CaMP Anthropology

Terra Edwards on her book, Going Tactile

July 1st, 2024

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/going-tactile-9780197778029

Bob Offer-Westort: Going Tactile is such an exciting book: It’s a unique read in a number of ways, many of which are interrelated. In the book you walk us through a history of the development of Protactile—a DeafBlind language and way of being that’s come about in Seattle over the past couple decades. Very few linguistic anthropologists get to work with language emergence in this way, or to deal with language in a tactile modality. I wonder if you might talk a little bit about that juncture in the term Protactile itself, with all the different things it denotes: a perspective on engaging environmental affordances, a form of personhood, a language, a social movement. What it is that’s anterior to Protactility temporally, phenomenologically, in terms of personhood, in terms of code?

Terra Edwards: That’s easy, Bob! Anything outside of contact space.

“Contact space” is a theoretical construct that first appeared in print in a 2018 article called, “PT Principles” (PT = protactile). The article was written by two DeafBlind intellectuals, teachers, and political leaders, aj granda and Jelica Nuccio. It contains a unified theory of living and communicating the protactile way, including 7 principles, several sub-principles, and explicit statements regarding the relationship between them. The first principle, from which all others follow is, “any time space is used, make sure it is contact space, not air space.” (p. 4). At first, I thought “contact space” was like “articulatory space” in linguistics—the space within which linguistic signs are articulated. And it is that. But it’s also what protactile people live in. The way I’ve come to think about it is that, whether it is at the level of linguistic structure or something much larger, contact space is the thing that sets the parameters of intelligibility in protactile settings. The best way I can explain my understanding of contact space is to tell you about some recent experiences in it (both of which are discussed in the book).

Last summer, I was visiting a protactile training center run by a DeafBlind woman I call Adrijana. I hadn’t been there in a while and the last time I tried to keep up with a protactile conversation, I was having difficulty with basic things like what time we would meet back up for lunch, what our schedule would be for the week, and who we were talking about. That’s why I went to the training center. I wanted to get caught up on new vocabulary. When I got there, I asked Adrijana to teach me some new words. She told me to put on a blindfold. That was a pattern. People would ask, “How do you say…” and she would tell them to pay attention to their environment. When Adrijana first told me to put on a blindfold, I wasn’t sure how to behave. I took hesitant steps around the house with my arms extended straight out in front of me. Adrijana pushed my arms down and said, “Zombie”. She told me that my feet would tell me when to extend an arm. I knew it was customary to take your shoes off in protactile settings, but I hadn’t fully grasped what that affords. Adrijana showed me that my feet (separated from the environment only by my thin socks), pick up all kinds of information. Standing in the kitchen on the smooth cool floor, she turned my hand so my palm was facing down. The hand stood for (represented) my foot. From underneath, she slid her palm slowly past mine, creating a sensation that resembled the feeling of my foot on the kitchen floor. Then we moved into the living room and this time she mimicked the feeling of carpet on my down-turned palm by making a scratching motion with her fingertips. Crossing over the threshold from the kitchen to the living room, she guided my attention to where the two textures met underfoot and showed me how it gave us the clue we needed to reach out our hands. Together, we followed the smooth edges of the kitchen counter to the dry wooden door frame, to the puffy warm couch, and we sat down. Once seated, she explained that now, we were in “contact space”. Me walking around as if there was nothing meaningful beneath our feet was anterior to Protactile, in part because the environment was not legible to me and to Adrijana in ways that corresponded, and in part because I was not legible in that environment as a person (I could only be a zombie), and the two are related. Contact space sets the parameters of intelligibility.

Bob Offer-Westort: One of the really striking things in reading this book is the contrast between experiential loss (or collapse) and experiential discovery in your accounts of people’s growing blindness and their coming into Protactile ways of being in the world. As we follow people undergoing these shifts, we find ourselves thinking through fragments of experience that are rare in ethnographies: The accessibility or inaccessibility of moisture on a window, what can be smelled from a dog’s mouth, the feeling of the floor through one’s socks… Like many of the people in this book, you too are learning how to be Protactile. In our fieldwork, many of us have to learn more directed modes of attunement, but in your case—as a sighted, hearing person—you were dealing with actually having different sensory access to the environment from your interlocutors. What is this kind of fieldwork like?

Terra Edwards: It wasn’t foregrounded in this book, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about sensory access, and despite its utility, I’ve come to the conclusion that the idea falls off right where the world starts. I just published an article in Anthropological Theory called The Medium of Intersubjectivity. The main question that article addresses is: “What are we in when we’re together?” If you think about it as sensory access, then maybe we’re feeling rather than seeing, or touching rather than looking, but you can’t be in that. Over the years, I have been taught by protactile people not just to feel, but to work with others toward an understanding of how the environment speaks to us, moment to moment. The senses are part of that, I guess, but the more important thing is listening for signs that tell you how to act and to act in ways that count as signs to others. What you realize when you do that is that there is a whole world full of chatter telling you where you can go and what you can do. When you start cashing in on that, one thing leads to another, like a day in your week, or an hour in your day. To me, that’s different from sensory access, and it’s an open question how different it is from what other anthropologists do.

Bob Offer-Westort: The major theoretical touchstones in this book seem to me to be the work of theory-making undertaken by Protactile leaders on the one hand, and Paul Kockelman’s residential reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time on the other. Could you tell us a little bit about how these theoretical efforts come together in the book and your thinking?

Terra Edwards: Going Tactile is part of a larger project about the existential and environmental foundations of language emergence. This book focuses on the existential and my second book (which I plan to co-author with Diane Brentari) will focus on the environmental foundations. Both very much center on semiotics in a broad sense, but you can’t get at the existential without re-thinking readings of Peirce that have become canonical in our field. Paul has offered us that—a re-thinking of Peirce via Heidegger that makes a very useful distinction between residing in the world and representing the world, and breaks the former down into a tractable set of interrelated concepts that can actually be removed from the philosophy and applied, anthropologically, at the level of interaction and language-use. In the introduction to Going Tactile, for example, I draw on this framework to understand a series of events that unfolded one afternoon when I was with Adrijana and Sam, who is hearing and sighted. I wrote the following in my fieldnotes afterwards:

A couple of days ago, we were all at Adrijana’s house and Sam said, “There are beautiful white flowers all over your back yard.” And Adrijana said, “They’re weeds”. And Sam said, “Come on.”, and the three of us walked together to the back yard. We padded across the porch, which was hot, down the steps, and into the dry, cool grass. The yard was filled with white flowers. Sam and Adrijana pulled one of the flowers out of the ground, and it came with a whole complicated root system. Adrijana felt the roots and said “Weed.” Sam directed Adrijana’s attention to the flower—the part that had been visible to her from above. The flower was silky soft and cone-shaped. Inside, there was a delicate, yellow stamen. Adrijana felt the flower. Then she cupped Sam’s jaw loosely in her palms, fingers angled out, forming a cone. She tilted the cone, with Sam’s head inside, toward the sun, and said as if she were the flower, “I’m innocent.”

Adrijana was arguing that our eyes deceived us. The flowers looked innocent, but their roots were ruining her lawn. In expressing her argument this way, she was inviting us into a way of interpreting the environment, which was grounded in a protactile way of being.

If I cupped your jaw in my palms right now, Bob, and I turned your face slowly toward the hot afternoon sun, you would probablyfeel exactly like a disingenuous flower. If I’m right, and you did, then more has transpired than just talking about a flower. That interaction leads us into an environment where beautiful white flowers don’t fool anyone. This is where being in the world and representing the world come together, and that, to me, is at the heart of protactile theory. The further you get into “contact space”, the more likely you are to talk about the world in ways that correspond across those living in (and visiting) contact space. A self-reinforcing loop starts to form. The people I spend most of my time with in the field are big fans of Paul’s work. In fact, one of them texted me a while back and told me that they were starting a club called “KFC”. What does that stand for? “Kockelman Fan Club”. The reason they like his work, I think, is that it introduces a vocabulary that articulates to, elaborates, challenges, and otherwise interacts with their own conceptual vocabularies in productive ways. I’m part of that conversation and this book is a contribution to it.

Bob Offer-Westort: There’s decidedly a politics to the book: You’ve designed it without diagrams, tables, or footnotes to avoid creating a description of DeafBlind worlds for which an interpreter would need to provide access to DeafBlind readers. You also follow DeafBlind political activism in state government. But perhaps the most central political thread through the book is a politics of environment situated at the limits of language: We see this very clearly in your sixth chapter, on the design of DeafBlind space at Gallaudet University, but I think it’s present in everyday approaches to environment throughout. I would love to read more about how you’re thinking about this.

Terra Edwards: Why do we represent the world? One reason is to obtain resources through established social and political processes. We stake a claim, make our case, and so-on. The recent history of the Seattle DeafBlind community highlights the fact that when we engage in those processes, we tend to reproduce or reinforce ways of being in the world that are taken for granted by those in power. It feels a little like a trap: You have to be what you are to them in order to get what they have. The protactile movement broke out of that by uncovering environments that were not controlled by sighted people or their norms. That created a reprieve, where new environments could be discovered. Claims about the world, what was true, what was right, and what was needed emerged from those efforts, not the other way around. But once those environments were discovered, they had to be protected, defended, and justified. There is a politics that emerges out of situations like that, which are not aimed at getting what they have, but at protecting what is, and always has been, yours. Throughout the book, I am trying to trace a form of politics that doesn’t try to replace one construct with another, change standards that cannot be conformed to, or enter spaces that were designed to exclude, but instead, aims to create, maintain, and protect the possibility of existence. Given that goal, my attention was drawn away from explicit mentions of language as such, talk about identity, or other things that often become targets of political discourse, and toward things that might seem to fall outside of the realm of politics, like how one person directs another from the kitchen to the living room, or debates about whether a plant is a flower or a weed. If I was going to sum it up, I would say that the environment is what we exist in and what we move through. When it breaks down, we sometimes struggle to exist, and there are forms of politics that operate within that struggle that we, as anthropologists, are well equipped to study.

Bob Offer-Westort: I would guess that one of the things that’s exciting about studying an emerging language is that things are in comparatively rapid flux. This book is the product in part of your dissertation fieldwork as well as some post-dissertation work at Gallaudet. It’s now been a few years since the latest fieldwork in this book. What is changing now?

Terra Edwards: You’re going to have to read my second book to get an answer to this question, Bob.

Bob Offer-Westort: The semiotic perspective that you employ in this book opens up questions that aren’t yet standard fare in linguistic anthropology. I don’t want to ask for a programmatic statement or a prescription, but I’d love to read your thoughts about how linguistic anthropology and other disciplines might take up this mode of engaging semiosis more broadly. What is the work or mode of work that you’d really like to see?

Terra: Edwards: I’m not sure I have an idea of what I’d like to see (I love being surprised), but I do think there are some important conversations to be had about the limits of language. When DeafBlind people in Seattle were becoming blind, the visual world they once knew collapsed. Historically speaking, the first collective response to that problem was to obtain resources from the state to pay for sighted interpreters who were trained to substitute descriptions of the world for the world. Thinking carefully about those attempts, I learned that there is a limit to what language can do when the world is falling apart. Broadly speaking, in moments of crisis, rupture, and collapse, one might find that talk about the world is no longer a reliable way of gaining access to, intervening in, or otherwise affecting change in the world. For example, if you were one of the people who spent most of your time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, you may have felt at some point that digital representations of social life were exhausting their capacity to substitute for social life. That is what I talk about in Going Tactile as a “sign of collapse.” You can’t perceive collapse directly, so you look for signs. Maybe you realize one day that statements are no longer treated as true or false, or maybe arguments for rights and resources carry no weight. Maybe your attempts to spin things only drive you deeper into the problems you’re trying to escape. Maybe you realize that no one out there is coming to help, so there really is nothing more to say. Problems like these are all rooted in a terminal imbalance between residence and representation. Unfortunately, I think this issue will become ubiquitous in the years to come, and it would be well worth our time as linguistic anthropologists to find ways of thinking about it.
Moyukh Chatterjee on his book, Composing Violence

June 24th, 2024

https://www.dukeupress.edu/composing-violence

Drew Kerr: On one reading, you’ve offered a fresh take on the exclusionary Hindu nationalist project of perpetual crisis re/creating an internal enemy in India, which we might highlight a special animation to this crisis in 1992 with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, cemented as a model in the 2002 events of the Gujarat pogrom in your book, and now, as of January 22, 2024, in a way consecrated with the building of the Ram Mandir over the site of the destroyed Babri Masjid. You challenge us to not take these events — and major events like them across the globe — as finished and to not take them as simply destructive. Simultaneously, your work broadly challenges the idea and hope of witnessing in spaces of violence. I’m curious if you could explain the tensions you knead out between destruction and composure, and how violence forces us to rethink that relationship?

Moyukh Chatterjee: Thanks, Drew, for your question, which goes to the heart of the book and its ambition. The mise-en-scene of political violence, especially what is called communal violence and riots in South Asia, may be quite familiar to many readers and scholars – burned shops, cycles, cars, dead bodies, police marches. This violence is often categorized as religious violence and ethnic conflict, which is not very helpful at all since it assumes the violence can then be somehow sequestered within the boundaries of something called Hinduism and Islam which exists outside the secular apparatus of the courts, police, law, and elections.

