CaMP Anthropology

Victoria Bernal, Katrien Pype, and Daivi Rodima-Taylor on their edited volume

March 11th, 2024

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BernalCryptopolitics

In our new edited volume Cryptopolitics: Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media (Berghahn Books, 2023) we propose the term “cryptopolitics” to draw attention to the significance of hidden information, double meanings, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages in negotiating power dynamics. Focusing on African societies, the volume brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media to consider public culture, sociality, and power in all its forms, illustrating the analytical potential of cryptopolitics to elucidate intimate relationships, political protest, and economic strategies in the digital age.

What is cryptopolitics?

Cryptopolitics manifests as secrets, hidden knowledge, skeptical interpretations, and conspiracy theories, which are at the heart of social and political life. Secrecy and decoding are deployed to produce boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, and cryptopolitics are therefore intimately entangled with inequality and difference. Cryptopolitics involves managing communication in ways that play off ambiguity and the distinction between concealed and overt information. Secrecy, deception, and ambiguity are not novel, but cryptopolitics brings these kinds of activities into view under a unified conceptual framework that reveals how they are deployed politically. It focuses attention on the workings of the hidden and the deceptive in relations of power – trying to make sense of signs and forms that obscure and shield.

Cryptopolitics in the era of digital media:

Cryptopolitics takes novel forms and has new consequences when it enters society through digital media. While digital media seemed to promise a new age of transparency and open access to information, it has also created new sources of ambiguity and deception. The recent rise in fake news, conspiracy theories, and misinformation draws attention to powerful ambiguities manipulated for political ends. We suggest that political conflicts, elections, revolt, and other flashpoints bring cryptopolitics dramatically to the fore. Furthermore, everyday interactions and interpersonal relationships are also fields for cryptopolitics as people increasingly manage their connections with others through revelation and concealment, especially as they conduct their lives across online worlds. What needs to be hidden from whom, and what gains power or protection from being hidden, depends on the social and political context. We suggest that anthropological and ethnographic perspectives are therefore key to understanding the dynamics of cryptopolitics in any given situation.

New forms of cryptopolitics emerge with digital media—including the veiled, complicit partnerships between states and technology companies that enable surveillance or internet shutdowns in times of elections or other tense political moments, as it happens frequently in Africa and throughout the Global South. A growing number of states rely on telecommunication and technology companies to help limit the circulation of information that threatens their political power. States also seek to use data collected by tech companies for various political ends. In both these efforts the official rationale is often that of what is framed as security, a paramount contemporary domain of cryptopolitics since threats and espionage produce and are produced by secrecy and suspicion.

Why Africa?

This edited volume employs the concept of cryptopolitics as a lens that helps bring into focus a dynamic of power and communication that operates in a wide array of settings. It explores cryptopolitics in diverse African contexts through ethnographic perspectives and in-depth qualitative studies. The authors situate their work at the intersection of cultural anthropology, media studies, and African studies. We contend that ethnographies of African digital cultures provide fertile ground for the exploration of cryptopolitics. Indirectness and the cryptic have been preferred forms of communication in many areas of postcolonial Africa, where citizens often have a long history of distrusting their leaders. Digital media, consumed mostly through smart phones, has rapidly become central to African politics and social life: private companies, humanitarian organizations, religious communities, families and other networks rely on digital technology in one way or another.

Cryptopolitics itself is not a new phenomenon. Discussions about encryption, fake accounts, and disinformation remind us that deliberate confusion, doublespeak, distrust, and deciphering are often part of human interaction and are always embedded in strategies of power. At the same time, we should keep in mind that cryptopolitics is foundational to the digitized world, as technologies amplify the duality of concealment and revelation, and also magnify the scale, scope, and set of stakeholders associated with any particular instance. In our book, we employ the concept of “cryptopolitics” as an analytical space that is fruitful for new investigations in contemporary power configurations. We hope that the chapters of this volume can serve as an inspiration to engage in similar research beyond the African continent.

Digital technologies and social media platforms:

Digital technologies have fostered new surveillance and security measures used by states and private companies. These stockpiles of data are powerful public secrets that are known of yet hidden from citizens: a form of cryptopolitics. The objection of African governments and the U.S. government to the encryption of communications is testimony to the power that rests in information and in data. Struggles over who controls what is known, what can be revealed, by whom and to whom are being waged globally.

Such new power formations lead to new power struggles, as the tensions between the European Union and American platform companies show. They also generate new strategies and tactics of resistance. All over the world, to varying degrees, people engage in new, digital and non-digital practices in efforts to escape repression, whether enacted by the state or other actors of authority.

The chapters of this book use cryptopolitics as a tool to illuminate the underlying discourses of power and powerlessness that are mediated by the novel technologies. Enabling new strategies of concealing and revealing information and intentions, the digital technologies are shown to disrupt and reconfigure people’s communicative practices and lifeworlds. However, the chapters also show that the emerging virtual public sphere that allows people to connect through a variety of new media, should not be seen as always enabling free speech and empowerment, but is shaped by complex interaction between a variety of actors—individual and collective, public and private. We can therefore see how cryptopolitical practices are anchored in local cultures and social norms, but also interlink online and offline, public and intimate socialities.

Our rich empirical cases:

This anthology brings together original research on diverse countries in Africa and diasporas, including Somalia, Eritrea, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Mali, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. All chapters examine the role of emerging digital technologies and platforms in mediating knowledge production. A common theme is the relationship between the state and society with particular attention to conflicts, migration, ethnic rivalries, and authoritarian systems. The chapters demonstrate how political and social practices are always anchored in local sociality, and suggest that the analysis of the role of social media in Africa is often central to understanding the present-day cryptopolitical dynamics between the powerless and powerful.

The rise of digital communicative platforms can be seen as central to contemporary activities of obfuscation and revelation—offering new possibilities for the empowerment of the marginal, but also creating new mechanisms of surveillance and control. The book casts light on the emerging dynamics of digital platforms in Africa that are often characterized by ambivalent implications to power and agency—the ability of individuals to make their own choices and act upon them. Various social media and internet search platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Google, increasingly feature as an arena for construction and negotiation of alternative meanings and strategies of resistance.

Our anthology explores the new digital publics that emerge on diverse global and local social media platforms to question and contest the political legitimacy and narratives of the state. It draws attention to important continuities in political cultures, and the ways long-standing cryptopolitical understandings and practices are adapted to digital media. The chapters of our book provide rich empirical material to illustrate these topics. For example, social media in Burundi draws on the patterns of selective concealing that are part of the cultural repertoire in Burundian politics, while providing citizens with new avenues to combat the machinations and violence of the state. In post-conflict Somalia, the enduring struggles to reify and strategically manipulate otherwise fluid and contextual clan identities have been transferred to the digital world of algorithmic search engines. Communication on Congolese digital platforms is shaped by a locally specific aesthetic of ambiguity that foregrounds socially conditioned modes of concealment and revelation, forming an important strategy for managing personal relationships. New digital technologies of identification aimed at regulating and surveilling migrants in Kenya give rise to new strategies among Somali and Burundi refugees who evade and manipulate the state authorities, while providing them with informal ways to draw on their customary ties of sociality and mutual security. Among Eritreans and the diaspora, the double meanings and ambiguities of humor both mirror and decode the cryptopolitics in the narratives of the authoritarian state and expose these to public scrutiny.

While digital media may render participation in political and economic governance more accessible to the masses, the outcomes remain contested and ambiguous. Thus, for example, digital platforms such as Twitter have disrupted state control over the circulation of information in Kenya and introduced new, participatory practices of engaging with institutional politics. At the same time, digital platforms also entail new opportunities for the state to strengthen its repressive regime. Similarly, the restrictions and freedoms produced by the engagement of the users with Western-owned BigTech platforms that often dominate the digital economy landscape in Africa are also ambivalent and context-dependent. In South Africa and Kenya, for example, WhatsApp-mediated informal savings groups have emerged as an alternative to digital group accounts offered by commercial banks and dedicated FinTech platforms. While they build on vernacular templates of mutuality and allow broader financial access to the masses, they have also given rise to rapidly spreading scams, and data capture by technology companies. Fundraising campaigns increasingly combine WhatsApp with offline contribution networks and mobile payment channels, demonstrating the continued importance of integrating offline and online modes of livelihood management. As the chapters show, digital publics in Africa are thus constituted through multiple materialities and communicative forms, and digital spaces shaped by a variety of actors that include individual users, governments, civil society organizations, diasporas, and increasingly, technology companies and investors.

Cryptopolitics and ethnographic fieldwork:

Cryptopolitics is not only a topic to study in the lifeworlds of our research subjects. Collecting ethnographic data and publishing research involves strategies of exposing, concealing and obscuring as well. As anthropologists, we have sometimes failed to acknowledge the politics of ethnographic research and scholarship, and the local and global power relations that shape our engagement with the people we write about.

