequences people are worried about are big and broad and multifarious. We need many studies, in many different domains, to start to suss them out. I think a lot of people have an intuition that these systems are obviously influential, in obvious ways—but we shouldn’t assume that the goals of engineers translate neatly into broad cultural consequences, good or bad. We’re starting to see more empirical research on things like how musicians and record labels think about making music in a world full of recommender systems, how listeners think about all the designs on their attention, and the knock-on effects of widespread personalization. And the results are really mixed! In some cases, filter bubble-like effects don’t seem to happen; in other places, musicians try to adapt their style to “the algorithm,” but can only do so through mental models that may have very little to do with what’s going on under the hood.

So I don’t want to let my interlocutors in the book off the hook, nor do I want to assume that they are supremely powerful actors. Like everyone else, they occupy positions that enable and constrain them, their plans do not always work out, and while they certainly attempt to influence others, their influence is not guaranteed. That can sound like a cop-out answer, but I’ve long worried about a style of technology critique that artificially inflates its objects so as to increase its own importance. I think it’s a mistake to figure these people as powerful men behind the curtain. That kind of move does not help us understand our situation, and it takes us away from the boring-but-important empirical work we could be doing instead.

My own modest effort here is fairly constrained to documenting, as adequately as I can, how this particular group of people thought about their work at a particular moment in time. The chapter on all these gardening and farming metaphors, for instance, takes a rather contrarian angle in the discourse on data metaphors: instead of explaining how metaphors like these naturalize the work of engineers and convince a non-expert public that machine learning is all objective and organic, I try to figure out why people use these metaphors even among themselves, to try and make sense of what they’re doing. My takeaway is that pastoral metaphors usefully index a kind of bounded control, where the objects of one’s labor can be lively and surprising, despite the organizing role of the worker. This is less critical in a narrow sense, but I think it helps us to understand the appeal of these ways of thinking to their thinkers, which is part of the overall puzzle we’re living through now.

I hope this approach I take throughout the book makes it useful to folks who want to make more grounded critiques of this industry, as well as to people working in this space who may want to step back and think about some of the deep assumptions that underlie their work. Whether or not we imagine these systems as super-influential, there is a lot of work to do.

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Mira Guth: In the book, you write beautifully about the power of storytelling to both gather knowledge and incite action—from ethnographic stories of changing honeybee ecologies to Islamic eschatological tales that teach listeners how to live well in the face of imminent end times. Thinking about the role of stories in your book as well as your documentary—where hope and apocalypse are not mutually exclusive—what can storytelling offer us in the age of climate change?

Larisa Jašarević: Thank you, Mira, for speaking kindly of my work and for raising the question on which this book pivots. Ethnography was always about storytelling, wasn’t it? Just think back to Malinowski, Mead, or Evans-Pritchard; for all the issues that we may have with the way anthropological knowledge fit snugly with colonial projects and imperialist epistemologies, those classic monographs still yield insights and carry a charge when we re-read them nowadays, precisely because of the stories they tell. Once anthropology became more honest about and more comfortable with the fact that ours is the science of “writing culture” and ever since critical studies of modern science, such as Isabel Stenger’s Inventing Modern Science or much of Bruno Latour’s undoing of fact/fiction, storytelling has become available to us not just as a colorful way of conveying the lore of others but as a method of producing knowledge. In other words, storytelling does not just add frills but is a method of thinking through puzzles, a preferred way of teaching and sharing. Anna Tsing’s work—and, my word, what a storyteller she is!—ever since the Realm of the Diamond Queen, and for me, Friction is the insider’s guide to telling stories anthropologically, to theorizing through storytelling.

With the global environmental and climate crisis, storytelling has become all the rage among concerned scholars across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Donna Haraway’s incitement that ‘we must tell stories” and that “stories must change” became chants at the writing riots within eco-minded scholarship that narrates our catastrophic times. Storytelling is recommended to grab attention, to compel care and action and, importantly, to recast the lots and the stakes: what in the world could we be feeling and doing if we no longer took the world we knew for granted? We are living in the ruins of our late-modern certainties. A turn to storytelling has become a way to salvage good things from our scholarly enterprise, so that robust thinking can go on as climate change frays the biosphere and overheats our undergrounds.

This book and the film I co-directed with my sister, Azra Jasarevic, draw inspiration from Islamic cosmology, metaphysics, and eschatology as well as from Bosnian Muslim lore. Now, if I started from the flat statement that as a revealed, monotheistic, Abrahamic tradition Islam has been seldom perused for its ecological and analytical insights, I’d be making an argument that is sound, provocative, but not very inviting. Let me tell you a story of two angels, instead. If you lend me an ear, you’ll hear stuff about human companion species, eco-eschatology, about near synonyms and rough translations of apocalypse, as well as about God and revelation that you may not have imagined belonging in the stiff drawer that we labeled religion and stuffed full of mothballs. Angels, it turns out, have much to do with climate change, if we broach that problem from some different grounds. The tall task has never just been to tell stories, but to earn a listening. The challenge for the storytellers is to tap into and hone the arts of listening; this is what local Sufis have taught me. Most of all, storytelling can strike a tone with listeners outside academia. I’m striving for that.

Mira Guth: By foregrounding the ecological sensibilities and metaphysical insights of Islamic thought and practice, your book makes a key contribution to the field of multispecies ethnography—among many other realms of social thought—that have often avoided thinking seriously with monotheistic religion. What kinds of doors for scholarship do you see this intervention opening?