But the dead bodies on the streets and the burned down shops and houses only show the destructive force of collective violence on lives and spaces. And as you mentioned, what do we do with an explicitly exclusionary project that also aims to create new forms of belonging and inclusion? What do we do when riots and pogroms are only act one, stage one, like the case of Gujarat 2002, when anti-Muslim pogroms became the launchpad for a new form of public, muscular Hinduism, a new form of majoritarian governance, and a new kind of wounded and triumphant Hindu self. In such contexts, I have suggested that composition rather than exposure may be more helpful. Since composition moves away from the framing of political violence as an event that is supposedly finished or as always ensconced within the framework of victim/perpetrator or even as something that is always already under erasure. In this way, my book builds on the work of a range of political anthropologists – Veena Das, Jonathan Spencer, Daniel Hoffman, Val Daniel, Pradeep Jeganathan – to name just a few who come to mind, who have explored this tension between the destructive and the productive in tracking the afterlives of political violence in different contexts.

In other words, composition is the answer to the problem of framing an object that does not end with the horror and brutality of subjection and humiliation, (and here I am thinking of the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten writing about racism) but continues to animate new spaces (courtroom and police station) and new forms of rule. (new laws or the use of old laws for new purposes). In a related but also different way, this helps us see the question of violence anew, not within the binary of violence/peace as if violence against minorities is an aberration or breakdown of democracy, but ask what kind of social and political relationships sublimate, organize, transform, and interrupt violence against minorities within liberal democracies.

Drew Kerr: A few different types of dialectics — for example, norm and ideology, erasure and exposure, witness and victim, majority and minority — come into being through violences that ultimately give flesh to the categories and roles of Hindu and Muslim. You clearly show us, though, none of these categories are ever fully self-evident or stable in concept for the researcher or in practice for the residents in 2002 and present-day Gujarat. I find this incredibly hopeful (thank you!) to think, write, and live beyond false and fixed dichotomies on one hand, as well as quite insidious, which, I think, plays a larger compositional role in the book and the events described. Can you tell us more about the logics of such an “impossible dialectic” (Agamben 2000) and how they showed up in, and comprised, your research?

Moyukh Chatterjee: Because I was working with paralegals and human rights activists, the dialectics you mention above, especially binaries like Hindu/Muslim, victim/perpetrator, acquittal/conviction framed my fieldwork (in almost overwhelming way) and it was a major challenge for me to not be fully absorbed or determined by them. Put another way, it seemed to me that the project of Hindu supremacy aimed to create an environment, an ethos, a background, where what you call false dichotomies appear self-evident, even experiential. So, I remember one Muslim witness telling me outside the courtroom that it was foolish to expect justice from the courts because they were Hindus. So beyond the breakdown of the law, the courts were doing something else, they were joining the wider political and social climate in Gujarat to declare to Muslims that they were outsiders, eternal outsiders.

Another example. During the pogrom in Gujarat, my interlocutors told me, it was a time when it did not matter what kind of Muslim you were – rich or poor, Shia or Sunni, apartment resident or slum dweller, judge or beggar – you were reduced to being a Muslim, and all the richness of other categories or all the differences of caste, language, sect, and region that mark the heterogeneity of Hindu/Muslim falls away. I think your question raises the larger context of social pluralism which is the norm (rather than the dichotomies) in India.

Speaking of binaries, the binary between impunity/rule of law and law/illegal also melts away when you observe the performance of trials and justice. So one day in Ahmedabad, almost a decade after the pogrom, you (Muslim witness) find yourself in front of the judge, and your neighbor is an accused, and you have to identify him as such, but the informal setting of the courtroom, or more specifically the lower courts in India, means that the accused can approach you, often in front of the NGO workers and paralegals, and ask you to forget the case, or reconcile, or otherwise intimidate you. Anthropology can reveal in such moments the human rights and statist fantasy of legal punishment, a fantasy often shared by activists, that one can move outside the social into a sanitized world of the legal.

Drew Kerr: Semiotics or signs don’t play an explicit role in the argument of the book; however, you do draw on the language of meaning-making, composing, and producing what is rendered as legible, licit, and legitimate (Das 1995) — what I might frame in one word as significant. On my read, I find the work your argument is doing to be very beneficial for also thinking through regimes of language, the entanglement of social forces and speech acts, and the interplay between political ideologies and human capacities of sign-use. I’d love to hear more about your choices, then, in composing the book’s theoretical arc, as well as composing yourself methodologically during your research.

Moyukh Chatterjee: An attention to semiotics, signs, and what you can call significance has been an integral part of my training in literature and anthropology. As a student of English literature in Delhi, I read Barthes and later in graduate school in Emory, I gravitated towards a group (or should I call them a cult?) of scholars and students who were very influenced by Deconstruction. But as an anthropologist, I felt uneasy dressing up my fieldwork in the language of deconstruction; it would mean that my fieldwork or stories would be to prove/disprove theoretical tendencies found within canonical texts by Foucault/Derrida or someone else. Nonetheless, I was deeply impressed with the readings that were offered in those classes – readings that deconstructed texts and performed incredible acts of interpretation!

So while composing the theoretical arc of the book, I thought maybe it will be a good idea to take some of the most familiar objects that frame political violence – witness, archive, trial, the unspeakable – and recast them, or attempt to recast them. To be frank, I am not sure I succeeded in doing all this in one book. And it was easier to show the limits of exposure than to compose violence. In terms of composition, I build on the literature on critique and post-critique. Composition builds on the limits of critique identified by literary scholars, for whom it is primarily a way of reading texts, which in my case becomes a way of reading violence.

And I use it in terms of assembling a heterogeneous set of actors and affects, indebted to Latour’s concept of compositionism as well.

And the question of language is quite an important part of what I have in mind with composition. And of course, there is a long tradition of attention to language in studies of violence. Unlike exposure which is perhaps indifferent to the object, and assumes that the language of exposure per se is not important (after all it is exposure that is the point) I think composition puts the question of significance at the center; it is, to paraphrase the novelist Coetzee, to wrest control from regimes of significance connected to the state/major. At the same time, I think the question of what lies beyond language, or semiotic regimes is also important; the affective charge of far-right Hindu supremacy and its performativity is a key aspect of its success. For instance, on encountering a violent image or procession, a compositional approach will ask, what are the publics formed by such images and rituals, how do actors insert themselves into its circulation and proliferation, and in that sense, make it political. I find these questions are difficult to ask within the exposure model.

Drew Kerr: Legal documents, on the other hand, do play a central role in Composing Violence and the lives of your interlocutors. Nusrat Chowdhury (2019) in Bangladesh, Akhil Gupta (2012) in North India, and Matthew Hull (2008) in Pakistan have similarly shown how other types of official documents take on lives well beyond what we might evaluate as bureaucratic failures or democratic inefficiencies, demonstrating how documents themselves become affectively charged in particular milieux. You join this conversation with a special emphasis on the human actors involved in and with the document-type of the First Information Report (FIR). Ostensibly a legal and bureaucratic tool promising legibility and due legal process, the FIR, you illustrate, actually accomplishes something quite different. Can you help us understand the FIR as a medium – in the sense of something that “makes society imaginable and intelligible to itself”(Mazzarella 2004) – and the media ecology within which it circulates?

Moyukh Chatterjee: Your question takes me back to graduate school. At the time I was writing my dissertation, some of these exciting new books had come out, and I remember that I was excited to witness the documents/paperwork turn in anthropology; in fact I almost made it the heart of the dissertation, but my advisor helped me to see the larger picture. In line with my interest in language and archives (which was also because of Subaltern Studies), I gravitated towards the power of police acts of interpretation and reporting. I was excited to find that police reports break out of context (what Derrida called iterability and Veena Das has a wonderful essay that uses this idea called the Signature of the State) and circulate in newspaper reports as public information. In fact, this discovery made me realize the extremely limited vocabulary used to describe religious violence in India and its genre-like quality that allowed violence to work like myth. This goes back to your question about the role of the FIR in making certain forms of violence against minorities intelligible as religious fervor and not state-sanctioned pogroms. David Nugent, a wonderful anthropologist of the state and also a member of my dissertation committee, would ask me pointedly, “why are the police recording the violence in the first place?” And as I describe in the book, even the blank FIRs in the archive, the blankness does political work by creating a certain time-space of violence. Overall I was struck by how a dry, technical document like the police’s first information report becomes the key ingredient of newspaper reports (and this must be based on relationships between crime reporters and police officers) that allow what Gyan Pandey has called the colonial master narrative of the communal riot to circulate as what is labeled news. And here, rather than expose the falsity and bias of the FIR (important work accomplished by activists and scholars soon after the violence) I got interested in its power to inscribe a wounded majority and a treacherous minority. In this sense, legal documents get charged by Hindu nationalist politics and are also constitutive of a milieu that produces the Muslim as outsider, communal, and destructive of the national community.

Drew Kerr: Where would you locate this book in relation to the category of the minor you develop throughout your argument? I’m curious for whatever that question might spark for you, but I’m particularly imagining a capacious archive — and the idea of the archive — that houses media about and of violences rendered as communal and religiously divisive in India.

Moyukh Chatterjee: This is such a wonderful question. I wish I could have developed the idea of the minor more expansively in my book. The minor and the minority as a concept, as you know, belongs to a long history, and I have learned from and continue to learn from the work of Talal Asad, Amir Mufti, Qadri Ismail, Ajay Skaria, Gyan Pandey, Faisal Devji, Chulani Kodikara to name only a few people who come to mind. As a concept I wanted to give a sense of the making of the minor and the minority, not simply as numerical categories, but as what does not circulate as the norm or model; that which interrupts the major or can unravel the major; and finally as a binary that is framed and re-framed within the institutional apparatuses and technologies of democracy., including the courtroom and police archive. As David Scott has argued, democracy seems to lock us into thinking that there is only the possibility of minority rule or majority rule, and if the minority position is a position without sovereignty, then part of the fantasy of right-wing movements like Hindu nationalism is to create a permanent majority and minority within a democracy. This has been framed in an earlier classical literature, as “the tyranny of the majority” (Tocqueville). But in terms of my ethnography, I have tried to work out a minor reading of violence, which is not a search for what is hidden or repressed, but what is on the surface of documents, technologies, and practices (like repetition and aggregation) and helps us understand the making of the major, and its artifice. In the book, it takes the form of the minor event, the minor characters who are often overlooked in the mise-en-scene of violence.

Your idea of a capacious archive to document and tell this story of violence is really wonderful. I think it would take the idea of composition seriously to imagine such an archive outside the limits of conventional archival thinking. By which I mean non-narrative and non-chronological ways of representing anti-minority violence or what has been called religious violence. I have been very influenced by artistic work on violence, and perhaps, composition is my way of bringing some of that sensibility into scholarly work. In my fieldsite, I have been speaking to artists and curators, more recently, and thinking with them, this question of the archive. Would it be to map the soundscapes and visual field of this violence or to move away from the archive altogether, and think about how the minor – for instance Muslims and Dalits and Tribals – imagine a life inside and outside Hindu supremacy? When I was growing up in Delhi, this work was done by an organization called SAHMAT. They would create such counter-archives and use art to counter communalism and I think it would be great to reimagine a similar project in our times. Perhaps I will be lucky enough to be part of a project like that in the future.

Thank you so much, Drew, for your questions and patience throughout. I really enjoyed our conversation.

References

Giorgio Agamben. 2000. The Remnants of Auschwitz. (New York: Zone Books).

Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury. 2019. Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh. (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Veena Das. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).

Akhil Gupta. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press).

Matthew Hull. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. (Berkeley: University of California Press).

William Mazzarella. 2004. “Culture, Globalization, Mediation,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33, no. 1: 346.
John Postill on his book, The Anthropology of Digital Practices

June 17th, 2024

https://www.routledge.com/The-Anthropology-of-Digital-Practices-Dispatches-from-the-Online-Culture-Wars/Postill/p/book/9781032370828

Katrien Pype: In this book you not only aim to describe the online culture wars from what might be called an anti-woke perspective. You also want to tackle causality, and especially media effects. You argue that anthropologists eschew this question because it seems too linear. To that end you formulate a plural paradigm whereby one can identify multiple causes for a particular effect. How does a scholar identify the relevant interactions among multiple causes? In other words, how does one know that it is the combination of a particular set of, say, events, texts, voices, and experiences that co-produces worlds? And how can lurking from afar allow us to study these causal constellations?

John Postill: When Routledge asked me to write a media/digital anthropology book I faced a dilemma, as I had two very different ideas in mind. The first idea was a book about the social effects of media practices based on a previous essay I had written. The second was a study of the online culture wars in the Anglosphere, more precisely of colourful anti-woke figures like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Tucker Carlson. A friend of mine, the digital culture scholar Edgar Gómez Cruz, suggested I combine the two ideas, and that’s what I did. In the book I invite media researchers, including media anthropologists, to overcome their aversion to media effects, with the anti-woke world as my case study. So the reader is getting two books for the price of one!