Our usage of pseudonyms or the alterations of various idiosyncratic characteristics of local people with whom we interact are also practices of cryptopolitics, of producing layers of meaning, of hiding and obscuring so that our interlocutors or our relationships with them are not harmed. These processes of anthropological research are well-known. Yet, with the ubiquity of social media, practices of data collection, contacting interlocutors, and maintaining relationships with them are constantly being transformed. Scholars increasingly need to reflect on how digitally stored ethnographic material will be protected from risks such as data hacking or theft. Just as citizens are not always fully in control of the data flow of data they consciously produce or inadvertently generate, neither are researchers. All this points to a need for new approaches and perspectives in the discipline that would allow for more balanced disclosures in an environment of mutual dialogue and respect, to replace the old, extractive modes of knowledge-making.
Lisa Messeri on her book, In the Land of the Unreal

March 8th, 2024

https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-land-of-the-unreal

Stefan Helmreich: Your first book, Placing Outer Space, asked not only how place was imagined on and for such off-Earth entities as exoplanets, but also placed such imaginations within the (mostly) American cultural contexts within which they emerged. In In The Land of the Unreal, you again place a technoscientific imagination with respect to a social address. This time the technoscientific object is virtual reality and the place is Los Angeles. Can you get us up to speed on what difference LA makes to the VR that is created there?

Lisa Messeri: Thanks, Stefan. That comparison between the two books is a great place to start. As you point out, in both books I’m interested in the relationship between place and technoscientific endeavors. In the first, I catalogued how scientific elites made place in the cosmos. In this one, I flipped figure and ground and was interested in how place – in the sense of geographic location – shaped technological work. Ethnographically, it was quickly apparent that conversations and development around VR in specific and tech more generally in LA felt different from my prior experiences in Silicon Valley (and spending a decade immersed in MIT’s tech culture). In the book, I therefore attempt to tease out LA’s technological terroir; the features of local geography, history, and expertise that cultivate a different sensibility around tech. Hollywood’s impact on the political economy of LA is of course a driving factor, but so is the longer history of the region’s aerospace and military histories that, as I came to understand, have long been entangled with the entertainment industry. Alongside these different institutional configurations for tech development is also the simple fact of a geographic removal that provided LA’s VR scene space to be something slightly different than San Francisco’s Silicon Valley dominated activities. To be clear, the differences I attribute to place’s influence on tech development and conversations are subtle. They slowly became apparent throughout a year of ethnographic research. On the surface, one could find many connections between VR as it existed in LA and other globally situated hot spots. But teasing out these subtle differences became essential for understanding how particularly claims about VR – for example, that it could supposedly be an empathy machine – came to hold power, both in LA and beyond.

Stefan Helmreich: Anthropologists have taken an interest in virtual realities for a spell now. I think of early speculations in 1990s cyborg anthropology. And then I turn to Tom Boellstorff’s 2008 Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human and Thomas Malaby’s 2011 Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life— which took somewhat opposed approaches, with Boellstorff doing his fieldwork “in” Second Life and Malaby looking at the physical workplace of Linden Labs. I wonder if you might say something about how you think about the relationship — or, even, difference? — between ethnography in virtual reality and ethnography about virtual reality.

Lisa Messeri: When I first began this project (I can offer my NSF proposal as proof!), I imagined I’d be studying the institutions that develop VR, following Malaby, and the sociality of the virtual, following Boellstorff. While such a “mixed reality” project is possible and admirable, it quickly became clear that they require distinct methods and do not necessarily have intuitive points of connection. In the end, I conducted all of my fieldwork IRL and so even though this is an ethnography about virtual reality (and, to some extent, aims at theorizing the virtual) it is not a virtual/digital ethnography. This was partly because the VR experiences whose creation I was documenting were largely cinematic VR rather than social VR; meaning they were experienced individually and not part of a persistent, inhabited virtual world. While I did a lot of VR during my fieldwork, the sociality I was studying as an anthropologist all occurred outside of the headset.

This distinction is really important, as Boellstorff points out in a recent article, “Toward Anthropologies of the Metaverse.” So maybe the metaverse has already peaked and fallen, but the point he is making is that the virtual (be it Second Life or Meta’s Metaverse) is not necessarily something that is only experienceable in virtual reality. When these two are conflated, the field that is taken to be the virtual or the metaverse is prematurely constricted. I agree with this, but the article limits anthropologies of the metaverse (perhaps we will update this to include anthropologies of spatial computing, in light of Apple’s Vision Pro) to be studies of virtual (in headset or not) sociality. Here I would interject and suggest that anthropology’s potential is to create an anthropology of the virtual/metaverse/spatial computing that capaciously includes both ethnography in the virtual and ethnographies about the virtual. Indeed, the conflation Boellstorff points out between the virtual and virtual reality is ethnographically interesting! How might we understand Apple’s and Meta’s insistence that the future they are promising comes in the form of a headset? And how do we understand the communities that form around the promises of such futures (whether they are formed in good faith [to make a quick buck] or not)? We need to study both the makers of technology and the users of technology. Even if this is not a single project for one investigator, they are necessarily complimentary, as Boellstorff and Malaby’s initial work on Second Life demonstrated.

Stefan Helmreich: Your book is keen to look at the work of women innovators in VR, especially in the immediate (and at the time very encouraging) aftermath of #MeToo. You encountered some women who made claims that their work might generate more compassionate technological development — claims that you usefully complicate by directing the reader to feminist work on the multiple and not always straightforward politics that arrive any time notions of care are invoked. Can you tell us what it was like to be in conversation with some of these innovators — in ways that both heard them out and that offered your own feminist STS expertise to the discussion?

Lisa Messeri: My biggest concern at the start of this project was that I knew I would be in conversation with people whose VR projects I might not fully be behind. After all, the impetus for this project was trying to understand how a community comes to believe that their technology can make the world a better place. Given ALL the studies we have about how well-meaning technologists (and technologies) often … do the opposite, I was very aware of my positionality. Therefore, going into the field, my strategy was that for those who would let me be a participant observer, I would take the participation seriously. I was not going to sit back with my notebook and document practices that (unintentionally!) inscribed problematic politics into VR experiences, but I was going to participate – I was going to offer my feminist STS lens as a resource for these teams. A small example was when I was working on a VR experience about a mission to Mars, I was asked to read a preliminary script. It was riddled with references to “colonizing” Mars. I suggested we find other language, noting how that loaded metaphor presupposes certain social (including human-nonhuman) relations. We rewrote the script and that conversation led to a slightly different ethos behind the fictional Mars world that continued to be built out. Anyway, that was an easy enactment of participation.

There were harder situations where projects were admirable – and too far along in their development to change – but I could see potential pitfalls. I still wanted to document these cases, as it was important that I hear the creators out (as you say) and really try to understand the well-meaning intention behind such projects. As my year of fieldwork progressed, and as these relationships became more trusting, I would be able to discuss some of my concerns and never was there a case where these concerns were rejected. And most of the time, these concerns weren’t even a surprise but ones that the innovators themselves had been privately puzzling over.

When it came to writing, I employed several strategies to layer in the critique. Sometimes, my interlocutors would open the door to critique with their own observations. Other times, I made the object of critique not individuals or even projects, but the structures and situations that make potentially harmful VR experiences seem potentially helpful.

Stefan Helmreich: “Unreal” — Can you talk about what this/word concept means from the point of view of your interlocutors? How and where do their uses of the term resonate — and not — with your use of the idea?

Lisa Messeri: The unreal got stuck in my brain really early in fieldwork. I had gone on a studio tour at Paramount and our guide played a clip from the 1961 Jerry Lewis movie The Errand Boy, which began with an arial shot of Los Angeles that slowly zoomed in on Paramount studio. A voiceover narrated, “This is Hollywood. Land of the real and the unreal.” This was in my mind as I began to better understand LA as a city and VR as a technology. The unreal would pop up in weird places. Usually it was a colloquialism, exclaiming that a really cool VR experience was “unreal.” But after fieldwork, I also came across a 2016 marketing report that was tracing the trend of “unrealities.” This trend included escape rooms and astrology and Snapchat filters and meditation retreats and, of course, virtual reality. These things are all appealing not exclusively because of the fantasy they offer, but because that fantasy is experienced in dialogue with a reality that is being pushed against. In the book, I define the unreal as that which “holds in tension an extraordinary rendering of reality with what might be thought of as an everyday reality.” There have always been multiple realties, but the unreal marks moments when such multiplicity demands attention. So, saying a VR experience is “unreal” is from a delight in knowing your body was in the physical world but having an experience that is deeply at odds with those surroundings.

As I was conducting fieldwork in 2018 – right in the middle of the Trump presidency and its explosion of alternative facts – I marked US politics as also unreal, in so far as many liberals struggled to comprehend Trump’s “extraordinary rendering of reality” with how they understood reality. This political reading comes from an intellectual genealogy of theorizing US politics from LA, from Baudrillard and Eco’s hyperreal to Soja’s real-and-imagined thirdspace. To these 20^th century theories, I add the 21^st century twist of the unreal.

Stefan Helmreich: You write in the book about VR boosters as sometimes eager to pitch their projects as in the service of empathy. And you point us to the fact that the register of empathy can be a way of avoiding questions to do with institutions, the distribution of resources, politics — with things beyond the scale of the sheerly well-meaning individual. The silicon panic of our time is to do with generative AI — and some thinkers, like Sherry Turkle, have kept their eyes on the rise of tools promising artificial intimacy, thinking here about therapy chatbots that promise artificial empathy. What, if anything, do you think recent AI development has done for/to the promises or VR? Is empathy still important? Or are other terms of conversation now surfacing?

Lisa Messeri: When I was doing fieldwork, VR was in frequent conversation with blockchain and AI as a triumvirate that would usher in the future. I mention this to mark that they are part of the same ecology – and draw on many of the same institutions, resources, people, and so on. So in general, much of what I write about in my book is a primer for today’s genAI moment. And the persistence of empathy as a category is a frightening reminder! An October 7, 2023 headline from the Wall Street Journal asked “Can AI do Empathy Even Better than Humans?”