Larisa Jašarević: You said it. My book is an invitation to venture beyond multispecies relations to think seriously through the relationships between plants, human, animals, elements and God—the nonhuman that modern secular social thought is most uncomfortable with. Likewise, to entertain the idea of the cosmos that includes angels, jinn, and, indeed, the devil. Very few sources in the budding, bold scholarship on the pluriverse, cosmologies, alien and Amerindian ontologies, human-animal relations, new vitalisms and so forth, deal with revealed religion except in passing, often off-handedly if not outright dismissively. Ontologies are welcome but metaphysics (which ontologies presume, by default) are avoided. Speculation is now cool but the mere mention of Revelation comes off as deeply inconveniencing and unconvincing. Indigenous cosmologies and science-fiction are mined for the perspectives that estrange or reenchant our ties with the planet in peril but the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions are presumed to be essentially synonyms with the western anthropocentricsm at the heart of global resourcist economy. What is more, Islam is often overlooked or lumped among the Abrahamic traditions, as presumingly not much different than Christianity or Judaism. In short, right at the heart of the most conceptually expansive surge there is a closure, a hard line drawn around the revealed tradition. My writing is tapping a finger there; scholars and writers better than I will, hopefully, take a second look, find cracks in the wall, start taking it down. Repurpose the bricks to lay down a path through the thickets and gulistans our gardens and campuses may become when we stop mowing our comfort zones. Much of the eco-minded writing, if not all of it, is about nurturing hope. There’s no shortage of good advice on why we should keep hope on a battered planet. What we’re missing is faith, now that we doubt Progress, development, disenchantment, the greenness of green technologies, the politics of climate action, and so on. Mind you, the question of faith, monotheistic or otherwise, is always a question of faith in the world teeming with sacred propositions at odds with each other. What grounds our hopes? What makes them possible and viable? We’re back to metaphysical questions.

Mira Guth: It strikes me that you initially had other plans for your research before a large storm and rainy summer hit Bosnia at the beginning of your fieldwork—with devastating implications for bees and their keepers. How did you pivot your focus? How can all contemporary anthropologists stay open and attuned to the strained multispecies worlds, inevitably touched by climate change, that they and their interlocutors must now inhabit?

Larisa Jašarević: Mira, I appreciate this question so much. It’s the key question that I can only expand upon here. Initially, I intended to write about bees but not about climate change until its ecological local effects were forced upon me by a catastrophic storm and by the weird weather that bothered bees and plants and worried beekeepers long after the storm was nearly forgotten. Initially, I didn’t think I could study climate change, but over the years I’ve been rethinking the ways in which we could be attending to it. Climate change has been largely made into a technical issue that is intimidating to anyone who’s not conversant with climate science, climate biology, technologies and narratives of climate future projections, and such. Anthropologists have been cornered into studying the issue of climate change with terms such as vulnerability, resilience, or sustainability that are themselves technical and policy terms—and as such, worth engaging, indeed—but also rather narrow and uninspiring. On the contrary, there is so much that social sciences and humanities could do to step in and help us articulate questions, hear out concerns that various parties are already raising in non-technical terms. Let us find ways to discern the myriad, oblique, disseminated ways in which strange and extreme weather, deranged seasons, elemental alterations, species mismatches, bodily and sensuous registers of the unraveling atmosphere—in short, the rattle bag that is climate change—comes upon and by-and-by upturns all domains of social life. Our terms are becoming archaic (“a nice day,” “spring fashion”); our bodily experience is already archiving records of the former planet. The almanac of late modern and multispecies habits is being rewritten. That is not a technical issue. Biologists know this for a fact: idiosyncratic responses across species will be multiplying. The same goes for all species of knowledge and practice, for all are dependent on the climate in one way or another. So, yes, how do we study it?

Mira Guth: In the book you mention your own practice of keeping bees. How has this experience shaped your research, relationship, and understanding of beekeeping in the end times?

Larisa Jašarević: Caring for the honeybees made it real for me; the whole of it, the end times, you know? But just as important has been the fact that I live by the honeybees, on a landslide-crumpled, precious heirloom of a piece of land. And that the apiary where I live and write is in Bosnia, the country where genocidal war shaped the landscape and inadvertently fostered ample new honey flow opportunities. I write from the place where, nowadays, extractivist, global ventures are quickly showing just how the corporate rush and grab to transition to green energy is, literally, colonizing air, water, and soil in the boondocks. And there’s been talk of new violence; the country has been on the edge ever since the war ended. At the same time, our mountaintop is a heaven for insects, birds, and plants. I keep seeing species that are new to me. Jasmine bushes are abloom. It’s the time of the year when owls are hooking up. The very air is hoarse with strigiform longing. The smaller birds must be on guard because this sort of courting between raptors is sealed by offerings of flesh. The mixed-up world we live in, here at my doorstep, jamal & jalal, lovers and raptors, all of us, caught in hail storms and jasmine perfume. Right now, it’s the swarming season for the honeybees. We’ve been having a swarm a day. Just yesterday, the strangest thing happened. A great swarm caught high up in a plum tree. Some fifty thousand bees, at least! Then it started separating across two, then three branches—bees literally walked back and forth, undecided. Twice I tried catching them in a swarm bag, standing up in the tree, and twice I failed. “I give up,” I swore loudly. Just as I turn on my heels, a cluster of bees plummeted to the grass, just like that, and instead of dispersing, stayed huddled on the ground, bee bodies pressed to each other, sticking tenaciously, wings folded back. What’s happening? I took a step closer and…. You can imagine the rest, dear Mira, this had been too long. Adhan from the local mosque was announcing the midday prayer. Putting things into perspective, and summoning me to presence.