As soon as I started drafting the first meaty chapter (Chapter 5) I realised that I couldn’t write only about media practices and their worldmaking effects. I also had to consider the effects of other media things, for instance, media events, dramas, and texts – what I call ‘the causal life of things.’ So I shifted from a media practice paradigm to a plural (media) paradigm. In Chapter 5, I examine a 2017 protest against Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist accused of racism at Evergreen State College, in Washington. I found that emailing was the most causally significant media practice during the early stages of this Turnerian drama, while social media and TV practices had a greater impact later. How did I know this? Because the participants themselves focused on these practices, and this was corroborated by other materials I collected. Reconstructing the protests allowed me to identify the unique sets of media practices, actions, and texts that shaped their evolution at each stage of the social drama.

Studying this American recent event from Australia was not very different, I imagine, from doing social historical research. Rather than a conventional ethnographic study based on participant observation, this book comes from an open-source investigation that relied on online archival materials of recent events. It is still ethnographic, I would argue, because it is driven by participants’ own priorities and schemas rather than my own.

Katien Pype: How did you decide on the four major events you studied in the book, namely Trump’s electoral victory, the Covid-19 pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and the war in Ukraine?

John Postill: When I looked back the other day at my book proposal, which I submitted more than two years ago, I was shocked to find that of the five events I said I would cover I ended up covering only one, the just mentioned Evergreen protests (linked to Trump’s shock 2016 election). The rest emerged in the process of drafting the book. I decided I needed four or five formative events to tell the short story of the anti-woke resistance. Eventually I dropped the Capitol attack of January 2021 because I didn’t have much on it.

Most of my research and writing decisions are intuitive. I don’t have any set criteria other than doing whatever feels right based on the materials to hand and whether I think they might shed light on problem X – here, the mediated making of the anti-woke world. In short, I chose those events because they mattered to my research subjects and because I had rich empirical materials on them.

The events are arranged chronologically, but analytically they work best in two discontinuous pairings (Evergreen and Floyd; Covid and Ukraine). Thus, in the anti-woke imaginary the Evergreen protests presaged the Floyd riots, while the schism between Covid conspiracists v consensualists was reinforced by the Ukraine war. In other words, those anti-wokes who favoured the scientific consensus on the pandemic also favoured the West’s consensus on the need to support Ukraine.

Katrien Pype: You write about culture wars. Can you explain where, as a social anthropologist with a training in the UK, where the focus is on the social, you have come to study culture, and what is culture here? One could argue that we are dealing with culturalism – then the question is: is the culture concept itself used by your interlocutors? Do you think the digital produces its own culture(s)?

John Postill: Unlike my previous offline or hybrid research in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Spain, I see this work as a form of parasocial anthropology in that I followed my research subjects online, without interacting with them. That said, I was keenly interested in the anti-woke social field and how leading anti-wokes related to one another as well as to their fans and foes, so the social is still very much in the mix.

In the book I don’t go into whether these are actually wars about culture. My focus is rather on leading culture warriors – I use this as a folk notion – and three of the key issues (racism, Covid and Ukraine) they have fought over in recent years. I haven’t tracked the use of the term culture by my research subjects but if someone did, they would probably find it in the ubiquitous term cancel culture as well as in connection to their perceived need to protect Western culture/civilisation from so-called woke multiculturalism. In the book I make the point that the culture wars are language wars (over preferred pronouns, hate speech, the word woman, and so on) but I don’t relate this to a broader discussion about culture or culturalism. More research needed!

Does the digital realm produce its own culture(s)? Well, in the anti-woke case, digital practices like tweeting, YouTubing, or podcasting, alongside other digital things, certainly helped to create an anti-woke subculture led by prominent personalities like Peterson and company. But we can never assume digital purity – the analogical is always present, too – nor should we neglect older media like radio or television rooted in the pre-digital age.

Katrien Pype: You regularly mention that influential voices do not remain within an online filter bubble, but that their texts/opinions/theories circulate ‘right across the hybrid media system’ (p. 69). This leads to two interrelated sets of sub-questions: (a) How can we see the boundaries between the woke and anti-woke movements online? What are these boundaries? What kind of boundary making is performed? (b) Is this because they are constantly looking for confrontations (and thus transgressing the boundaries)? And/or are these people constantly associating online (à la Latour) with their opponents?

John Postill: Content creators are world creators. I didn’t look at boundary maintenance, but the key strategy seems to be mutual avoidance. It is rare for social justice advocates (aka ‘wokes’) and their enemies to interact in public. Instead, they both engage with content, especially videos or texts in which their foes appear to embarrass themselves. There are no clear boundaries, but in the culture wars most commentators fall into one or another camp. It is not hard to tell which camp because the images and tropes are so familiar by now. In this sense, they each inhabit their own bubble, yet these bubbles rely for their maintenance on a regular supply of enemy content.

The key point is that we all live in what Andrew Chadwick calls hybrid media systems – even culture warriors whose main outlets are, say, podcasting and Twitter (aka X). By this term, Chadwick means systems in with old and new media interact in complex, non-teleological ways. To reiterate, we can’t disregard radio, television, or printed books. Indeed, some of the most formative moments in the anti-woke collective memory were precisely rare public clashes on television with woke figures, for instance, Jordan Peterson’s famous interview with Cathy Newman on Britain’s Channel 4 which became the subject of countless memes mocking the journalist.

Katrien Pype: You describe how the online wars can lead to meltdowns and to forced reorientations in careers, and other symptoms of cancel culture. What is your own positionality related to this split? Obviously, as your research consisted mostly of remote ethnography and lurking ethnography, your interlocutors didn’t force you to take a stance, as often ethnographers who are following a conflict must do. How do you think readers will position you? And is there any risk of this book being dragged into the conflict?

John Postill: I hope most readers will position me as a serious scholar with a keen interest in the anti-woke scene who is trying to convey this enthusiasm in writing while sticking to the evidence. I also hope they will see me as someone who wants to further the ethnographic study of causality.

Of course, authors have no control over what people make of their books. There is the chance that someone could try to drag this book into the culture wars – and me with it. That would be unfortunate, as I have no desire to become a culture warrior. Besides, I wouldn’t be any good at it. I may grumble about neoliberal academia (don’t we all), but I’m still happy to be a scholar.

Acknowledgements

Several of these questions have been formulated by the students of the course “Anthropology and Social Media” at KU Leuven University. On February 28 2024, John Postill participated in a “meet the author” session in that course, convened by Katrien Pype. She therefore wants to thank her students for their close reading of The Anthropology of Digital Practices, and their engaged discussion with the author.
Timothy Cooper on his book, Moral Atmospheres

June 10th, 2024

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/moral-atmospheres/9780231210416

Patrick Eisenlohr: Moral Atmospheres is not just a rich portrait of the freewheeling mediascapes of a Lahore marketplace, it is also a fascinating exploration of sensory and moral engagement with media among its traders and customers. What originally motivated you to embark on this project?

Timothy Cooper: Initially, I went to Lahore to study the circulation of Pakistani films. This was 2017 and I was new to anthropology, having previously studied experimental film and artists’ moving image media. I was interested in the image, its materiality, how celluloid ages, and how digital files glitch. I had also been working in curation and was writing for contemporary art publications. The big thing back then was the archival turn. Born out of postcolonial material and visual culture studies, this was concerned with the storage, retrieval, and possible restitution of knowledge and collective memory. I had first lived in Lahore in 2012-2013 in a professional capacity and, having previously known little about Pakistan, came to engage my new surroundings through these previous interests. If I remember correctly, my journey went from exposure to Pashto-language film music to Pashto Pakistani films, and from there onto Urdu and Punjabi-language Lollywood films made in Lahore’s studios (as Pashto films were also). This was a whole film industry, once one of the largest in the world, that I knew nothing about, but one with no national film archive, and with barely one or two books written about it. I began to look in film and electronics markets like Lahore’s Hall Road and found a dizzyingly quantity of Lollywood films of varying age, quality, and provenance. I was fascinated by how and why these films survived into the present. I was equally attracted to their visual palimpsest, overlaid with the names, companies, and logos of those who reproduced, retrieved, and appropriated them. In the economic model of this trade, celluloid films were sold to large marketplace traders for a lump sum to convert to VHS or VCD. These traders would then sell them on to smaller traders at varying price points; high for master-copies free of watermarks; low for copies watermarked with the larger traders’ logos. Unsurprisingly, the latter category quickly became fair game, a free resource for small one- or two-man traders to reproduce without owning the master-copy. Piracy didn’t seem a salient category here. But the absence of the moralizing underbelly of intellectual property discourse didn’t mean that there wasn’t a deep and pervasive concern with morality among the people who kept Pakistani films in circulation. Something else was going on, something that seemed to lie between the materiality of the media these traders moved and the various forces – religious, urban, inter-personal, technological – that shaped their ethical lives. So, I went back between 2017 and 2020 to learn what.

Patrick Eisenlohr: In the book, you describe how traders felt compelled to follow public demand in their business strategies, which they took to be an impersonal, difficult-to-locate force. On the other hand, you show how they also saw themselves as moral regulators of the public sphere. In South Asian media studies, there has been a lot of emphasis on the role of piracy and informality bypassing formal and legal regulation, so it is especially interesting to find a serious preoccupation with regulation elsewhere, in the traders’ ethical judgements of their own acquisitions and sales. Could you say a bit more about the role of traders in regulating the world of Pakistani film and other media, and what that tells us about South Asian public spheres more broadly?

Timothy Cooper: Among Hall Road film traders, public demand is a political sensibility. There is a rich body of literature – Aasim Sajjad Akhtar’s work springs immediately to mind or the legal activism of Asma Jahangir – on the lasting impact of post-secular movements in Pakistan’s 1970s and 1980s. These movements and the legal changes they brokered, brought into public life the possibility that women, minorities, or secular entertainment could offend or endanger Islam. This is paired with the notion, central to the election strategies of major political parties, that the united awaam – the people or public – should be taken as moral exemplars. In mercantile Lahore, middle-class traders and their unions and associations are important sources of votes and are often keen to leverage their unique position to further the aims of their particular Islamic movement or school of thought. The common sense that seems to guide the notion of public demand is a sensory domain bracketed on all sides by an acute awareness of how one is being perceived as a Muslim mediator of film, music, and other kinds of media. The logic is that while everything is up for grabs on Hall Road – everything can be retrieved and little is out of bounds – the existing repertoire of what is in circulation is shaped by what people want. These wants and needs are expected to have been filtered through the moral sensibilities and ethical lives of the awaam. Media traders are the final interface in this chain. Their priority is not to be seen as (only) traders in sexually suggestive films or pornography or media pertaining to an Islamic movement or denomination beyond their own. So, the transactions that take place between customer and trader are both events removed from the web of public demand and its interface. These are moments when one person takes stock of another and curates the transaction accordingly. What does the idea of traders as regulator tell us about South Asian public spheres? That if the idea of a public continues to offer itself up as an idealized democratic image of impactful agency, it becomes meaningful through figural and diffuse, rather than only discursive, flows. In South Asia, public spheres can also be spaces of mutual sensing born of the understanding that the affects that find surface and the objects that give them form can be illusory, particularly when this mutual sensing comes to exceed or fall out of step with the institutions that once authorized them.

Patrick Eisenlohr: The notion of atmospheres is central to your book. In European philosophy, from which this notion has spread into a range of other academic fields, including anthropology, atmospheres are less about subjectivity, let alone interior feelings, but are above all taken to be aesthetic and multisensory forces spreading in space. In your view, how can atmospheres as material and motional phenomena also be moral? And how did atmospheres become central to your research, how were you led to them as a tool to make sense of a Lahore marketplace?

Timothy Cooper: Other than when it refers to the biophysical, the way the Hindustani term mahaul (a term I translate as atmosphere) is used is almost always morally situated. It is both the effect and means with which one is affected. While usually a judgement that refers to negative influences, mahaul is moral because one defines values, behaviours, and attitudes in relation to it, even in normative inversion. When an atmosphere isn’t negatively defined, its identification can acknowledge its effects are ephemeral, thus inviting all at hand to sustain it, as this also furthers the well-being or dignity of those affected. In the book I describemahaul as a container for values, but I also describe it as mutually entangled with another important concept, thresholds. In my ethnography, what I call a threshold refers to the sense of magnitude that precedes a moral judgement. This is both an emic term – from the everyday use of the Islamic theological term hadd (plural: hudood) meaning the social location of divine boundaries – and my own descriptor. When you have a public sphere saturated with concerns about moral performance, about what is seen to be right and what external markers might help you see through the opacity of other people’s intentions, that’s when you get people talking about atmosphere in moral terms. These moral atmospheres allow allyship or means of exclusion. Atmospheres can also coexist and intersect, leading to unexpected or awkward alliances that can explain things that seem contradictory or hypocritical. An example of this is the paradox that the book revolves around; film traders who find film morally impermissible.

Atmospheres became central to this research because all my interlocutors talked about mahaul,and my main interlocutor told me that I wouldn’t be able to understand how film or media moves in Pakistan without coming to grips with the notion. In the back of my mind, I also must have thought it was a salient term of analysis for the things I was interested in: film, sound, and moving-image media. People had been writing about the atmosphere of film since the earliest days of cinematography, in the coming together of light, the bodies of strangers in a confined space, real and imagined movement, and the intermittence between sound and silence. When I realized this was going to be important, I looked beyond atmosphere as a purely aesthetic category. For mahaul, I looked to Nida Kirmani’s work, and for atmosphere to your own. Your book Sounding Islam had been published while I was in the field and it proved very influential for me, as had your work on the dialectic of mediation and immediacy before I went to the field.