But all the thinking that has been done about VR and empathy gives us a head start on how to think about AI and empathy. Turkle was one of the first thinkers I looked to when getting at the empathy angle. In a chapter in which she responds directly to claims that VR is an empathy machine, she worries that “the feeling of conversation becomes conversation enough.” Denny Profitt, a psychologist at UVA who provided me with my first exposure to VR, observed to me sometime around 2015 that VR empathy experiences were potentially dangerous because they could induce a feeling of false catharsis. In caring deeply, do you forget to actually act in a way that remedies the problem? Or as Nakamura has put it, what is the morality of “feeling good about feeling bad”?

In figuring out how to think about empathy – be it AI- or VR-induced – I have been guided by Atanasoski and Vora’s Surrogate Humanity. They show how technologies that seek to replace or conceal human labor very often replicate dehumanizing logics of race, gender, and colonialism. So, yes, we need to be incredibly wary of VR that promises instant empathy or AI that does empathy better than a human. But, one of the case studies of my book suggests that replacing or concealing human labor isn’t the only strategy for deploying VR (or possibly AI). Should these technologies instead be used to augment human labor, perhaps there are less destructive applications of these tools. In other words, I don’t think there is something inherently bad about attempts to leverage technologies in an effort to help people and situations become better. In fact, I think such pursuits, done genuinely, are admirable! However, social problems will never have exclusively technological solutions and therefore thinking of solutions in which technologies augment – rather than replace – human labor and sociality seems to be a plausible way forward.

And that will be the hopeful note with which I end this Q&A!
Kinga Koźmińska on her book, Soundings

March 6th, 2024

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/soundings-and-the-politics-of-sociolinguistic-listening-for-transnational-space-9781350331303

Leonie Schulte: Can you describe sounding and how as a conceptual lens it allows us to understand power in contexts of migration and linguistic hybridity?

Kinga Koźmińska: I’m interested in contemporary vernacular-cosmopolitan transformations and how the current communicative environment which enables extended capabilities of action and multi-presence in various sites transforms our relations in transnational space, with a focus on what role language plays in these processes. I study sounded signs in contexts of migration to understand emerging linguistic norms and practices, and to unpack processes through which individuals and groups place themselves in socio-linguistic landscapes. The aim of this book is to draw the reader’s attention to the practices of sounding and listening. I called the book Soundings to confront the reader with multiplicity and the reality that sounds of language do things in the world.

By examining the relationship between research practices, communication and knowledge production, I wanted to add to the debates on group formation processes and examine the ways in which we relate to these multiple others and construe difference at the level of language. Working in the context of migrations between Poland and the United Kingdom since 2012 has coincided in time with the most radical changes in European space and increased politicisation of movement. In my work, I explore how beginning with situated audio and audio-visual recordings may enable us to see how these changes were affecting particular individuals and groups.

I began with a simple premise that in human face-to-face interactions, sounds of language are produced by bodies situated in space and time. This enabled me to focus on how the senses were imbuing timescapes and landscapes with their own memory and understanding of social relations. I investigate how the way we pronounce sounds of language is entangled in particular imaginaries about self-other-time-space relations: while some of us may be moving in universal time, others may portray themselves as evolving in stable timespaces and still others may focus on the here and now. I am interested in unpacking how these different imaginaries may be sounded out and how this may lead to some of our rhythms becoming dominant and others being erased or portrayed as less real.

Beginning with situated performances enables me to observe how we remain positioned while we do the work of sounding and listening. My approach to this project was situated within history of specialist knowledge production, which still has a profound impact on how the world works. This book explores how my act of bringing these different soundings in relation with one another may help us see how semiotics of the voice works today, noting shared themes, but never erasing nuances and contradictions of human experience. By doing so, I hope to push my field forward as we deal with the legacy of our troublesome past in linguistics and anthropology.

Leonie: Your book ties together several research areas, including the anthropology of the senses, to expand upon our knowledge of sociolinguistic listening. Can you speak more to the ways in which we can understand both sounding and listening as embodied practices?

Kinga: I started writing this book in October 2021, finishing in early 2023. The context of its production is important: when we started unlocking ourselves post Covid-19-pandemic, and when we had transformations of sensory experiences that were really impossible to ignore. They had a tremendous impact on people around me and made me rethink some key questions about human communication, language and relationality.

Because of this and my work on a family language project (2017-2019) involving audiovisual recordings, I became engaged in discussions in anthropology of the senses. I saw materiality and sociality of the senses as key for emerging transformations and constellations of power. I was reading about projects examining the role of technology for discourse production, such as in studies of deaf communities. At the same time, I was inspired by Bucholtz and Hall’s (2016) call to move beyond materiality-discourse dichotomy in my field. I decided to combine these bodies of research.

When engaging with some arguments in anthropology of the senses, I wasn’t fully convinced that we can actually say that language/semiotics are no longer modes for encountering the sensual cultural world. If you come from a background where you don’t speak one of the dominant languages as your first language, you immediately see that language is interwoven in modes of experiencing the world, and it is really who you are.

To me, we may try to understand the world only if we take language seriously into account, a proposition influenced by language ideological research stressing that rendering language invisible creates social inequality. I wanted to allow for reconfiguration of how we think about linguistic knowledge in the light of current changes, while not ignoring what we know about how language works. I explore how bodily production and response may work today, how we connect with others, how we occupy and push the limits of normative structures.

As the social and sensory orders continue to be (re)made, I argue for seeing sounding/listening as embodied, always multidimensional, embedded in particular energetics of social relations, never neutral/unmediated. This urges me to see my own practice as operating within a particular culture of listening, hopefully carving a way to use the knowledge we have while remaining open to transformations of concepts and realities so that the world may become more liveable for more of us.

Leonie: What I found particularly exciting about reading your book was the richness and variety of data you present, including a depth of ethnographic detail, which really speaks to the ways in which your work engages so many fields of research. Can you speak more to the methodologies which underlie this book?

Kinga: It is important to note that the methodologies that I bring in dialogue are tightly linked to my trajectory within academia and engagement with different questions and audiences. The reader will quickly see that the book goes back to my PhD data. It is my final take on ideas that I have been sitting with for a long time. I was trying to understand what the focus on the sonic dimension of discourse adds to discussions on emerging transformations in transnational space, how it unpacks how we are mobile and still emplaced, how we are singular but multiple. I explore how the ubiquity of and augmentation in human capabilities may influence linguistic norms and innovation, and how that in turn impacts how we develop categories of normality and weirdness, who’s included, who’s excluded. Importantly, the PhD project was followed by work with variously positioned Polish-speaking migrants in Greater London, where I was interested in multi-party talk and multimodal analysis to see how these families were made, how language was embedded in other embodied phenomena and used together with objects and technologies. This project focused on Polish, Somali and Chinese families in the UK. I worked with audiovisual data from 10 families of different types including Polish-Polish-speaking, mixed heritage, biracial, LGBTQ with history of transracial adoption.

There were important societal and methodological questions emerging from that work. Going back to this first project in 2021, looking at the sonic dimension of discourse, I couldn’t ignore other observations. The methodologies that I bring in dialogue are spread over a long period of time. I operated within various corners of seemingly similar debates, but with quite differently positioned migrants in the UK, and in different periods: pre- and post-Brexit. Beginning with performances of collective memory in a community of movement, the book brings the voices of those others who are often silenced in key societal debates to the fore. The book is my own experimentation to understand what has happened, how this is linked to history, what these methodologies enable us to see, and how that can push us forward. Creating a relation between these bodies of research, I hope, new questions may emerge, perhaps allowing us not to go back to assumptions for past times, but gain a new perspective for new times.

Leonie: Your book offers a very in-depth and longitudinal view of Polish newcomers in the UK, and what has always struck me about your work is how you demonstrate the ways in which processes of belonging, and community formation, but also individual ties to national and local identity and socioeconomic mobility are negotiated linguistically–or rather, how they are sounded out. Can you talk more about the ways in which structures of dominance and marginalisation are unsettled through embodied soundwork?

Kinga: I did something that is rarely done. I decided to explore what may happen if I don’t allow for erasure of minute phonetic detail, but rather follow my participants’ suggestions who at the time were linking features of language to emerging person types in transnational space. I was interested in seeing how my specialist knowledge and tools may be used to shed light on what was going on at that point. Engaged in discussions in theoretical linguistics and anthropology, I decided to examine sound production in detail. To do so, I used discourse analysis and phonetic and statistical software. I wanted to figure out how sound relationships work and are linked to sociocultural dynamics, e.g. social networks or orientation in transnational space. I analysed the emergence of the dominant scale, the use of standardized forms of language and how in transnational space this plays out in a fairly privileged context.