Patrick Eisenlohr: One of the many things I really like about your book is how it juxtaposes your interlocutors’ analytic of mahaul (atmosphere) with the notion of atmospheres current in academic theorizing, which mostly derives from German neo-phenomenology. Your book shows plenty of resonance but also some difference between these two conceptualizations of atmosphere. In other words, you do not follow the increasingly criticized but still common approach to frame an ethnography with a concept taken from European or North American philosophy or social theory, and “apply” it somewhere the world. Uses of the related notion of affect as derived from Spinoza’s affectus via Deleuze are one standard example for this tendency. Against the background of Moral Atmospheres, is there also a chance to at least partially invert the flow of theory and abstraction?

Timothy Cooper: As with the others, thank you such a generous and perceptive question. The possibility of, as you say, inverting the flow of abstraction, is what initially drew me towards anthropology from my background in contemporary art, film, and media studies. The kind of social theory you mention is great to think with but should always be taken as one set of ideas among others, rather than a master key that unlocks the vastness of human difference. What I found illuminating about atmosphere was how the two differing trajectories in German neo-phenomenology seem to follow the two differing strands of the anthropology of ethics. Do we locate atmosphere in human agency and reflection, or in the ambient, embodied, or transcendent forces that affect us? As in the anthropology of ethics, looking to the intellectual lives of our interlocutors and their situated analytics of atmosphere widens the frame of how we might understand the environmental and the affective. It also helps us take forward an interesting recent turn in contemporary media studies and the environmental humanities that argues that biophysical forms can store, transmit, and transform information. It also helps us take the current dialogue between anthropology and theology in a new direction. By taking atmosphere as one of the key analytics for discussing public morality and ethical life, my interlocutors held true to a core tenet of Islamic metaphysics. That is, that the environment provides a constellation of signs that not only provide proof for the miracle of creation, but encourage interpretation, reflection, and speculation.

Patrick Eisenlohr: In the chapter on the circulation of Shi‘i media in the month of Muharram, mahaul also emerges as central to some of your interlocutors’ religious experiences and engagements. Could you say more about the potential of mahaul/atmosphere for an anthropology of religion, especially when it comes to media practices and entanglements?

Timothy Cooper: The chapter you mention marked the epiphanic halfway point in my ethnography where everything changed, where what I thought I knew before going to the field was overturned, and a new way of looking at the matter at hand took root. I met the founder of one of the country’s first Islamic videography firms, whose recordings I’d seen circulate on Hall Road. This videographer told me that what his customers find so special about his recordings are the ways they capture his community’s mahaul, that word I was hearing all the time on Hall Road. He told, me “Liveness has an atmosphere of its own”, explaining that the unedited aesthetics, sudden zooms, and visual noise captured more of the community’s passion and piety, their commitment to public disclosure and openness to being seen. Rather than being a term of critique that denigrates and excludes, liveness makes atmosphere open to anyone willing to be moved by the sufferings of early Islamic martyrs.

When delineated by media practices and concepts, atmosphere allows religious communities to be entangled in space and feeling, while the issues that divide them remain unprovoked by its impermanence. Since completing Moral Atmospheres my research has turned entirety towards Pakistani Shi‘ism, where I study the liveness of Shi‘i commemorations of death. This is rooted firmly in the anthropology of religion because what atmosphere and liveness do here is provide theological precepts with a surge of magnitude that lends renewed significance to existing rituals and commemorations. I think that the analytic of atmosphere could play an interesting role in both theologically-engaged anthropology and religious environmentalism, particularly as these domains come together around topics like divine sovereignty, guardianship and stewardship, and apocalyptic thinking.
Daniel White on his book, Administering Affect

June 3rd, 2024

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34329

Drew Kerr: Soft power, nation branding, pop culture diplomacy, anime, manga, anxiety, hope, all feature centrally in your wonderful book. Affect emerges, though, as the gravitational center to the book’s ethnographic universe. It seems to me you could’ve picked any one of the topics I just listed to take as your primary object of study for fieldwork, though. Can you walk us through why affect emerged for you and how it came to anchor everything else in your project?

Daniel White: The idea of politically conditioned affect struck me as a phenomenon that was on explicit display in nation branding projects in Japan. Because affect is described in theory as something that we can all feel but cannot always easily find a language for, it also struck me as an important topic to bring forward in anthropology (especially at a moment where, in geopolitics and many domestic political contexts—certainly in the US and Europe—we can feel this turn toward emotional appeals to fear, entitlement, exclusionary politics, and other tactics that often accompany momentum shifts to right-leaning politics. After spending several months working alongside bureaucrats focused on national cultural policy, and finding that their discussions of soft power logics were far less consistent than a sense of urgency and anxiety that fueled those discussions, I realized there was really an affective logic that was driving policy. That logic goes something like this: after decades of economic stagnation in Japan, increasing political economic competitiveness in East Asia, and a sense among Japanese politicians that Japan was losing political prestige to neighbors like China and South Korea in the eyes of the West, Japanese bureaucrats latched on to the idea of pop culture-driven soft power (or what I call Pop-Culture Japan) as a mechanism that could transform that geopolitically generated anxiety into hope for Japan’s national resurgence through culture. This affective logic is what connected all the topics you mention—soft power, nation branding, pop culture diplomacy, anime, manga, anxiety, hope—and held them together in a cultural logic of affective conditioning.

By drawing out that logic ethnographically, I was also trying to answer a question that seemed critical both for people in Japan who found themselves entangled in this logic—consciously or not, whether they wanted to or not—and people elsewhere who are all affectively interpellated by the political systems of which they find themselves a part. The question is, “How do the worlds that state administrators manage become the feelings publics embody?” To me, this is a fundamental question of political affect that presses upon subjects of the state, a question that I think we all want to answer personally. Anthropologically speaking, I also think it is an analytical question that will never go away because the way political affect gets conditioned is so highly dependent on the particular historical, cultural, and technological components of what Jan Slaby and his colleagues call an “affective arrangement.” Accordingly, I think anthropology holds a special tool in the ethnographic method, as well as a heavy responsibility given its disciplinary histories of complicity with regimes of power, to draw this complex arrangement of political affect out with some clarity.

Drew Kerr: Can you distinguish for us between administering affect and managing feeling? In the introduction, you heuristically set these into two different camps respectively akin to meshwork (Ingold 2011) or structures of feeling (William 1977). I find that orientation theoretically helpful to navigate affect theory and its dis/contents, but you draw this out in a very compelling way from your ethnography later in the book. What is it about the affective elements of Cool Japan that engender administration, per se, as opposed to management? Maybe it would be helpful to hear a little bit specifically about Cool Japan and kawaii diplomacy, too.

Daniel White: This is a beautiful question, as you highlight a really instructive point of disambiguation. In short, managing feeling points to classic political endeavors of seeking to identify and control the emotions of others—your classic framework of propaganda. Administering affect points to a far broader, more complex, and in some ways more subtle field where the affects that are being targeted for control are as much the bureaucrats’ own as they are those of foreign publics. In other words, I’m arguing that although soft power and nation branding campaigns explicitly targeted the feelings of foreign consumers of Japanese pop culture, the way the policies developed—with such enthusiasm and creativity but not always with consistent and defensible administrative logics—suggests that it was really administrators’ own feelings of political insecurity that were the direct motivators and objects of administration.

For example, one thing commonly argued about nation branding and soft power is that it doesn’t really work. Or, in other words, it doesn’t work when one tries to do it deliberately, as it more often causes a backlash. As nation branding researcher and advisor Simon Anholt regularly asserts, when governments try to control the meaning and imagery around the various cultures within their borders, it can easily come across as propaganda and be rejected. And as Joseph Nye asserts in his scholarship on soft power, a country’s prestige grows most not with explicit political campaigns but rather with the organic growth of and popular support for a nation’s culture, values, and its positive and popular political policies. When Japanese administrators became excited about the potential of Japanese pop culture to grow soft power, encouraged by influential Western voices such as Joseph Nye and Douglas McGray, their excitement led them early on to take a rather heavy-handed approach. So, for example, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK created a show called “Cool Japan” that invited foreigners (usually English speakers) on to directly tell people how cool certain aspects of Japanese culture were, which included such questionably cool items like salarymen, sleeping, and the rainy season. Additionally, some advisors to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs created the idea of the Cute Ambassadors (kawaii taishi), which involved featuring and sometimes literally parading three young girls representative of different youth fashion trends in Japan in front of foreign audiences at overseas cultural events. These strategies definitely backfired for many observers, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, and drew substantial criticisms from Japanese pop culture fans, foreign and domestic press outlets, as well as academics.

Drew Kerr: I found your attention to the type of feedback loop that results from official programs about Japanese pop culture addressing international publics quite illuminating to understand the very real consequences for interpellated domestic publics. On many levels, you help the reader to clearly see the concomitant tensions between representing–producing-being-feeling different elements that define Japanese culture(s). This especially emerges in your chapter looking at gender in kawaii (cute) subculture. What does looking at these tensions through the lens of affect open up for analysis, especially considering the male-oriented, bureaucratic practices and aspirations appropriating so-called girl culture?

Daniel White: Affect is often posited theoretically as something that circulates below the level of discourse, even though—very importantly—it can nevertheless be conditioned by it. Kawaii (cute) culture and girl culture are perfect examples of this. Kawaii is often described as something one immediately feels and that one just knows without having to explain it. Thus, it’s very much both a visual aesthetic and an embodied sensation, an affect—as anyone who has heard the iconic high-pitched “kawaiiiiiiii” from fans of kawaii culture knows well. And yet, the kawaii-oriented culture industries in Japan (manga, anime, toys, J-pop, fashion, idols, and so on) represent enormous discursive factories that are constantly shaping cute tastes in conjunction with consumers and, increasingly, YouTubers and influencers. An ethnographic method that could document the way affective capacities develop in and between bodies, like the ability to sense and be moved by kawaii aesthetics, would be an incredibly powerful one. I think tracing the feedback loops between content industry producers, consumers, and a variety of administrators who all contribute to shaping an affective circuitry of cute culture is one way to do this.

That said, I do not at all want to suggest here that engaging with and feeling into kawaii culture is a passive act at all. As many of my colleagues have argued (Christine Yano, Laura Miller, Sharon Kinsella, Kazuma Yamane, Gabriella Lukács, Patrick Galbraith, Ian Condry, Kukhee Choo, David Leheny, Emily Wakeling, Mari Kotani, Kumiko Saitō), there is a strong and active political component to cute culture—and especially the figure of the shōjo (beautiful/cute young woman or girl), often depicted in manga, anime, and toys. Shōjo is one of many different figures through which young women in Japan can play with affects of male desire in ways that serve up serious countercultural statements on patriarchy in Japanese society. Especially with shōjo fashion, by producing spaces by and for young women, as well as for nontraditional men, shōjo culture resists male-scripted roles of adult femininity by challenging adulthood itself. It does this in a variety of ways, such as by emphasizing a youthful, alternative femininity unaffected by the pressures of social roles, represented in traditional figures like the obedient daughter (musume) or the doting wife/wise mother (ryōsai kenbo).

Even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Cute Ambassadors program, which seems like the most direct male appropriation of a particular style of shōjo representation for political prestige-building, left room for the girls—and thus for girl culture at large—to actively determine the meaning and affective impact of their style. As one former Ambassador of Cute Aoki Misako stated, she intends “never to quit Lolita fashion” (isshō Rorīta yamenai), crediting its power as “combative clothing” (sentōfuku) that can save one from images of a “negative self ” (negatibu no jibun). Aoki’s statement suggests that shōjo fashion can offer resources for self-determination against those forces of social patriarchy that manifest as affectively harmful. I feel like long-term, slow, iterative, and detailed tracing of the feedback loops between the various discursive shaping of kawaii affect and its embodied expressions, which often contest and redefine those discourses, is one way to do fieldwork on the politics of affect.

Drew Kerr: I was really compelled by your explicit identification of the interest in affect as shared by many of your interlocutors, the administrator, and you, the anthropologist, though of course with different goals of characterizing, understanding, and engaging affect. I’m curious about the extension of this relationship. Have many of your interlocutors read your book? What have their reactions been? Because of your sustained and wide-reaching analysis, I could picture parts of the book serving administrative needs for bolstering geopolitical and domestic initiatives. If, however, the book hasn’t made its way yet into the soft power playbook, let me ask the question differently: Would you say more about how you situate your work within the broader governmental project of anxiety/hope in contemporary Japan?

Daniel White: This is really tricky territory to navigate, but important to address. In one sense, nation branding and soft power rhetoric in Japan remain so powerful in Japan because the ambiguity of their definitions allows for easy appropriation. In so much as any public display of Japanese popular culture abroad represents soft power in the eyes of (mostly male) bureaucrats who advocate for it, anything can look like an example of soft power. In this sense, my own book with flashy pop-culture icons splashed across the cover, and written by an American academic, is a perfect example of their version of soft power—even if the contents of the book contain ample critique of their soft power strategizing. But, as I also outline in the book, many administrators are aware of the many critiques and criticisms of soft power. I often raised these critiques with those I interviewed: some were comfortable with the criticisms (such as the flattening of culture, claims of propaganda, or simply criticisms that nation branding doesn’t build soft power); however, they felt like the point was simply to raise the presence of Japanese culture in global imaginaries. Other administrators understood those criticisms but felt like if pop-culture could be a gateway to building genuine cross-cultural understanding, government investment in it was not such a bad thing. Still other officials fully agreed with those critiques and felt like the government shouldn’t be thinking about soft power at all. This diversity of administration, or what Yael Navaro calls the many “faces of the state,” is important for ethnographies of the state to draw out, I think.

As for my own relationship with my interlocutors, it no doubt exhibited the challenges, constructive alignments, and contested moments that all mark what George Marcus calls the “complicity of fieldwork,” especially when studying those in power. My interlocutors clearly saw that I held some skepticism toward the explicit policymaking surrounding soft power, which was grounded in ethnographic observations of a gap I and many others observed between the critical academic literature on soft power and the government’s optimistic endorsement of soft power programming. (This gap, incidentally, is what most brought the prevalence of anxious affect underlying soft power discourses to light.) But because these terms (soft power, nation branding, culture) are all often discussed and contested within and between government agencies, my own sometimes critical questions were often welcomed. The negotiation of these contested views was often reconciled in very detailed and specific ways, such as in a joint translation of a PR note for a Cute Ambassador event I assisted with, which I discuss in chapter 3. That some of my anthropological background was written into a public diplomacy note, while government soft power attitudes were written into my book, feels quite representative of both the reciprocity and messy complicity of fieldwork today. Key interlocutors of mine read portions of the book before publishing and offered suggestions and requests for changes. And I suspect the strongest advocates for soft power among my interlocutors will, again, see the book itself as evidence of Japanese soft power. Given the overlapping political interests of academics and administrators, as they both appropriate culture toward various forms of knowledge production and prestige, this two-way appropriation is something I tried to be reflexive about throughout the book, as you keenly and kindly noted. I think this commitment to reflexivity and complicity remains indispensable for anthropologists, as the discipline continues to grapple with the ethics and equity of its knowledge production.

Drew Kerr: I’d be remiss to not take this opportunity to ask you about connections between this book and your current work on affective software and artificial emotional intelligence. In the context of Administering Affect, I can’t imagine that personal data mining and interventions facilitated by artificial intelligence haven’t played a role in administrative decisions and policy-making. I’m curious what you might have observed about the dynamics between digital platforms and emergent technologies and the administration of affect domestically in Japan and globally. Do you see any new trends in how emotional design in policy and affective computing may be informing one another?

Daniel White: The question of automation and AI in political administration is a fascinating one, with global implications and vectors. Japanese culture is sometimes characterized as combining cutting-edge technology with traditional and hierarchical organizational structures. This can result in what looks from the outside as curious composites of very putatively high and very low tech in a single office, which a brilliant article title from a colleague of mine, Erica Baffelli, demonstrates superbly: “The Android and the Fax.” In short, it’s not uncommon to see a fax machine still in use in some offices that also embrace the latest humanoid robotics technology. Of course, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to posit technologies on a spectrum of low to high, as these often reflect quite ethnocentric expectations of what technology means. Although my current research (modelemotion.org) is focused more on emotion modeling in emerging technologies of artificial intelligence (companion robots, virtual companions, wearable devices) rather than on the process of automating decision making in policymaking, I will be curious to see the different ways affect does or does not get incorporated into automating administrative work culture, and the degree to which affect becomes entangled with quantifying productivity or workplace satisfaction. I couldn’t yet comment on the applications of emotional design and affective computing in policy, although I cannot wait for that book from someone else. However, I can say that the rise of affective computing and emotional AI shows that anthropologists are not the only ones doing things with affect. Accordingly, to the degree that the digital modeling, algorithmic reading, and mechanized replication of affect takes off, anthropologists will certainly need to keep refining their theories of and methods for conducting fieldwork on affective processes.
Marina Peterson on her book, Atmospheric Noise

May 27th, 2024

https://www.dukeupress.edu/atmospheric-noise

Drew Kerr: Atmospheric Noise highlights multiple sensory modes involved with negotiating airport noise. On first brush, the sonic obviously invokes hearing or listening, but the shaking of walls, rattling of glass, the pressurized movement of concrete infrastructure as an aircraft passes overhead in its flight path also make hearing something perceptibly haptic and tactile. You guide us, “[p]roprioception and thermoception are coterminous with hearing: the former a state in the inner ear, the latter a sensation produced by low frequencies.” (120). Then inscribing that noise through measurement in renderings of graphic data and noise contour maps, as well as legal files and written complaints present a material visuality to hearing. Can you talk more about this movement of energy, as you frame it, and how it came into focus for you as the atmospheric, as opposed to the legal-discursive or the activist-political, for example?

Marina Peterson: There’s a lot in this question! Several strands of thought come to bear on these issues. First, I was (and am) invested in finding ways to de-objectify sound – to treat sound as immanent and processual rather than an artifact, whether in the form of a recording or a notion of soundscape that sustains a modern distinction between sound and hearing. Approaching sound as energy helps with this. In Ohio, we had a project “Energy Soundscapes” that involved listening to sounds of energy past and present, while also exploring what it means to treat sound as energy, as an immaterial form or force that is always in motion. Some of the projects can be seen/listened to here. Brian Harnetty was part of this group, and has continued to engage with the region through listening engagements. Treating listening as coterminous with other senses, especially ones like thermoception or proprioception, destabilizes a subject/object divide expressed in the differentiation between hearing and sound. With Thermoception and proprioception, there is no difference between the thing sensed and sensing.

On the other hand, I was also captivated by the materialist turn, reading Jane Bennett and others, and considering what it means to write with and through forms of matter. I experimented with this, writing about the landscape of southeast Ohio and the invisible yet palpable presence of a history of coal mining that left hills cloaking their emptiness, which became apparent as sinkholes or acid mine drainage.

I went to Los Angeles with a project on infrastructure that connected the city to the ocean, and was in the archive (at the Huntington Library) looking at material on building storm drains and channeling the LA River. Concrete, though a fascinating material form that shifts from viscosity to solidity with the aid of water, was nonetheless hard to get to move, especially in its hardened form. I found files on airport noise and thought they might be useful for teaching (I was wary of doing a sound project, in part because of my reservations about reifying sound). The first files I read were letters from residents around LAX to County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, appealing to him to do something about the noise. He took their complaints to Washington, finding that airspace jurisdiction was an unsettled domain. This was the hook for me: noise activating air (through airspace law), both coming into being in a dynamic relationality on the move. Air came into focus as a material form that pushed back on new materialisms insofar in its immateriality. Now there is a lot of work on air and atmosphere, but at the time (2013-14) there wasn’t much, so it felt like an exciting area of investigation. Atmosphere came after air, which explains my emphasis on the aerial rather than the affective. However, what I was also interested in was a logic of air or the atmospheric – as something immaterial that is also indeterminate or difficult to pin down. Atmospheric became an expansive way of describing how noise moves and works on and with air, buildings, bodies, and the city. My approach remains rooted in the ethnographic, especially in the fact that airport noise is for the most part curtailed to airborne sound within the range of human audibility.

Drew Kerr: I originally picked up your book coming with my own questions about affective atmospheres, but in your ethnographic world of sonic atmospheres, I quickly was (productively) redirected toward “acoustic sensation, knowledge, and imagination,” (7) as you quote from Steven Feld’s (1996) work. The interplay of these various elements grappling with the matter of noise around the Los Angeles airport reminded me, perhaps a little afield, of Constatine Nakassis’s (2015) proposition that linguistic anthropology is not the study of “language,” per se, but language’s entanglement with other semiotic modalities, particularly intervening in understanding (or at least unpacking) indexical processes. Though you’re not directly engaging that literature, through the course of the book I was convinced of the opening, the possibilities noise provides as a medium. Can you set the scene of how “acoustic sensation, discourse, technology, law, and urban infrastructure” (7) take shape with/through noise?

Marina Peterson: I tend to return to Lefebvre’s spatial triad to account for the simultaneity of what he calls representations of space, representational space, and spatial practice. Though in Atmospheric Noise I describe noise as “A material-discursive ‘monster,’ a ‘quasi object,’ an ‘unformed object’ or ‘hybrid’” (8), formulations developed especially in STS by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Michelle Murphy and Stefan Helmreich. Katie Stewart describes this as “registers” in her essay “Road Registers.” The list you offer (“acoustic sensation, discourse, technology, law, and urban infrastructure” (7)) are some of the ethnographic domains in which noise emerges as an acoustic object as it were, that is given a designation as noise and made meaningful in ways that exceed it as such. In this way, even as noise is always coming into being, it also becomes a way of knowing (in Feld’s terms) – with knowing at once bodily and epistemological. I wouldn’t call noise a medium, as to me that suggests a stability that it doesn’t have; it’s not background, or something in or through which things are formed, instead, it is always emergent even as it does work.

Drew Kerr: I’m also thinking with the enmeshed relationality between metrics, machines, and bodies — the measuring devices that inscribe sonic signatures, human bodies that perceive sound and its effects, sound as that which touches, and sound that is noise, an annoyance. You suggest at a later moment in the book a “continuity across differently vibrating matter that extends from the skin of the body to that of the house and beyond” (131), which I take to poignantly describe this enmeshment. The continuity strikes me as a dense, yet porous bodily materiality (or perhaps material embodiment?), that acutely draws our attention to conversations about im/mediation. Would you say more about your methodologies to encounter this assemblage and its emergence? And, if I might selfishly extend, how might you anticipate such methods contributing to conversations around mediation (what we might frame under semiotics)?

Marina Peterson: I’m aiming to approach the material in a nonrepresentational way, staying close to the thing itself, which might be the physicality of sound or something like semiotics. I describe this as the “viscerality of abstraction” in Chapter 2, engaging with haptic qualities of graphs and metrics. I don’t want to deny the semiotic work they do, but I approach them in a way akin to Rabinow’s assertion that “representations are social facts.” This is also a way of pushing against an understanding of such forms as mediating, which places them between one thing and another. On the other hand, I don’t want to reify experience, which centers a human subject. That said, methodologically my approach is to read documents for haptic moments, with, as you suggested, a continuity of embodiment across forms of matter, which might be bodies, buildings, sound or air, all of which is emergent and in relation. This kind of discussion comes out strongly in acoustic engineering reports, or the way acoustic engineers talk about their work. It’s what Stengers calls the “meso” – “a site of invention” that “affirms its copresence with a milieu” (https://www.inflexions.org/n3_stengershtml.html). I call this a glitch methodology, insofar as I’m drawing out something from the material – principally an attention to the physicality of sound and atmosphere – that isn’t necessarily the intended or expressed meaning.

Drew Kerr: To turn us in another direction, I’m curious to hear more about attunement. The book draws out a tension between audiovisual technologies that render specific measurements of airport noise into general soundscapes, and the individual subjective and collective experiences of noise. There are aerial attunements by microphones, people’s ears and bodies, while simultaneously there are social attunements between people talking as they’re drowned out by plane noise, new existential and legal attunements of annoyance, and commercial economic attunements by farmers navigating their chickens frightened to death. The murmurs and echoes of noise resonate quite deeply. How does attunement disperse from moments of experiencing noise into a public ear? Or perhaps to ask this differently: Can you help us grasp the scales across which attunement and the atmospheric transect in your writing and the worlds of your interlocutors?

Marina Peterson: Attunement is a minor gesture, a turning toward something, whether sound or heat or person. It is a mode of relationality that is ordinary and usually unremarkable. In my article “Sensory Attunements: Working With the Past in the Little Cities of Black Diamonds” I write that “Attunement is an orienting toward, a feeling-ness that does not necessarily have specific content and is generally nondiscursive.” Heat is an important mode of attunement, felt, and discussed in the way that weather is, just part of the ordinary. But that turning toward another to say “it’s hot” is also a moment of relationality, between people who are also experiencing atmospheric effects of coal mining, the history of that region materialized in present and future climates. I brought this sense of attunement to Atmospheric Noise, paying attention to those minor gestural moments that get registered as experience in congressional hearings, but are doing relational work between family members and neighbors, or between residents around the airport and politicians and ultimately federal legislation. This is also part of the atmospheric quality of aircraft noise, which shifts the interpersonal aspect of noise as nuisance to a more distributed or dispersed – and multiscalar – register. Making claims against aircraft noise shifts from the specific noisemaker to law, metricization, airspace jurisdiction, and so on.

Drew Kerr: A final, striking element of the book is your style of writing. Whether through the present tense, layering narratives and parallel events, your own self-reflections in the ethnography, and a curious experiment with glitching, the writing yields an account richly present and animate. This is a powerful rejoinder to the dilemma of capturing the viscerality and fleeting nature of noise often cited by your interlocutors, the court proceedings, sound engineers, and yourself. Can you recount for us the motivations and arrival to this style of writing, and especially how the idea of glitching formed into its own method for you?