In the final chapter of the book, I put my findings in dialogue with projects focussing on the form of the underheard or silenced, where these uneven language expectations play out with the most intense force, as it was beautifully written, when bodies ‘open themselves up in order to survive and live with others’ (LaBelle 2018: 68). By doing so, I explore how standardisation works in transnational space, what regulatory mechanisms make it work, but also how this underscores that scales are constantly (re)made, with sounds of language acting as scalar connections that make value effects in the world. This illuminates multiple mechanisms that lock us in transnational space, often contributing to experiences of mobility and immobility at the same time. There is no single metric to understand all scenarios of migration. My work is trying to make an intervention with the skills I have to make multiple logics and rhythms our starting point. Trying to critically address my limitations and foregrounding adjustments that must be made, I propose to see sociolinguistic listening as curatorship, hopefully, enabling healing of these multiple publics that I bring in dialogue.
Johanna Woydack on her book, Linguistic Ethnography of a Multilingual Call Center

March 4th, 2024

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-93323-8

Kristina Nielsen: Call Centers have been the study of multiple linguistic and cultural studies that often focus on the topic of outsourcing labor or the spread of neoliberal values. Your book seems remarkably different in its focus in that it takes place in London and focuses on calling scripts, could you please explain how your book frames call center work in a different light than other scholars who have studied this kind of workplace and why that is so important?

Johanna Woydack: As a global city, London has been a hub, if not the hub, of Europe’s call center industry, making and taking calls worldwide. Call centers support numerous industries, such as financial services, fintech, and the tech industry by relying on highly educated multilingual migrants who, taken together, form a capable workforce. It is not unusual in London call centers to find someone working from the EU or the Commonwealth making calls to places across the globe including the US, Gulf countries, the EU, Asia, South America or New Zealand and doing so in multiple languages. As a result London is an important focus for call center work.

As you mentioned, a lot of the other call center literature focuses on offshore (monolingual) call centers as part of the spread of neoliberal and (neo)colonial values, allowing researchers to highlight topics such as globalization. Typical emphases in the literature are the novelty, exploitation, and exoticness of call centers and offshoring of services from the Global North to South including time-space compression. Although this has been important research, it perhaps paints a misleading picture by downplaying the importance of onshore call centers, which outnumber offshore call centers in terms of employment workforce percentages. By contrast even vibrant and vital Western call center hubs such as Toronto, Dublin or London, sites of incredibly large numbers of call centers, look odd. Yet these centers are integral to the global and local economies and allow us to study globalization, post-fordism, migration and integration, standardization, organizations, surveillance, gender, social class, language learning, and upskilling among other things.

I was fortunate to be able to enter the call center industry as both an employee and researcher thus giving me unusual access for a researcher to daily practices. To my knowledge, there is no other long-term ethnography of a call center. Based on my four years of fieldwork and over one hundred interviews, I found that a call center is a lot more than just a place where people read from scripts and are monitored round the clock and as a result become robotic and deskilled. In fact, I observed that scripts aided second language learning and grounded increasing professional, cultural and linguistic competencies. I focused on scripts because they were not only representative of call centers and their standardization, but linked different levels of the company: corporate management, middle management, and agents. My work is inspired by classic ethnographies of workplaces such as Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent and Donald Roy’s Banana Time, but also Erving Goffman’s books Asylum and Stigma. I applied an innovative methodology combining Dorothy Smith’s ‘institutional ethnography’ with Greg Urban and Michael Silverstein’s ‘transcontextual analysis’. I call this framework ‘institutional transpositional analysis’, a method by which I follow the career of a script to investigate why it is created, changed and performed as it travels through the organization and how different actors contribute to an organization and express their agency. I believe this method can be applied to studying other organizations, not just call centers.

Kristina Nielsen: In this book, you follow the social life of a call center script, how does focusing on following a script’s career rather than a person’s career allow you to tell a story that is not often told about the workplace?

Johanna Woydack: There is a tradition to design research around chains, threads, and trajectories to follow the flow of objects to create multi-sided ethnography. I am thinking, for example, of Sidney Mintz’s and Ulf Hannerz’s work. By following text trajectories, in this case, the social life of a script from its creation to its death, I created an ethnography within an organization that is integrally multi-sided in terms of the corporate hierarchy, employees of diverse backgrounds, and clients around the world. Following a person’s career would not have highlighted this multiplicity. My methods further allowed me to explore what standardization means in the call center. As the call center’s controversial raison d’être, standardization raises questions of agency, surveillance, resistance and compliance by multiple actors from (corporate) management, to team leaders and finally to call agents. Besides that, I was inspired by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban’s seminal book on The Natural History of Discourse, especially Richard Bauman’s chapter on the “Transformation of the Word in the Production of Mexican Festival Drama” which also explores how a script is re-contextualized and re-entextualized, although in a different context.

Kristina Nielsen: Working with corporations while in the field poses its own sets of challenges to fieldwork, could you tell us about your approach to working within a corporate setting?

Johanna Woydack: As many other ethnographers who have done fieldwork in corporations or on factory floors, I was also an employee and gained full access as an insider. I first worked the phones and then was promoted to team leader. One challenge in such research, especially when the agenda is developed outside the corporation, is to gain management approval. I asked management whether they would allow me to do research and interview fellow co-workers while working myself as an employee and they agreed. It was my impression that they appreciated my application of linguistics not only in my own work for the corporation and in my research but also in training and helping co-workers interact on the phone and improve their performances so that corporate targets were met.

Kristina Nielsen: One of the theoretical frameworks you engage with in your book is the notion of standard which has been a mainstay of linguistics but is often looked at as a phenomenon that is resisted from the bottom and controlled from the top. How does your account of standardization show some of the nuances and motivations that might not be clear from previous accounts?

Johanna Woydack: My account of standardization offers insights into types of participants marginalized or overlooked in previous non-ethnographic studies such as middle management and team leaders, not just the agents.

These insights emerged through the mapping of a script’s textual trajectories encompassing the entire organization, and through field notes on the surrounding real life back-stage activities during a script’s career. Campaign managers and team leaders are important figures whose interpretations and actions influence proceedings on the floor. Ethnographic observation allows one to see how they perceive standardization or work with it on a daily basis. Discussion of team leaders or middle managers in previous call center studies has been limited to mention of supervisors who are part of a system, but has not recognized these employees as a significant interest group with the capability to act differently from their line managers.

The trajectories of the script and many of my fieldnotes not only highlight the actual existence of different interest groups within the organization, but also show that in real time all participants (agents, team leaders or middle managers) have agency, for example, when they recontextualize a script in a new context, orally or through hand-written annotations. This is an important form of agency overlooked in most previous studies that draw only on interviews or questionnaires. Ethnographic insights reveal that it is not the sole purpose of a script to regulate activities within the organization. Only corporate management and the client believe a script is static. Participants further down the hierarchy conceptualize a script as part of a textual trajectory and therefore transforming throughout its journey. Changing a script is not an act of resistance but of performative improvement of benefit to the company and its clients, as well as agents. Hence, scripts and standardization vary in meaning from corporate management to participants on the floor. Against this background, the notion of what standardized, standard or standardization means becomes more difficult. If understanding depends on the hierarchical position of a participant, whose understanding do we take?

Finally, I wanted to draw a more complex picture of standardization as in social theory and sociology it has tended to be derogatory leading to homogenization, deskilling and ultimately to dehumanization. I started off from the assumption that standardization does not have to be negative and investigated possible benefits in actual use. For example, a significant number of college graduates work in call centers in London because competition for most jobs is fierce and graduates from other countries compete with graduates of over 50 domestic colleges/universities. It often requires some time in London before migrants find a satisfying job in their fields of expertise. In the meantime, to make money and improve their English, they may work in a call center. Often this becomes an opportunity to improve one’s linguistic competence and launch oneself into an appropriate professional career.

Kristina Nielsen: Would you say that your book is a story of how call center agents… have agency?

Johanna Woydack: This is one of the facets of the book. I wanted to re-conceptualize the concept of resistance as it can be crude. Previous works on resistance, both Neo-Marxian and Foucauldian, although epistemologically very different, have succumbed to what Dennis Mumby has “called the duality of control and resistance”, wherein there is no room for agents, agency or subjectivity. Agency tends to be limited to upper echelons of power structures. Equally, if there is resistance, it is assumed to be guerilla-like, never collective, as it is read as subsumed within and reproduced by control mechanisms.

Agency, however, in call centers such as the London centers I explored is part and parcel of the skilled work entailed by those who operate the phones as well as by their leaders and management. Lower-level agency is often missed because of the negativity associated with calling as robotic and because it is a job that is mostly oral; the oral and technical skills of agents can be invisible and illegible even to managers.

I was also interested in producing a framework to study an organization in the new economy, including providing voices to different people such as middle management and lower-level employees.

On yet another level the book is about how standardization works or perhaps fails to work and how it is interpreted. The drive to standardization is not limited to call centers (including the desire to impose scripts top-down) but also appears in institutions like schools and hospitals, making the topic one of even greater general interest.

Lastly, I provided a larger story about being a graduate/immigrant in London, about London socialization and about how call centers play an integral part in the local and global economies. One’s call center past is something successful graduates or other individuals might hide due to social stigma but in safe settings agents report gaining important cultural and linguistic skills there.

Kristina Nielsen: Finally, call centers are a topic that most readers can relate to because they have inhabited the role of customer at one point or another. Is there one thing that you would want readers to learn about call centers, not as academics but as customers?

Johanna Woydack: Call center workers usually work hard, are educated, tech savvy and with time, become skilled in communicative competence, although this is sometimes hidden by constraints of the system. They try to help consumers but sometimes cannot because of conflicting logics and rules within rules that the system has created. They navigate their way through these constraints the best they can but often this is a challenge they cannot meet on their own. The industrial sociologist Marek Korczynski has theorized this conflict and dilemma as consumer-oriented bureaucracy.
Dario Nardini on his book, Surfers Paradise

February 26th, 2024

Ledizioni Publishing

Interview by Nicco La Mattina

Nicco La Mattina:  In Surfers Paradise, you describe how the figure of the surfer is characterized as a risktaker, emblematic of a putative Australianness and of the Gold Coast specifically. How does the risk-taking surfer presume upon a particular sociocultural ideology of sport and of masculinity?