Marina Peterson: Thank you for the kind words. A project of writing through things emerged from my engagement with new materialism, nonrepresentational theory, and the landscape of southeast Ohio. I wanted to really push the idea of writing theory through the world. Katie Stewart does this. Of course, we select ethnographic material that is relevant for a framing. But to make the framing intrinsic to the account of a place or thing or encounter brings another kind of intention and attention. It requires staying close to the thing rather than generalizing or skating across the surface.

Glitching is a way of reading against the grain of intended meanings. It’s partly a way of articulating how my approach to science and engineering differs from much (not all) STS. But it also foregrounds the possibility of reading against the grain of dominant (Eurocentric, modern, and so on) modes of knowledge production more broadly.
Haley De Korne on her book, Language Activism

May 20th, 2024

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781501511561/html?lang=en

Elizabeth McHugh: On page 25 you talk about how you came to be involved with this project. Had you known about the language ecology in Mexico before you were invited in? Or was there something you really wanted to look into with this situation as opposed to another linguistic ecology, or situation in another region?

Haley De Korne: I knew that Mexico had passed a law in 2003 granting rights to Indigenous language speakers and recognizing Indigenous languages as national languages alongside Spanish. This puts Mexico well ahead of the US and Canada, for example, in terms of official rights and recognition for Indigenous languages. I’ve always been interested in the impact of top-down policies on the ground, and the interplay of bottom-up efforts under different social conditions. In my previous research on Indigenous language education policies in the US and Canada, many of the problems could be blamed on a lack of top-down rights and recognition. I wanted to examine possibilities and constraints in a context where the top-down recognition is in place.

In addition to that, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec was also especially interesting to me as a region because there are multiple Indigenous languages spoken there, plus Spanish and now some English, so it’s a truly multilingual language ecology. Zapotec also has a history of literacy that goes back to 600 BCE and in modern times speakers of Isthmus Zapotec have been actively promoting their language and culture in written and visual modalities for well over a century. In other words, this is a language community where there have been, and continue to be, many forms of language activism. So I was drawn to it as an excellent place to research language activism in practice, and Indigenous language learning in a contemporary multilingual context.

Elizabeth McHugh: On pages 22-23 you talk about situating yourself as an activist scholar, and especially examining the legacy of exploitative research that activist scholars are attempting to overcome. I wondered if you could touch on that more, in the way that your project and the methodology you chose strayed away from those harmful and exploitative practices of the past?

Haley De Korne: The way in which I work to avoid exploitative research is through collaboration, consultation, and of course reflexivity. With regards to the Isthmus, I first met people who were from there and/ or already working there, and who said that it would be useful to understand more about the kinds of issues that I research, that is the social dynamics of language learning and language reclamation. The methodological framework I have used in this project is ethnographic monitoring, a term first coined by Dell Hymes to refer to the use of ethnography for applied or action research. Ethnographic monitoring essentially combines the ethnography of communication with action research. You begin with participant observation in order to understand contextual dynamics, and the priorities and aspirations of the people in that context to the extent that that’s possible. You stay alert to ways that you might be able to support those priorities and aspirations, and potentially engage in some form of action research to that end with stakeholders or collaborators in that context. In other words, you don’t show up assuming you know what matters to people or what should happen, which action research without ethnography can risk doing. And you don’t just observe and stay disengaged, which ethnography without action research can risk doing. I don’t think it’s possible for researchers to engage in the action research piece in every project or every context, but I think it’s important to stay open to it and to take that step when the opportunity arises.

Consultation or checking in with the people you’re doing research with is also key to understanding if there’s something useful that you can do from your position as a researcher, or not. Sometimes we think we have a great idea about how to do something useful, and the stakeholders or people in the context can point out what we’re missing or what we’ve misunderstood. Sometimes it’s not about what we can do, but what we can support. Trying to use the privilege that we have as researchers to amplify the voices and initiatives of people that we work with can be valuable.

Last but not least, reflecting on our research as social action, and the impact we may be having as social actors is also important in my view. It’s unfortunately all too easy to misunderstand certain dynamics or to have an impact that is not what we intended, and on-going reflection can help to guard against that, even if none of us can ever be sure that we’re avoiding all harm. There is great guidance available from Indigenous scholars for avoiding exploitative research, such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s classic Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (1999/ 2021). Understanding what researchers from our disciplines have done in the past is also important for making different choices ourselves. There are of course many ways to do engaged or applied research, and I don’t believe that there is one correct approach.

Elizabeth McHugh: This is a follow up question to that. How would that work if the project wasn’t something where you were invited but one where you sought it out, or where you have to apply for a grant? How would you suggest going about explaining what the goals are then, if you’re not exactly sure in the beginning where you would be stepping in or how you might be helping to amplify their voices? Would you say the goal is language activism, but it has to start with the community first to see what their needs are, and you expect that something will arise?

Haley De Korne: Yes, that’s exactly what I’d do. I would emphasize the importance of contextualization and stakeholder participation to achieve any kind of meaningful social impact, and argue that initial participant observation fieldwork is necessary to lay the groundwork for that. You can also give examples of the kinds of initiatives you anticipate could emerge or would likely be incorporated into the study. You can establish a timeline about when key decisions would be made, even if all of those concrete details can’t be included in the application.

Elizabeth McHugh: You talked about how many people you met during your fieldwork would associate your work with rescuing or saving the language and you say that you avoided describing your work in these terms. How would you describe the difference of what language activism is as opposed to a language maintenance or language revitalization effort?

Haley De Korne: Language maintenance is generally understood as trying to stabilize language transmission between generations and maintain a bilingual (or multilingual) community in a context where one language is under pressure. Language revitalization is usually understood as trying to increase the number of speakers of a language that is already marginalized and perhaps endangered. I define language activism much more broadly, as efforts towards positive social change that relate to language, both through resisting inequalities and through imagining and creating alternative futures. This can mean efforts to support an endangered language, but it can also refer to efforts to encourage inclusive and affirmative language choices within a speech community, efforts to change prejudices towards users of a certain dialect, or initiatives to create a literary culture for a language that has been primarily oral, to give a few examples.

Elizabeth McHugh: You mention in this case that there are different types of activism, such as in primary and secondary education, higher education, community-based education, and in popular culture spaces. Would you say that an activist can take on smaller roles at a time and just work in higher education language activism? Do they automatically have to take into account community level activism as well? Furthermore, do activists always have to encompass the three actions you include in your activism strategies framework– creating, representing, and connecting– in their activism?

Haley De Korne: Language activists have to work where they are and within the limits of their positionality. For many of us, we can have more impact and work more effectively in certain spaces. So absolutely, yes, I don’t think activists necessarily have to work across multiple spaces at once, although minoritized language speakers are often pressured to do that, for example through the choices they make in their personal, private communication practices, and through taking on roles as teachers or organizers. It’s useful to consider what our social positionality may make possible for us, and what we cannot or should not do because of who we are.

I do think it’s useful to be aware of the work that is being done in other spaces, to the extent that’s possible, and to explore possible synergies. One of the successful strategies I observed in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec was where teachers invited young hip-hop musicians who are producing bilingual music to perform in their schools. The students loved it and were impressed that the local Indigenous language was being used in such a cool way. In several cases I heard students talking about these experiences long after they happened. Because some of the teachers were aware of what the popular culture activists were doing, and because the hip-hop artists were willing to collaborate, they were able to bring a new energy into the classroom and influence the perception of students more effectively than if the teachers had just lectured on the value of Indigenous heritage, or something along those lines.

The strategies of creating, connecting, and representing can often happen simultaneously, and in overlapping ways, but they can also happen separately. One of my main arguments is that all different kinds of strategies can be impactful, depending on the context and timing. I do not want to prescribe any one way of going about language activism, but rather to draw attention to the many strategies that exist. I also argue that it’s useful to have a flexible repertoire of strategies, and to attempt to adapt to the needs of the moment. I’m not aiming to provide a recipe for language activism, but perhaps more of a flexible playbook or a source of inspiration and illustration of the multiple strategies that are possible.
David Berliner on Becoming Other

May 13th, 2024

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BerlinerBecoming#:~:text=Description,an%20array%20of%20astonishing%20experiences.

Todd Meyers: I think a fair place with which to open a discussion of Becoming Other is, “Where to start?” Where did this project begin for you? I’d also like to hear your thoughts on a bigger, more unwieldy question the book invites: how might we think of beginnings as we move and change (radically, subtly) across living?

David Berliner: The book project started approximately 10 years ago. In parallel with my study into memory and cultural transmission, I became interested in the mechanisms of immersion, beginning, of course, with those that govern participant observation. By living alongside people and engaging in their daily activities, but also by constantly wondering what they think and sense, the anthropologist may feel as if she is “becoming other”, albeit lucid about such impossible metamorphosis. Being a Pentecostal among Pentecostals, boxing with boxers, Papuan among Papuans… Hortense Powdermaker writes that anthropologists are endowed with a particularly flexible, plastic, chameleonic self. I would add fragmentation to this.

And this leads me to an earlier beginning of this project. I believe that my interest for such question rests in an existential trouble as a Belgian Jew. Jankélévitch sees in the very nature of the Jewish being to desire “to be the same and another at the same time”. Because they have often migrated from elsewhere, Jews have been trained to oscillate between compartmentalized repertoires of knowledge and action, following their own calendar, using their language, while at the same time appropriating the culture of others, a chameleonic identity at the service of personalities which have become divided. But it is also because they have experienced stereotypes, discrimination and violence at first hand that many Jews have learned to fragment their selves. All the better to blend in and absorb themselves in social and cultural worlds that were not favorable to them, an immersive capacity that is not intrinsic to Jews as I discuss in the final chapter in comparing their condition with other historically stigmatized and persecuted communities in the West.

Above all, I believe that the writing and the research behind this book have helped to make me slightly other, as I hope it will have such an effect on the reader.

Todd Meyers: I’m fascinated by the ways you deal with self (selves) and experience in the book, especially the refashioning you call exo-experience, which you describe as “a singular type of experience by which an individual identifies oneself with an entity, whether it is human or not.” Could you talk more about exo-experience? I’d also like to know where (if at all) you see the book fitting within the larger frame of the anthropology of experience.

David Berliner: Yes, I view this research as part of an anthropology of experience in line with the current trend recognized as “existential anthropology”, a pragmatic approach that scrutinizes lived experiences. Perhaps what distinguishes it from different endeavors is that, at the crossroad of social sciences and psychology, I look for some minimal ingredients exploring human mechanisms (in a Batesonian manner) rather than social causality. Immersive experiences that produce fragmented and plastic subjects are far from being reserved to the participation observation. To designate these phenomena, I indeed propose to use the term exo-experience which I define as quests driven by a desire to adopt the perspective of another, or even to live the existence of another, or at least what one imagines it to be. It is about investing a reality different from one’s own, from the inside, de l’intérieur. Some decide to materialize this identification in a theatrical style. Decentrement is their cardinal principle.

In particular, I look at a diversity of exo-experiences usually studied separately: cosplayers, animal role players, actors, drag kings and queens, historical reenactors, life action role-players, psychoanalysts (who, through transference, can embody the family of their analysands), and finally writers who dive in the personalities of their heroes. From these spectacular immersive examples, I ask: what do they teach us about the self, its multiple facets and its plasticity? Not only do they rely on similar psychological processes such as perspective taking, empathy, imitation, not only are they empowering and provide pleasure, but they also make possible the emergence of fragmented and flexible subjects, as do mutatis mutandis participant observation.

Todd Meyers: Play is so crucial in the book, something I also found in my experience reading. Cosplay, role-playing, all the slippery forms of identification—-each is lively and often unexpected, but also keenly political. There are moments in the book where people appear to be working through forms of deep empathy and care. Becoming Other shows so well a wide range of forms of self-making, including those that are currently fraught and actively denied. Can you talk more about the political scope of the project?

David Berliner: Cosplay, animal role-play, novel-writing and participant observation, with the stories of heterogeneity they produce, help rethink the idea of the human as a unidimensional and constant being. They are laboratories for self-exploration, demonstrating not only that the self is socially constructed, but also that it must be considered in an ever pluralized and changing way. For some, these exo-experiences constitute a crossing, sometimes a transgression loosening the screws of identity categorizations, contesting the powerful rhetoric of the unitary authentic self.

However, exo-experiences are not just about play, an aspect I examine in the final chapter of the book. Some have to perform at being what the dominant wants them to be. They have become experts in plasticity, specialists in camouflage, switching from one role to another, modulating their language, their behavior. This is the condition of the colonized, the persecuted, the inferiorized who, in a state of alert, have learned to internalize the master’s point of view in their self– construction. The resulting cleavages generate considerable suffering. I don’t dare to compare such alienating ordeals to the thrill of fictional and playful exo-experiences. However, they do share some essential psychological components. Perspective taking. Imagination. Creative imitation. Multiplication. Pretending. Masks.

In this book, I follow Michel Serres’ position that such conditions of fragmentation and elasticity should not be thought of as “epistemological monsters”, but as “ordinary situations”. Moreover, I advocate for an ethic of multiplicity and plasticity, as capacities to be accessible to everyone, and to be the result of a deliberate choice rather than an imposed constraint.

Todd Meyers: Finally, where do we go from here? I ask because having read Becoming Other a few times by now, the book’s thesis leaves me with both a sense of promise and terror, which I find hard to reconcile, and maybe that’s the point.

David Berliner: I share your impression of hope and fear. Some commentators argue that late capitalist postmodernity, with its loosening of traditional norms, has produced infinitely adaptable individuals, versatile beings with fragmented and flexible (multitasking) selves. Although I partake worries about such neoliberal crafting, my position is slightly more nuanced. With my colleague sociologist Maria Erofeeva, we are now exploring the gymnastics of the selves on social virtual reality platforms such as VRChat. Yet, such technologies certainly are adamant to boost a protean desire to multiplicity and plasticity. The 3D headset, with its stereoscopic rendering and wide field of vision, offers the possibility to immerse oneself in the perspective of a cow, of a migrant, of another gender, of a fictional character — from the inside — . For some, it will be a matter of enjoying parallel lives via their avatars, for example by exploring identities or pretending to be someone else. As you stroll down the pixelated aisles of VRChat, you’ll find yourself amidst digital incarnations with a variety of bodies and faces (elves, anime girls, psychedelic mushrooms, hybrid humans, femboys, robots, and so on) There is a lot of literature on the ability of VR to enhance empathy, a view that is not shared by everybody as VR can only be experienced from one’s own biographical coordinates.

However, such an othering dimension remains half of the story. While they do role-play, and attempt to become other in such digital spaces, many VRChat users feel that their avatars, which they spend time creating and get attached to, give them the courage to be more themselves, and even to reveal secret aspects of their identity (what I call endo-experiences). Here, for instance, members of the LGBTQ+ and furry (people who identify with animals) communities come together and communicate freely. Since 2017, Symor (who is portrayed as Winnie the Pooh) has been collecting life stories from individuals who, under the mask of their avatar — sometimes a Kermit the Frog, sometimes a Bugs Bunny — dare to talk about their pain as veterans, alcoholics, victims of harassment, or cancer sufferers.

All this to say that, while the metaverse is heralded as a frightening neoliberal territory with no law or order (like the dystopian world invented by Stephenson), it could also become a machine for empathy. A machine where people would learn to distance from their false self (“you can be your true self” is a formula often heard in VRChat), but also, through the multiplicity and plasticity offered by VR technologies, explore and care about otherness.
Mark LeVine on his book Heavy Metal Islam

May 6th, 2024

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520389380/heavy-metal-islam

Lara Sabra: Your book has shown that especially in the Middle East, which suffers from censorship and authoritarian regimes, art can be and is used as a political weapon/strategy for defiance and even relief from experiences of violence and repression. What can we learn about society or about politics from studying art and music? How can music or art, more generally, function as a resource towards understanding issues that social scientists typically explore?

Mark LeVine: You know that’s kind of interesting because art is one of the first things that humans did, that makes us human. The ability to create symbolic representations of reality or of our imagination and then share them with other humans – that’s probably one of the defining features that separate us from every other species on this planet. So it’s interesting that one of the most basic expressions of our humanity is so rarely used as an arena for investigation or study by political scientists and other social scientists. That’s a problem of political science and the narrowness of their conception of what politics is. It’s not just a problem of art or culture and how they’re excluded from analyses of politics, it’s also a disciplinary problem within the social sciences, this idea that you can separate politics from sociology, or sociology from anthropology. Obviously, there are nuances and every discipline has its own particular focuses, but they also all run into each other and ask different questions about what is quite often the same phenomenon, usually involving power and how humans gather, utilize, maintain, and hold onto power over other human beings. Art is going to be, like you said, a weapon in those struggles. Its also going to be a tool of resilience or healing; art can be medicine. But also, art talks back to power, always.

And usually when people don’t have the power to resist directly, either politically or physically through fighting or some form of mass protest, they can at least resist through art. So art becomes a site of resistance. If art is a site of resistance, then it’s inherently political. Therefore, looking at art and artistic production becomes a way of understanding politics that might not be visible if you’re just looking at the official political realm – the realm of official political contestation and of official political actors like voters, politicians, insurgents, military. Art expands the conversation. Looking at art brings to the surface trends or beliefs that might still be hidden, because bringing them to the surface in that way would expose people to state violence and repression.

And on the other hand, it’s not just about studying the art produced by the oppressed, it’s also about studying the art produced by the oppressor. With Israel/Palestine right now, we can understand even more about the nature of this violence and occupation by looking at the music and artwork created by Israelis and Palestinians since October 7, than we can by looking at official pronouncements to the media. Art is usually way more honest. Even when the art is duplicitous, even when it’s state-sponsored art created to reinforce a clearly nonsense program – it still tells us how the government sees things; or which people the government thinks it needs to speak to in cultural ways and what discourse it thinks it can most usefully deploy to maintain its grip on people.

Lara Sabra: How important was collaboration in the research for and the creation of this book? There are several moments in the book where you describe your participation in various activities with your research participants by playing musical gigs, co-writing and composing songs, and even co-writing or editing chapters of your book. How did this collaboration come about? Was it intentional or spontaneous and organic?

Mark LeVine: There’s a famous quote that I’ve used many times by this great African musician Manu Dibango, who famously said “There is only one race: the race of musicians.” What he was getting at is how musicians from very different cultures can meet each other, and within minutes of meeting each other they can be playing together as brothers or sisters. There is this ability in musicians to create deep relationships very quickly with each other through music. And because I approached many of these artists that I wound up writing about and working with first as a musician, it was much easier for me to work with them and for them to trust me.

I think the traditional mode of doing ethnographic research is extremely extractive and highly imbalanced in terms of power relationships, and very often has no benefit for the people involved. One of the places where this has long been challenged has been in ethnomusicology. The pioneers in doing this have long been musicians who are also anthropologists. If you look at their work – people like Steven Feld or Philip Bohlman – they tend to work collaboratively with the people they’re studying and produce collaborative research that reflects a shared set of values, questions, and assumptions. This is of much more benefit and more respectful to the communities they’re studying than the kind of extractive anthropology that has for so long been dominant, though less now than before.

I’m also very influenced by Indigenous research methodologies and protocols by Indigenous peoples who have always been the biggest victims of this kind of extractive research to begin with. There’s an entire set of Indigenous research principles revolving around collaboration, permission, respect – what I and Prof. Lucia Sorbera of Sydney University call a collaborative ontology. That’s the principle I’ve long worked in. You can’t treat people as merely objects or subjects of your extractive knowledge – the way anthropologists traditionally treated so-called primitive peoples. I always try to begin my relationship with people by asking them, how can I be useful to you? What story can I tell that is helpful and respectful to them and that teaches other people something they don’t know? My philosophy has always been to work with people as musicians first, and then let them tell me what aspects of their lives and their art they think are important to share with other people.

Lara Sabra: While the musical genre the book is focusing on is heavy metal, you make continuous references to musicians who explore other genres throughout the book such as hip-hop, rap, and rock. Indeed, when I think about music in relation to politics, I think of these musical genres first and foremost, especially drawing on my own experience within protest movements in Beirut of the past decade where it was these types of music that was played at protest squares (not heavy metal). Why did you choose to focus on heavy metal specifically?

Mark LeVine: Since I wrote that book, metal has become less popular, a lot of young people have switched over to hip-hop. It’s easier, it’s cheaper to record, it’s more popular in a way. So hip-hop and EDM have kind of supplanted metal. Electro-dabke, Omar Suleiman, all of those people have become big stars by mixing together house, electronic, with Arab(ic) dance music –that’s a huge thing, but it wasn’t yet so prevalent when I was doing research for the book. In that period, from the early 90s to the mid-2000s, metal was the premier form of rebellious youth music. By 2007, hip-hop had taken over as the more popular form of what I call “Extreme Youth Music.”

But metal has more pure emotional power than these other genres; it enables a real catharsis. If a form of art can carry and transmit a lot of power, then it’s also gonna transmit a lot of political power. So naturally, it was a very easy music genre to politicize, even if it’s political in a very subcultural way. When Egyptian or Iranian artists are singing metal songs in English, they are usually saying things that would get them arrested or thrown in jail. Metal was able to transmit political protest, even if it was just within the in-group or subculture. Hip-hop is powerful because of the vocal element, the words, the lyrics, the specificity. Metal is much more about the power of the music and the guttural-ness of the vocals. The words are important too, but less important than the power and the way they are being sung. I created a term called “aeffect” – a combination of affect or effect – to refer to this kind of affective power that has political effect. Metal music is very aeffective – it’s got incredibly affective power, at a pre-political, pre-discursive level, but that also has immediate discursive political implications.

Lara Sabra: I’m fascinated by one of the ideas you seem to be exploring in this book, which is the similarity and subsequent competition between the alternative, youth-driven heavy metal scenes in the Arab world and the religious/political authorities dominating their societies. Can you elaborate or expand on this?

Mark LeVine: Metal as an intense, affective music shares many of the same practices as extreme religious practice, like Sufism, for example. When you see Sufi practices of dance and rhythmic movement to very intense drum beats and you watch people moving, it looks like they’re headbanging. And they are headbanging. It’s the same thing, the way the human body goes into a trance-like, repetitive extreme movement, to rhythms that encourage that. So of course, metal is gonna have a lot in common with that, because it’s an ecstatic form of music. Same thing with a mosh pit in a punk show – it’s the same kind of ritualistic intense movement that produces this emotional psychic state that is very similar to religious states that get produced through extreme practices. That’s why a friend of mine in Pakistan, this famous musician named Salman Ahmad, from the band Junoon, said, “The reason why the mullahs hate us is because we’re their competition.” And he didn’t mean politically – what he means is that they satisfy the same human needs of young people as religion. And that’s why there are attacks on metal and other musicians by conservative religious forces, because they understood they were a threat to them.

Lara Sabra: Much has changed in the political landscapes of most of the countries you write about in this book, and arguably much has gotten worse. What would you say makes this book relevant today? What are the implications of this book now? Is art/music still a legitimate and transformative space of resistance/alterity/creativity in light of the extreme violence we’ve witnessed very recently?

Mark LeVine: What I said in Heavy Metal Islam is that music is like a canary in the coal mines for looking at changes that are going to happen whether or not the elite in these countries want it or not. In some ways, I think it’s fair to say that I’m one of the people who predicted the explosion of youth activism that we saw with the uprisings of 2009 and beyond (really, 2005-06 in Lebanon). Many of the people and the music that I was studying in the early 2000s went on to be very important in the revolutionary moment of 2009-2014. Most of the young activists in the Arab uprisings or Iran were people who came out of the extreme music scene. And this is because – and this is key – the set of skills you need to form an underground DIY song culture are the same set of skills you need to form an underground DIY political or social movement. You need to know how to organize, you need to know how to circulate ideas and cultural production, you need to know how to get people together – all without the authorities knowing. You need to create something that appeals to a lot of the people in your group without being noticed by others. And these are all the things you need to do underground politics. So it wasn’t surprising to me that the people who were running Tahrir Square when I got there on day four of the uprisings were all my metalhead friends. The landscape has changed, and metal is not as important today in the region as it was then. But find what is the metal of today: find what music today plays the role that metal did, and spend time looking at it.
Marc L. Moskowitz on his book Internet Video Culture in China

April 29th, 2024

https://www.routledge.com/Internet-Video-Culture-in-China-YouTube-Youku-and-the-Space-in-Between/Moskowitz/p/book/9781032092881

Marcella Szablewicz: In media anthropology there is always the question of place. Where is the work situated? Your book is entitled Internet Video Culture in China and yet that region-specific title clearly doesn’t do your work justice. In fact, throughout the book you consciously challenge the reader’s understanding of place, referring to videos and popular culture phenomena that traverse time, geographic location, medium, and genre. What is more, just as your book examines Internet video mashups it is also, itself, a mashup of methodologies and scholarly approaches. Can you tell us more about how you made the decision to put these complex case studies in conversation with each other, and your mixed-methods approach to studying Internet videos?

Marc L. Moskowitz: Yes, this is an important point. Book titles about this region are inherently tricky. “China” is of course a topic that more readers are interested in because of the PRC’s raw size, its historical legacy, and its current place in the global political economy. But you are right that most of my book is focused on border crossing in one form or another. Unfortunately, the other title options would have led to their own set of problems. “Chinese-speaking Internet” is more accurate but clunky. “Sinophone” tends to place it firmly in an academic discourse but alienates a broader readership that does not know what the word means. Also, this term gets bandied around a great deal with no one fixed meaning. I have seen Sinophone used to refer to only Taiwan and Hong Kong, for example. It is also frequently used to include all Chinese-speaking cultures outside of the PRC, including the Chinese diaspora. At other times it refers to all Chinese-speaking cultures, including the PRC and beyond. So, I agree, labeling all of this as “China” does not do the range of my study justice, but for those of us who are not exclusively focused on the PRC these things are surprisingly complicated. Hopefully “the space in between” in the title did a better job of indicating the full scope of the project.

Building on this point, there is a tendency in academia to think of China’s internet as the internet in the PRC, but the internet is never truly bound by national borders and there is a whole set of other issues that come up once one acknowledges this fact. In my book, the dialogue between videos and the written commentary posted to those video sites, reveal both cultural proximity and profound rifts between those living in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the US.