Dario Nardini: When I arrived on the Gold Coast, I was surprised (among many other things) about the many ways surfing was consistently linked to masculinity. My sporting background was centered on combat sports, and I did not identify in surfing the traits and values that are socially ascribed to masculinity in many other sports (and in combat sports in particular), such as strength, aggressiveness, muscularity, physical confrontation/dominance, submission, and so on. Instead, the ability of a surfer is also measured on different skills, including balance, elegance, grace, fluidity, the ability to read and understand the ocean and currents, and so on. All these abilities, that surfers would probably describe as style, refer not to quantitative and measurable parameters (who submits his opponent, for example), but on subjective and aesthetic parameters, that are frequently and stereotypically associated with what are perceived as female disciplines (gymnastic or dancing, for example).

Through the fieldwork (that is the actual sense of ethnography), I realized that, like other disciplines, surfing is considered to be a risk sport. It is exactly the surfers’ bravery to assume and challenge these risks that characterizes surfing as a men’s field. However, surfing can be a very safe activity – if surfers do not overestimate their ability and choose safe spots/beaches and surf small-to-medium waves. Statistics on injuries are sensibly lower than for other practices (like Thursday-night five-a-side football, for example). Surfers actually risk only when they (intentionally, and consciously) deal with big waves, sharky beaches or rocky breaks, and so on. However, risk in surfing is mainly a social construct, settled in a long-term Western (Romantic) process of cultural conceptualization and representation of the ocean as the expression of the sublime and the place for both fun and adventure, as well as on more localized Australian Beach Cultures (as the historian Douglas Booth has evocatively described them).

The thing is that what we call risk (or extreme) sports are not always actually riskier than other, more putatively traditional disciplines. Risk in these practices, however, is explicitly thematized and centralized as one of the central features and motivations of both the practices and practitioners. As Mary Douglas showed, understanding risk from an anthropological perspective we should not focus on the actual dangers (that exist, and are a fact), but on the way people conceive and deal with certain dangers (and not others). That is, on the cultural meanings and values that are ascribed to danger in a specific social context.

The aestheticization of risk-taking and the courage to take risks make surfing something more than just “pure fun”. Risk-taking is the pivotal fulcrum of the social definition of surfing as a male activity in Australia – even though women have been the co-protagonists of the practice since its introduction in the continent, and are more and more represented on the local line-ups. Risk-taking, and especially the ability to challenge an “hostile” nature, is also at the base of some myth-making processes linked to the process of construction of a national (colonial) identity in Australia. The courage of the first settlers that explored and colonized the Australian bush, embodied by some mythical literary figures, has been relocated, through surfing and surf lifesaving cultures, in the figure of the waterman, that deal with the ocean and the dangers that it entails. In this way, surfing is also intimately linked with the process of definition and reproduction of a (partial, and exclusive, and mainly manly) Australian cultural identity.

Nicco La Mattina:     The theme of reciprocity is present throughout your book, from ideas of fraternal reciprocity between mates to the relation of reciprocity between surfers and the ocean. How are these forms of reciprocity constitutive of or in tension with Gold Coast surfers’ antagonisms amongst each other and self-affirming aspirations?

Dario Nardini: The fact that surfing is challenging and risky gives surfers the opportunity, on the one hand, to feel themselves to be an exclusive group: non-surfers cannot even understand what surfing means to the people involved. “Only a surfer knows the feeling”, is the popular slogan of a famous surfing brand, one that Gold Coast surfers love to repeat in many circumstances. On the other hand, their effort becomes for surfers the essential price they pay for their reward – the waves. In other terms, they establish a reciprocity with the Ocean, because the gift the Ocean offers them, the waves, generates the impetus for a return. They feel in debt with the Ocean. And they pay this debt with their commitment. “There are no free gifts”, as Mary Douglas stated, and waves do not come for nothing. What surfers call stoke, the ecstatic feeling of a good ride, cannot be free, and asks for a reward; and dedication and commitment are considered as a fair payback. However, surfing is an activity where participants compete not (necessarily) for the results nor for the score, but for participating. In fact, the (modern) surfing etiquette is clear: one wave, one surfer. You can share a beer after a surfing session, but not a wave on the line-up. Turns in a wave line-up normally follow this rule: the surfer closer to the peak gets priority. The others must leave the way. In fact, modern surfers perform radical manoeuvres on the wave, and they need space. There is no room on one wave for more than one surfer. And in the hyper-crowded line-ups of the Gold Coast, this generates a tough competition among surfers, that struggle against each other to get priority on the peaks and get the best from their surfing sessions. In their opinion, the waves are not a democratic resource. You need to deserve them. You have to show you can deal with them. And this means you have to dominate the line-up (to rule the line-up, as they like to say) and to beat the competition. Social partnership or collaboration is not expected in surfing on the Gold Coast – except among very close, small groups of friends, or locals. You can only count on your own skills, abilities and initiatives on the local waves, as the neoliberal rationality demands (the Foucauldian “entrepreneurship of the Self”).

Nicco La Mattina: What is the relationship between taste and choice that you discuss in your book? How are these factors related to the synesthetic knowledge that surfers cultivate and to moral premises of their lifestyle choices?

Dario Nardini: In my book, I analyze surfing on the Gold Coast under the light of the international literature on consumption. If one admits that the supply of cultural leisure practices is configured as a market, engaging in one of these activities, just as buying objects in Mary Douglas’ theory, means enacting a philosophy of life, actualizing a worldview (a lifestyle, surfers would say). For the choice of one practice entails not only aesthetic, athletic or performative, but also (and sometimes especially) the adherence to a moral/etiological system for the practitioners. In this process, consumers have an active role, for consumption, as Pierre Bourdieu stated, always presupposes a work of appropriation by the consumer; or, more accurately, it presupposes that the consumer helps to produce the product he consumes. However, on the one hand the choice is limited to the market of the sporting activities that are available in a certain social context in a given moment. On the other, we should consider that the subjectivity of each individual is, as Pierre Bourdieu explained, the expression of a taste that is socially co-constructed by the social actors. What is viewed as fun (and surfing is certainly considered fun) is not simply naturally fun: people learn how to feel it fun, through “system of appreciation” (according to historian Alain Corbin’s definition) that are socially elaborated.

Nicco La Mattina:     Speaking of the Gold Coast context, as one of your interlocutors succinctly put it, “surfing here is mainstream” (p. 201). Not only is this quite different from the gouren wrestling of Brittany (on which you have elsewhere written), but it is at odds with the countercultural history, representation, and practice of surfing elsewhere (such as California). What is distinctive about surfing in the Gold Coast that makes it mainstream and makes the Gold Coast a surfers paradise?

Dario Nardini: As the staff writer at The New Yorker and long-term passioned surfer William Finnegan wrote in his Pulitzer Prize winning book Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, surfing on the Gold Coast was already mainstream when he went to Australia in 1978-79. “Local surfers were less welcoming. There were thousands of them. The ability level was high, the competition for waves acute. Like anywhere, each spot had its crew, its stars, its old lions. But there were full-blown clubs and cliques and family dynasties in every Gold Coast beach town – Coolangatta, Kirra, Burleigh”. On the Gold Coast – and in Australia – surfing inherited some of the competitive, athletic aspects of the local surf lifesaving tradition, and competitive surfing developed earlier than in other surfing regions. The international competitions’ parameters for the evaluation of surfers’ performances were especially developed in the 1970s around some of the putatively radical maneuvers performed by Australian and Gold Coast’s surfers. Surfing clubs and surfing programs in schools have a long tradition on the Gold Coast, and surfing facilities such as car parking and showers all along the local beaches, or surf racks in the local transports have been implemented since the 1970s. Surfing shops, surfboard shapers and ding repairs are ubiquitous on the Gold Coast, and surfing iconography adorn local shops, markets and parks. Surfing here has also been part of the place-making process that from the 1950s to the 1990s has made the Gold Coast a national, and finally an international tourist destination. This has contributed to normalize surfing to the public opinion’s eyes, and to develop a sportive and athletic (and therefore healthy) image of the surfers, considered as sportsmen more than hippies. Accordingly, even if prejudgments were strong in the “counterculture” years in the 1960s-70s, and can still influence some people’s opinion, they are not central and do not define the social image of local surfers.

Nicco La Mattina: With respect to the notion that the ethnographic encounter necessitates some critical distance (lacking in much scholarship on surfing), and your own “body formed with feet on the ground” in the Apennine Mountains, what role did the adage that “only a surfer knows the feeling” play in your research on the Gold Coast?