And thank you for highlighting that methodologically and theoretically I tend to mix and match a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, and internet studies. I think it was Duke Ellington who once said, “There are only two kinds of music, good and bad.” In my book I try to take a similar world view to get at these issues from a range of different vantage points by using tools, and drawing on theoretical frameworks, from several disciplines to unpack just what is going on here.

Marcella Szablewicz: Even as this book is a study of sweeping “cross-cultural dialogues” and “transnational sharing” it also feels intensely personal. In one chapter, for example, you recall your own childhood identification with the character Spock from Star Trek. In this chapter we then follow you to Taiwan, as you engage (at first awkwardly) with the science fiction club at National Taiwan University. What does your book have to say about fandoms’ ability to toggle between personal and shared experience?

Marc L. Moskowitz: Yes, we tend to think of the personal and academic discourse as separate spheres but the kinds of topics one chooses, the areas of inquiry that attracts us, are intensely personal aren’t they. In anthropology reflexivity, in which authors put themselves front and center in their research as an exercise in honesty and ethics, has become the norm in recent years. I think this also lends to better storytelling—creating something that can draw in readers that include academics but reach a much wider audience as well.

Marcella Szablewicz: The uses of humor in online meme culture have been a subject of much debate among scholars. Often Internet humor is intentionally offensive, as with the popularity of “Hitler reacts” memes in both the U.S. and China. You argue that such difficult humor serves to “connect disjointed realities” and that by, “appropriating these historical narratives in this way, one disarms them.” However, Whitney Phillips, who has studied Internet trolls and meme culture in the United States, has since argued that humor of this kind has also served as a “trojan horse” through which more extremist content has slipped into the mainstream. (See Helen Lewis’s article for The Atlantic in which she interviews Phillips about her work on Internet trolls). What do you make of her argument when viewed through the lens of the Hitler YouTube meme you discuss in the book? Does her argument about extremism in the U.S. translate at all to the Chinese context?

Marc L. Moskowitz: I confess that I was not familiar with Phillips’ work before your question so my response to her research might be a bit superficial in that it is limited to Lewis’s four-page essay that you mention here, and Phillip’s equally brief article that Lewis cites in her interview. It should be pointed out that both articles take research that specifically focused on posts on 4chan and then applies this to the internet as a whole. The very real dangers of 4chan, and internet trolls more broadly, should not be ignored but it is misleading to conflate this with the internet in its entirety. Of course, if you hand a bunch of neo-Nazis a Hitler meme it is going to go in unhealthy directions pretty quickly. But I have also seen right wing attempts at appropriating Star Wars and The Office with memes so, as my students might say, “haters are going to hate” regardless. To use a somewhat simplistic analogy, one might ask what the structural factors are in heteronormative families that can lead to domestic abuse, but that does not mean that domestic abuse or heteronormativity encompass families in their entirety. There are dangers to taking the forest for the trees here.

To some degree, scholarship that is so critical of internet culture is building on a pervasive and long-standing undercurrent in a good deal of academia that voices an unmistakable mistrust of popular culture as a larger category. This dates back at least to the Frankfurt school in which Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and others evinced an oddly elitist sense of old-world class hierarchies in their analysis of popular culture, evoking a marked unease concerning the masses. And, of course, these scholars’ profound anxieties regarding the potential dangers of popular culture were in large part because of what they witnessed in Nazi Germany.

In my book I argue instead that humor in popular culture, both on the internet and in other contexts, has long been in the sphere of those doing battle with the very forces that the Frankfurt school was concerned with. In the US, for example, the far right has weaponized the domain of angry outrage quite effectively but I can’t think of a comedy news show on the right that can be seen as a successful counterpart to humorous left-leaning shows like The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, or SNL’s Weekend Update. As an older male living in the American south, Facebook algorithms inflict a pretty wide range of conservative memes on me (though none as offensive as those Phillips witnessed in her research on 4chan) so I am fairly familiar with the strained attempts at appropriating memes for right wing agendas. Good humor, the stuff that really makes us laugh, usually helps us to see familiar issues in a new light. In contrast, the conservative attempts to be funny that I have seen on the internet (memes revolving around the notion that vegetarians/people getting vaccines/those using electric cars are just silly, for example) are confirming biases within a particular community rather than challenging a wide range of viewers to see things differently. As such, the attempts to co-opt memes for these political ends fall flat on several levels but, most importantly, they are just not funny. I cannot agree, therefore, that these memes are inevitably the candy hiding an inner poison of hatred and bigotry as Phillips and Lewis seem to suggest, because right wing attempts to co-opt popular memes are inevitably preaching to the converted and they fail to reach anyone else.

Because, as you point out, both Lewis and Phillips refer to the same “Hitler Hates” genre of memes that I discuss in my book, I did a quick search on YouTube looking for the most popular videos in this genre today and could not find any examples of the bigoted or mean-spirited cases that they saw on 4chan. The popular versions of these videos on YouTube (by which I mean videos with more than 100,000 views) are laced with profanity but for the most part apolitical. The “Hitler Hates the iPad” video that I discussed in my book is a good example of this. Others leaned left, such as the video “Hitler can’t get his cupcakes and he is pissed” in which Hitler is made to seem like he is outraged at a woman refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Even in this instance, however, the funniest parts of the video are arguably its apolitically humorous take on Hitler’s perceived obsession with baked goods rather than dwelling on the more serious issue of homophobia.

To the degree that the problem of internet trolls translates to China’s internet, one does see fairly rampant sexism and ethnocentrism, but these are features of China’s thought and society that date back long before the internet. As such, I am not convinced that the internet has created these issues as much as provided us with a window view into this preexisting cultural milieu. In my research on Chinese-language internet video culture, the closest comparative point to the politics of hate that I saw was the nationalistic vitriol that emerges in response to some seemingly harmless videos that were intended to make people laugh. In other words, it was the outraged reactions to the videos’ humor, rather than the underlying messaging within the videos themselves, that revealed the most conflict-ridden aspects of Chinese culture. Rather than being a Trojan horse, as Lewis and Phillips suggest for the “Hitler Hates” videos, this antic frivolity has the potential to counter some of the venom that one is confronted with on the internet, and in our daily lives. I also argue that this humor often subtly subverts nationalist demands, in both China and the United States, in that in refusing to take the world so terribly seriously they disarm angry political trolls with a gentle hand. As I suggest in my book, in the PRC culture is so heavily saturated by politics that to be apolitical is a profoundly political stance—one that arguably undermines the Orwellian tendencies of an authoritarian government as viewers choose another path.

Marcella Szablewicz: Michael Jackson appears twice in this book. In your opening chapter you discuss a mashup of Jackson’s Beat It with a Chinese Cultural Revolution performance. In this case, it would seem, American culture has been creatively reappropriated in the Chinese context. In the second instance, Michael Jackson is the butt of a joke created by Taiwan’s Next Animation studios, which is playfully mocking talk show host Conan O’Brian’s creative reappropriation of their signature animation style. In media globalization discussions, the subject of the directionality of cultural flows comes up frequently. What does your book have to say about the common perception that pop culture often flows from the West to the rest?

Marc L. Moskowitz: Yes, these mash-ups are humorous videos that use Cultural Revolution visual footage combined with music from a wide range of countries, one of which is Michael Jackson’s song “Beat it”. Other videos might feature anything from K-pop to Taiwan’s pop and a range of other music. I also examine the written commentary that is posted on these video sites. On one side of the spectrum are people celebrating the apolitical frivolity of the videos. The other side, as seen in some of the comments posted to the videos, are people in the PRC who are enraged that China is somehow being insulted by the humor (based on the perceived sacrilege of combining Cultural Revolution visuals with Jay Chou’s song about Japan, for example). It should be noted that political vitriol is far rarer than those commenting in celebration of the sheer playfulness of these videos, but unpacking the dialogue between the two groups is an important part of coming to understand regional differences.

And you are absolutely right that this kind of cultural production problematizes notions of “The West to the Rest”, a point that I explore in my book. Although in truth the idea that the West dominates popular culture around the globe has always been problematic. I grew up watching Japanese television shows and movies that were very popular on American television in the 1970s. For me, and many people in my generation, Godzilla, Speed Racer, and Ultra Man were at least as influential as the American-produced shows I was watching as a child.

Regarding the Cultural Revolution mash-ups, we know that the video footage originated in China and we are aware that that Michael Jackson’s soundtrack originated in the US, for example, but I was never able to determine who originally created the first mash-up in this genre. This issue is exacerbated because videos are often removed from servers because of alleged copyright violations on YouTube, and for political reasons on the Chinese video server Youku. But these videos are quickly reposted by other people so they are never gone long. Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum seems appropriate here in that with these videos there is no longer an original so it would be meaningless to frame the others as derivative. This is not only because of the uncertainty of who the first creators were, or because the various components of the video have so many different cultural origins, but because the meanings are so very different according to who is watching them, as well as when and where they are doing so. Even the first person to create this meme cannot really claim ownership at this point (in part because no-one would believe them) so the idea of trying to imagine the flow from one country or region to another is equally problematic.

Marcella Szablewicz: Scholars of digital media struggle with the speed of change. What we write about one day is gone the next. My students in New York tell me that YouTube viral videos are over. Instead, they now prefer short-form vertical videos such as those found on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Is China experiencing a similar shift and, if so, has the artfully created mashup video already become a thing of Internet past?

Marc L. Moskowitz: That is so interesting. I was just talking about this with students in my gender class. When I asked them if their generation even looked at YouTube videos anymore, twenty-four out of twenty-five students enthusiastically said that they did. The one student who did not said that she felt a gap with her peers because of this, in that if her friends asked what she’d like to watch with them on YouTube, she couldn’t respond. This would actually be a great research project of its own. It would be interesting to try to better understand if our students’ different responses were regional (New York vs. South Carolina) or has to do with the class being taught. My course was not specifically focused on Internet or popular culture studies, for example, so it may be that these students have different tastes and sensibilities than students who are particularly interested in taking classes about the internet. Or perhaps it simply boiled down to every class having its own personality. Regardless, it does seem to highlight the fact that there is no longer one reference point in popular culture that all of our students are linked to. In class, I can no longer make references to recent films or television shows as I once could, for example, because I only get blank stares when I do. With a very few exceptions, there is no longer a shared “it” show that all of my students will have seen. One exception to this was when I mentioned the movie Cocaine Bear my students became very animated, but my impression is that none of them had actually seen the film (nor had I)—our exposure to it came through YouTube movie trailers and, for them (and me), the trailer was clearly enough—there was no need to actually see the film. The internet is very much a part of this fissioning of cultural sharing because, as you point out, there is such a wide range of ever-changing internet venues to interact with. But also, among my students at least, these brief trailers and other even shorter videos, whether on Instagram, TikTok, WeChat, Youku, or YouTube, have to a large degree replaced moviegoing culture, with its longer demands on attention.

As I outline in my book, one of the PRC internet’s greatest differences with its Western counterparts revolves around the ways that it must maneuver around censorship as an ever-present reality. People in the PRC contend with an even increasing surveillance by the state. It used to be that the Internet was a relatively free sphere in China, as compared with, for example, large public protests that the government was quick to crack down on, or State controlled media such as the movie or television industries. Today the internet in China is far more heavily monitored. China’s Great Firewall is far more effective than is used to be, and even VPNs, which used to give many people in China the freedom to access internet news and entertainment outside of China, is no longer the risk-free or easily accessible solution that it once was. The 50-Cent Army (people paid by the government to write pro-State agenda posts) or the Voluntary 50-Cent Army (people who truly believe in the nationalist agenda about, for example, Taiwan’s independence, and therefore write State propaganda for free) are another force for government surveillance and control on the Internet. In contrast, most people in Taiwan are looking at streaming videos both through the Chinese streaming server Youku and the US server YouTube, depending on the content that they are looking for at any given time.

This gets back to your earlier comment about what “China’s internet” really means. If we extend this to Chinese-speaking cultures such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Chinese-speaking diasporic communities across the globe, or students who are temporarily abroad and have access to these wider range of cultural productions for a few years before they return to their homeland, then the questions and answers become very different. In my book I compare and contrast the different written reactions to humorous videos on Youku in simplified Chinese and YouTube comments in simplified Chinese which were probably written by people in or from the PRC, with complex Chinese characters indicating the writer probably lived in, or originated from, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Those writing in English from a range of different countries across the globe complicates this mix. I contend that one cannot truly understand Chinese-speaking internet culture without an exploration of these border-crossing dialogues.

But at the core of your question, I think, is the important point that trying to keep up with internet culture, or popular culture more broadly, is like playing Whack-a-Mole because things change so quickly. Given the nature of how long it takes to write and publish an academic book, we will always seem painfully out of date if we try to present our work as a current trend. What we can hope for, though, is that the themes of our analysis continue to be relevant even if the particular examples that we base our theories on wax and wane in popularity. In this sense, although for the moment the videos I discuss in the book continue to be popular, they are in fact less important than the dialogues they represent between factions that seem likely to continue to be at odds for some time to come—those who embrace nationalistic rage vs. playful irreverence, for example, or the important ways that border crossing exhibits both cultural proximity and profound cultural difference depending on place and space.

Thank you for your exceptionally thoughtful questions about my book. I have very much enjoyed this virtual discussion of these issues in response to your insightful thoughts about my work and for that I am grateful.