Dario Nardini: Billabong’s “Only a surfer knows the feeling” sounds both to surfers and not-surfers like an initiatic mantra. Surfing is something so exciting that you cannot even describe it, if you won’t try it. However, in my book I try to show how surfing is an intrinsically literary activity, that is inspired by cultural (literal, mediatic, and so on) representations that actually orient surfers’ experience. “Only a surfer knows the feeling” certainly means that only a surfer may have experienced what other people can only imagine, but also that it is possible to imagine it (if not, surfing would not be so charming to the non-surfing audience, and even to my own “body formed with feet on the ground” in the Apennine Mountains). And the outcome of this act of imagination, to some extent, conditions the experience. Representations (of the ocean, of the watermen, of surfing) precede the experience of surfing, and orient it. The act of surfing is not naturally exciting. It has become so, in a long process of historical and social construction of the ocean as a place of leisure, contemplation, imagination and detachment, of the watermen as adventurers, and of surfers as embodiment of a contemporary version of the Romantic hero.
Tim Brookes on his book, Writing Beyond Writing

February 19th, 2024

https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/writing-beyond-writing/

Erik Shonstrom: Writing Beyond Writing is such a mind-blowing book. You took the most banal thing in the world, the letters that we look at every day, and you do this deep dive into this world. Paragraph after paragraph I was like, “Wow, I’ve never even thought of that.”

What can a script tell us about the people who use it, and how does that script potentially reflect cultural identity?

Tim Brookes: A script is the product and manifestation of its culture, and it embodies and displays the aesthetics, the values, the history and the beliefs, the materials, the tools, even the climate, that have shaped it. You can never sensibly discuss a script without its human context, just as you can never remove a script from its people without incalculable loss. Let me give you an example. The Beria script was created by the Zaghawa people, who live in Chad and Western Sudan. It’s an extraordinarily arid area, and consequently, their cultural symbiosis with the camel is profound. Not only is the camel a beast of burden, or a form of transportation, but they also do camel racing, and they have camel beauty contests…. In order to denote ownership of camels, as in the American West, they brand them with a branding iron.

In the 1950s a school teacher created a script for the Zaghawa language, which became known as Beria Branding Script because he used symbols that were similar to the branding marks on the necks of the camels. Subsequently, that script was revised by, of course, a vet. Talk about indigenously appropriate technologies! You have not only a technology, the branding iron, that is already in place and a substrate, namely the camel’s poor neck, which is already in place, but you also have a symbol system which is familiar and unique to the people.

That notion of a script that is unique to us, that whose appearance is familiar to us, and which arises out of our own daily lives, our daily perceptions, the landscape literally that we see, that is extraordinarily profound. To simply see a script as a phonetic system of abstract symbols and say, “Okay, here is a symbol–what sound does it represent?” massively underestimates the importance of the visual iconography of a script and its meaning to the people–which in this case not only fits in with their language, but their geography, their history, even their climate. And as such, it’s a linguistic-anthropological-graphic-semantic confluence.

Erik Shonstrom: One of the parts of Writing Beyond Writing that really blew my mind is how many different groups have devised scripts for their languages. Why would that be a powerful way to either retain or enhance cultural identity?

Tim Brookes: Yes, our research shows that half of all scripts currently in use were created rather than inherited. Half. Yet indigenously-created scripts are often looked down on in academia. They are described as “artificial” or “secondary,” and it’s taken as a sign of their failure that many newly-created scripts don’t survive their creator.

This attitude is both condescending and unfair, because so much inertia works against a newly created script. Often, the script is being created by a minority or an ethnic group the government doesn’t like, so they see the script as potentially dangerous, as a kind of iconic self-presentation that gives the minority group more of a sense of dignity, more of a sense of identity or coherence.

We know of at least four people who have been executed for creating a script for their people.

There are linguistic reasons for creating one’s own script—because the established colonial or missionary script, for example, doesn’t adequately represent all the sounds of the language–but more often it has to do with power. If a culture has been overrun or dominated by another culture that has imposed its own script, sooner or later, people start saying, “Enough.” That’s especially true in the last 20 to 30 years when it’s become increasingly possible to use digital tools to create a workable script, and even to digitize it and then start printing or texting in it.

Erik Shonstrom: Is the internet good or bad for endangered alphabets?

Tim Brookes: It cuts both ways. If you go to the very core of computing, namely the writing of code, virtually all of that is in the Latin alphabet. On the other hand the Internet has given access and functionality to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get in touch with each other at all.

There’s a very active world Mongol association, for example, and the fact that they can use their script to represent their language and talk to each other is, I would imagine, extraordinarily powerful and reassuring.

I know of Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups that are teaching either traditional scripts or, more commonly, new scripts, and in some instances creating YouTube videos as well.

Erik Shonstrom: Something I found fascinating about Writing Beyond Writing was that there is a difference between the printed alphabet and the handwritten one. What, for example, does a Chinese character demonstrate for us about the way in which a handwritten alphabet differs from the printed or computer-generated word?

Tim Brookes: When I started carving, I found that the very scripts I thought would be easiest to carve, namely the ones that are most geometrical, such as the Latin alphabet, were actually the hardest because the discipline required—exact symmetries, exact parallels, exact right-angles–is literally superhuman. These are letters that were created mechanically, not by hand.

As soon as I started carving Chinese characters, I had far more freedom for expression. When you’re carving a brushstroke you can make it a little thinner, or a little thicker, and in fact, because Chinese has always valued calligraphy, they’re used to people varying their brushstrokes. What’s more, in a brush-written script such as Chinese you can actually see the drama of the act of writing. You can see the initial attack, where the brush meets the page, because the initial contact is that much more rounded and rich. And where you have a double stroke that goes, for example, to the right and then down, it has this really distinctive elbow where the brush re-engages with the page at the point of turning.

I had never thought of writing as having that dramatic quality, or even of being a human action. As a writer, like you, I had thought of it in terms of “What can I do with these letters? How can I make people laugh, how can I make people think?” I thought of letters as pre-existing products, as givens. As soon as I started seeing writing as a human act, a manual art, I realized that writing is a way by which I take something of myself and create, with my hands, something I can offer you.

In this sense, writing is a gift–not in the sense of being a talent, but in the sense of being a spiritual transaction from my spirit to yours. The Bible talks about the Word made flesh; writing is the Word made ink, if you like, or the Word made paint. And when someone reads it, it affects them. This is how the Mandaeans see writing—as a spiritual medium, a vehicle for passing on enlightenment.

Erik Shonstrom: Something I found fascinating about Writing Beyond Writing was that there is a difference between the printed alphabet and the handwritten one. What, for example, does a Chinese character demonstrate for us about the way in which a handwritten alphabet differs from the printed or computer-generated word?

Tim Brookes: When I started carving, I found that the very scripts I thought would be easiest to carve, namely the ones that are most geometrical, such as the Latin alphabet, were actually the hardest because the discipline required—exact symmetries, exact parallels, exact right-angles–is literally superhuman. These are letters that were created mechanically, not by hand.

As soon as I started carving Chinese characters, I had far more freedom for expression. When you’re carving a brushstroke you can make it a little thinner, or a little thicker, and in fact, because Chinese has always valued calligraphy, they’re used to people varying their brushstrokes. What’s more, in a brush-written script such as Chinese you can actually see the drama of the act of writing. You can see the initial attack, where the brush meets the page, because the initial contact is that much more rounded and rich. And where you have a double stroke that goes, for example, to the right and then down, it has this really distinctive elbow where the brush re-engages with the page at the point of turning.

I had never thought of writing as having that dramatic quality, or even of being a human action. As a writer, like you, I had thought of it in terms of “What can I do with these letters? How can I make people laugh, how can I make people think?” I thought of letters as pre-existing products, as givens. As soon as I started seeing writing as a human act, a manual art, I realized that writing is a way by which I take something of myself and create, with my hands, something I can offer you.

In this sense, writing is a gift–not in the sense of being a talent, but in the sense of being a spiritual transaction from my spirit to yours. The Bible talks about the Word made flesh; writing is the Word made ink, if you like, or the Word made paint. And when someone reads it, it affects them. This is how the Mandaeans see writing—as a spiritual medium, a vehicle for passing on enlightenment.

Erik Schonstrom: In the closing chapter you talk in depth about pencils. I loved your insight that the way in which you use a pencil reenacts the way in which thinking happens. Thinking is iterative, just like sketching something out with a pencil, which I found totally fascinating and made me immediately want to sit down and write in pencil again.

Tim Brookes: Yes. The pencil is also perfect for the muscular coordination that is involved in the act of writing. We talk about handwriting, but writing involves shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand, finger—and as each joint and muscle affects the final product, it means that the pencil is extraordinarily sensitive to our bodies as well as our minds. Not only does handwriting very from one person to another, it even reflects our mood and our level of energy. In fact, the word autograph, if you take it to its roots, means self-portrait: this is the way we display who we are.

Erik Schonstrom: The idea of the evolution of scripts still seems to be common within the world of communication. You spend quite a bit of time soundly thrashing that inherently colonialist notion that the Latin alphabet is a more evolved means of writing.

Tim Brookes: It’s seductive, because the people who make that argument are actually praising themselves. If I say the Latin script has evolved from other, more “primitive” scripts, it means that I’m more evolved. And by the way, the same argument was made to assert that the Chinese script is primitive, even though Confucius was writing philosophy while the Ancient Britons were still painting themselves blue with woad.

Writing does change and evolve in certain ways. When the Bugis people of Southeast Asia went to the islands we now call the Philippines, they exported their writing. But the two locations used different local materials. So writing that had been on palm leaves and whose letters had very distinctive shapes so as to avoid angular strokes that would damage the leaf, now took on different curly letterforms because they were being incised with a point of a knife in a hard bamboo tube.

That’s very different from a culture saying, “Wow, the Latin alphabet is much more sophisticated than our syllabary or abugida. Let’s use that instead.” The occasions when one script was replaced wholesale by another are almost always because of power. The Mongols did not choose to write with the Cyrillic alphabet rather than with their own script because it was a better alphabet. They chose it because the Russians had tanks pointing in their direction. What we call evolution, because it suits us to see it that way, is more often a form of cultural genocide.

Everybody knows the phrase “History is written by the winners.” I extend it say “History is written by the winners in the alphabet of the winners.” The only reason why the Latin alphabet is so dominant–it’s now used by more people than all the other writing systems in the world put together–is because at various critical junctures, the Latin alphabet had more lawyers, guns, and money than somebody else.

Erik Schonstrom: Throughout the book, I got this sense of a dichotomy between the ease and efficiency of printed or digital writing as opposed to the greater difficulty but greater expressiveness of handwriting. When we celebrate and support these endangered alphabets, what we’re really celebrating and supporting is this expressive view of writing.

Tim Brookes: All of that crystallizes in the debate about ChatGPT and AI-generated text. If you regard writing as a commodity or an industrial product, something that you have to get done, then you’re defining writing as a chore. As soon as you define writing as a chore, then you look for ways to reduce that labor or give it to somebody else—or to a robot. ChatGPT is the robot that can do writing for you.

Imagine teaching writing not in English class, but in art class. Imagine a teacher saying, “Why don’t you find a way to practice with whatever tool you choose—pen, pencil, spray paint–to get to the point where you like what you’re doing, it represents who you are at the moment, and is legible to somebody else.

The opposite of the ChatGPT is the little kid who draws a picture of their house in crayon and writes “Mommy” or “Daddy,” and does that out of joy. They give it to the parent as a gift, and then the parent puts it up on the fridge, also out of joy.

Where did we lose that joy in writing?

In my book I actually spell out exactly how we lose that joy in writing because of the way in which we have defined what writing is, and is for.

The dichotomy that you’re talking about is the crisis that is facing us right now–and the only reason it’s a crisis is because our thumb is so heavily on defining writing as an industrial-commercial-technical product that we want to use as easily and quickly as possible, that we want to be able to distribute infinitely and store forever.

That’s fine as long as it’s balanced by understanding writing in human terms—in terms of its value to the people who use it. It’s just like respecting a writer for the quality of their writing instead of the quantity of their output. You’ve heard of the Slow Food Movement? I’m endorsing the Slow Writing Movement.
Alice Rudge on her book, Sensing Others

February 12th, 2024

nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496235466/

Interview by Steven Feld

Steven Feld: Congratulations on Sensing Others, which I found a thoroughly rich inquiry into how Batek “voice their own experience of difference.” Can you introduce us to the key themes of this intellectual project that always places “otherness” in question, under negotiation? And can you tell us about the general shape of your book and how it takes up the challenge to sensuously and ethically engage indigenous rainforest lives confronted by myriad social, historical, and ecological change?

Alice Rudge: Thank you so much for this generous prompt to expand on the key themes of the book. My reason for making negotiations of “Otherness” or “difference” the focus of the text is that for me it is both an intellectual concern, and an ethical imperative. And thinking about Otherness as both an ethical and intellectual project in an anthropological sense is directly derived from how Batek people theorise it intellectually, ethically, sensorially and politically in their own lives. Over the course of my fieldwork, it became apparent that the ways that Batek voice their experiences of and encounters with difference is highly subtle, sensitive, and always shifting. To them as much as me, Otheness was an intellectual project – something to be held to the light and examined at every available opportunity. This examination often took place through vocal utterances, which Batek use to negotiate degrees of difference with a constant attunement to the effects that articulations of difference can have in the world.

At the same time, I became acutely aware how in academic and public spheres in both the UK and Malaysia, whether indirectly (through media or commonly circulating perceptions), or directly (in tourism, policy, and conservation), Batek are rarely granted this subtle attunement in return. Whether it was through the idea that a presentation of radical differenceis necessary for theoretical anthropological innovation, or through crude stereotypes and their harmful on-the-ground effects, attention to the particularities of what difference is, how it comes to be known, and its effects in the world, are often missing. Without attention to these questions, there is a risk that notions of difference in anthropology can become reified, missing the real-life contingencies that bring it into being in unique circumstances. When we’re talking about a context of profound and rapid change such as Batek’s, this becomes especially problematic.

The book traces some of these contingencies across various domains of everyday life. In each chapter, I take a particular tension of everyday life in which conceptions of ‘difference’ are articulated. I first explore haʔip ‘longing, yearning, nostalgia’ and explore how the dynamics of closeness and loss that are evoked through this sentiment shape notions of interpersonal relations that are suffused with this bittersweet knowledge that what you hold close will always be eventually lost. In turn, this prompts a retheorisation of temporality, as through haʔip both past and future are felt as coexisting bodily in the present. This is a challenge to classic colonial and some contemporary accounts of “hunter-gatherers” which often portray them as modernity’s ultimate Others, existing in a pristine past. Yet Batek theorise themselves and gɔp (‘outsiders’)as always having coexisted in the complex messiness of the present – a present which is always situated in relation to the past and to the future. I then explore the tension between aloneness and togetherness through Batek ethical visions of being blaʔ (‘alone’) as the basic order of existence, an idea which coexists with the fact of the intimate togetherness and mutuality of everyday life. Moments when people react to perceived wrongdoing are when this tension – and the orders of difference that it makes clear – come to the fore. In the third chapter, I explore how people attune to the effects of difference through their uses of voice, expanding on the idea of ethical ‘aloneness’ through attention to Batek aesthetic theories of the danger of likenesses – a potential impingement on the bodily autonomy (or aloneness) of the person. With this autonomy in mind, I then inquire into Batek sensory experiences of the non-human persons of their forest, proposing that an appreciation for the unknown, and unknowable, aspects of non-human life are essential for ensuring that those different persons are permitted an autonomous existence. Finally, I explore sharing as a material means of creating both mutality and detachment through the creation of alignments and distinctions. Reconceiving difference as a negotiation that is always in flux, it becomes possible to understand how living well amid precarity involves constantly negotiating Otherness’s ambivalences, as people, plants, animals, and places can all become familiar, strange, or both. When looking from the boundary, what counts as Otherness is impossible to pin down.

Steven Feld: In your introduction you say that the book is not an attempt to “give voice” but rather an exploration of what voice is and what voice does. Some readers might gloss this to mean that you are more interested in ontology and metapragmatics than you are in politics and ethics. But in fact you go on, deeply in chapter 3, to complicate and overtake any such simple reduction in your ways of presenting and unraveling Batek narratives. These are very rich themes for the anthropology of language; can you speak to how your theoretical interests emerge with your many revelations about Batek metalinguistics and conceptions of language, speech, and narration?

Alice Rudge: Thank you so much for asking this! It was writing Chapter 3 (which appears in a prior form in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology), that prompted the broader theoretical framing of the book in terms of developing an exploration of what voice is and what it does (as you point out a question of ontology and metapragmatics), and yet it was the same chapter that initially prompted my desire to formulate an ethical, political challenge to standard conceptions of ontology. Which is suffice to say that I see these two aspects of the work as deeply entangled! And this very much goes to the heart of Batek theories about voice. Thinking about the metapragmatics of voice in detail – beyond description (as you do so beautifully and influentially in Sound and Sentiment) – is a unique way in to understanding how people theorise their relationships with the həp (‘forest’ – which I use here as a proxy to actually mean the hugely diverse human, animal, plant, and ghostly other-than-human presences contained within this term). We come to see names as part of human and animal bodies, for example, and their utterance as a powerful way to impinge on or inhabit the being of another in ways that can be experienced as a form of violence. We may see songs as part of the bodies of fruits, and bird sounds as inextricable from the being that utters them. There is danger in vocalising too great a likeness between one thing or person and another. And yet we see beauty and strategies for living well found in toying with this danger, evoking just enough likeness to hint at connection, while encoding the ethical and aesthetic importance of just enough difference. And so when we follow Batek metapragmatic theories (or language ontologies), it becomes clear how metpragmatic concernns are political and ethical concerns because they dictate the terms and outcomes of your engagements with Others (Batek or not, human or not). And in particular, they lead me to challenge the reliance of common conceptions of ‘ontology’ in anthropology on ideas of radical difference – because as Batek ethical and aesthetic strategies show, difference is not something that exists on its own, it is something that is created, negotiated, played with, and held in focus as an everyday of enquiry – both in terms of the metapragmatics of voice and in other domains of people’s lives.

Steven Feld: As a narrative and intervocal and intermedial (with photographs) device, your book’s five “chapters” are interwoven with five “interludes.” Unpack for us a little the textual poetics and politics of these interludes and the meta-narrative and meta-theoretical spaces that they open. How do they play into your larger intellectual aims with engaging vocal, sensory, narrative, and interspecies authority? Did you also imagine the interludes to connect to audio streams, so that these narratives and their ambient surrounds could be acoustically sensed and audibly entangled by your readers?

Alice Rudge: This question makes me wish I had included audio streams as part of the book! But to begin with the first part of your question, my reason for including the interludes as they are – separated out from the rest of the text (though with a little contextualisation preceding each) – was that I wanted the presentation of the stories in the book to reflect a little the feeling of how they emerge in Batek everyday life – as always connected to, yet set apart from everyday existence. They might be referenced in everyday moments where their topics or messages come up, in jokes, or when people hear the sounds of the birds that they speak about such as the pompakoh who appears in Interlude One. Or they are told in those hazy moments between wakefulness and sleep, where the children who begged to hear them are drifting off and its only the adults still trying to listen. As appropriate as ‘interlude’, might also have been ‘refrain’, something told in full in one moment, or perhaps appearing in other guises in other moments (as they do across the book’s various chapters).

As well as an aesthetic concern, it was also a practical concern because I wanted to present the stories as they were told to me – with enough interpretation that someone yet to be immersed in Batek life could still understand them – but not so much that my narrative imposed too much interpretation on them (as I may have done had I included them in the body chapters). I think including a sounded aspect would be an exciting direction for future work. Yet at the same time, now I think about it, I wonder if there’s something to be said for the written form in terms of it somehow evoking how Batek aesthetics rarely dictate exactly what something is and how you should interpret it (as I write about in Chapters 1 and 3). Instead, a space for ambiguity – perhaps for individuals to interptret through haʔip for different kinds of things – tends to be opened up by aesthetic creation. Would presenting a recording be presenting too much of a likeness? Does reading perhaps allow for difference to remain in interpretation as readers sound the words in their own minds? Maybe, or maybe not. These are questions I will definitely continue to think about!

Steven Feld: In chapter 4 you write: “In speech, in music-making, and in sharing other sensory experiences, Batek and the other-than-human entities of the forest attempt to make sense of one another, in the process constructing one another as moral agents.” This kind of cohabiting actant relationality is quite familiar to me through my experiences of rainforest Papua New Guinea, and it leads me to ask you a question that has been posed to me in one way or another often in the last 50 years. Why are rainforests so good to think? Is it that the (inter)sensory affordances are so overwhelmingly dense and multivalent? Is it that the (over)abundance of signs stimulates greater complicities of human, non-human, material, and spiritual entities? What figures the ground for the kind of deep listening intersubjectivity that so richly topicalizes moral agency and difference?

Alice Rudge: This is a question I’ve also grappled with both in the process of writing the book and in many conversations surrounding my work! I think that for me the answer is an excited yes, and. To explain, yes I do think that rainforests are amazing to think with – and your own work is a perfect example of what can be gained through deep attention to the (over)abundance of signs in these dense and multivalent contexts, as are recent texts by Eduardo Kohn and others. I also would agree wholeheartedly with the point that rainforests can configure a highly particular ground for deep listening intersubjectivity. And I also have two additional thoughts on this matter. First, that I would always want this point to avoid heading towards arguments that might indirectly support environmental determinism, as though rainforests may be special sites for this kind of polyvalence, they may not be the only sites of it: people may also develop or maintain a deep listening sensitivity outside of rainforest contexts. In a site of rapid environmental change, where people inhabit rainforest and non-rainforest contexts simultaneously, I think it is also important to think through the role of human agency and creativity in developing deep listening skills and an attunement to polyvalent moral agency and difference even amidst profound change and in their lives outside the forest. Second, any such argument must also attend to the particularities of and diversity within how rainforest dwelling peoples attune to and interact with this polyvalence. This is my aim in Chapter 4, where I argue that although Batek are highly attuned to the non-human entities of the forest, they also theorise this in terms of their difference from these entities – and the resultant unknowability of the inner lives of these other persons. I think this is an important point regarding your final question – what figures the ground for the kind of listening intersubjectivity that so richly topicalizes moral agency and difference – because we see how different attitudes and alignments and contingencies with regards to different rainforest contexts may produce quite distinctive understandings of what it is to be a moral agent. In short, I guess all this amounts to my attempting to theorise the political/ethical alongside the environmental/semiotic when thinking about the sensory affordances and meanings of rainforest contexts.

Steven Feld: As a certifiable language nerd I just loved the moment I opened to the page that says “Appendix 1, Grammar.” And I found there many things that captivated my attention and took me back to other parts of the book where you unpack lexical semantics and ethical pragmatics. But hey, this is not what most anthros are used to finding at the end of a narrative ethnography that embraces topics as diverse as difference and Otherness, intentionality, emotion and well-being, living well amidst environmental uncertainties, sensory epistemology, and, most broadly, relational ontology. Horay! I found this embrace of the materiality of language courageous and cool. But hey, tell us more about how you want this section to speak to the majority of your readers, who I daresay will not be linguists or area specialists, but anthros drawn to both Batek and your meditation on sensing and managing difference in the presence of remoteness.

Alice Rudge: I’m so delighted to read that that you were excited by the grammar! As a language nerd myself, that means a great deal, not least because this was exactly one of my reasons for including the grammar in the first place: I wanted the option for language nerds to be able to unpick more, but not to interrupt the flow of my other arguments that might have a wider readership – not least the topics that you list. This goes back to the same point that I made in relation to your earlier question about metapragmatics – that I see the linguistic contributions of the book as fundamentally entangled with its political and ethical aspects.

At the same time, it was also a difficult decision to include the grammar and the lexicon. This was partly because of my awareness of the coloniality of the dictionary/grammar writing endeavour – particularly from British colonial officials working in Malaysia – as so meticulously documented by Rachel Leow’s work in Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaya (2016, Cambridge University Press). And it was partly to do with my understanding of the central role that dictionary writing has historically played and continues to play for missionaries as well – missionary activity being a very live issue in some of the Batek villages where I work. Yet I also had to square this apprehension with the fact that Batek friends often ask me to produce an English-Batek dictionary, and with my own desire to do proper justice to the detail and care with which Batek interlocutors taught me about the subtlety and power of their use of language and its centrality to their everyday lives.
Jonas Tinius on his book, State of the Arts

February 5th, 2024

Interview by Matthew Raj Webb

Matthew Webb: Against the contemporary backdrop of right-wing nationalisms and populist sentiment across the world; in a country steeped in authoritarian state history (Germany); your ethnography highlights the ‘reflexive’ ethical possibilities of artistic practice in a public theatre institution. What are some of the key ideas and interventions you want to put forward?

Jonas Tinius: Alongside Alfred Gell, I consider it important not to confuse Art with “per se a Good Thing.” In fact, the Nazis created an entire ethico-aesthetic system of judgements of what is good and what is beautiful, what is bad and what is ugly. They appropriated some of the same classical and ancient Western artistic forms, genres, and content that before and after might have been used to celebrate humanity. Theatre, in the German context, was at the heart of this ‘modern problem.’ In State of the Arts,I trace some of the ways in which theatre became a matter of concern for the emerging German state and a central site and practice constitutive of what Louis Dumont has described as the “German Ideology” (1994 [1991]), that is, a particular fixation on the interrelation between autonomy and authority, and self-realization and structure. By looking at how the German state, and after WWII, in particular the Länder [provinces] and cities became patrons of public theatre institutions, I investigate how an ethics of self-formation does not necessarily contradict normative and authoritative contexts of work and play. Furthermore, I study how German theatre—both as a kind of institution and as a specific tradition—became at once a projection screen and stage for the enactment of nationalist ideals, as well as a site and practice that could subvert a focus on national and identitarian heritage.

It was for this reason that I went back to a particular theatre in a small city in the postindustrial Ruhr region to conduct my long-term ethnographic research. Through 18 months of fieldwork in a context where I could incorporate memories of my late father’s engagement as a leftist high-school teacher, as well as my own memories of growing up in this region, I developed an institutional ethnography of one of the first migrant-run theatres in Germany that propagated an anti-nationalist modern theatre aesthetic. Founded by the Italian philosopher, migrant, guest-worker, clown, actor, and director Roberto Ciulli, this theatre understood itself as a place for and of the Bastardo—those without father-land and mother-tongue—and as such exemplified both a culmination of the German logic of state patronage and its starkest rebuttal in a post-migrant logic of transnational becoming. It is precisely the practice of reflection on how one can be both within and in some ways against this German tradition of Bildung and Kultur that got me to think of this theatre as a prism, a public theorizer, itself.

Matthew: Working in a field site in which your participants (and their institutions) are such practiced public theorizers in their own right posed some important implications for the way you conducted the research and writing. Could you please say a little about this?

Jonas: The book is based on many years of what I think of as interlocutorship, sparring partnership, or as my fellow anthropologists call it: fieldwork, participant observation, or simply deep hanging out, to paraphrase Clifford Geertz. I conducted what I think of as a kind of reverse anthropology, which is to say that unlike the classic model of going far from home, I went far to go home. I inversely didn’t like the exoticizing tendencies of an anthropology that sends trained professionals into former colonies to extract knowledge about people they think have no theories about what they do—people, who, in this view, needed explanation for their practices.

In my case, the field of professional German theatre was a highly reflexive field and the Theater an der Ruhr a particular case of an institution that positioned itself already in contrast to not only a long-standing cultural tradition of the educated bourgeoisie, but also in contrast to theories of acting and theatre as mediators of literature. In other words, the field abounded in theorizing about its own practices. This has several consequences for how I conducted fieldwork: My position, first of all, was not unmarked. I was positioned. My work was re-interpreted. I was given reading lists about “anthropological” authors by the in-house dramaturg, which consisted of references to Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Adorno. Critical theory was a staple reference in the field. I needed thus to “catch up” with the theories of this field in order to be able to converse in this field.

For this reason, the ethnography I wrote wasn’t simply about a particular cultural field, but written among theories of culture. Reading in particular James Clifford’s introduction to Writing Culture (1986) reminded me that I would have to accept my writing as an arrangement of competing discourses that already problematize themselves. Many central concepts of anthropological writing—culture, aesthetics, art, practice, performance, ritual, organization—were already marked and I had to distinguish more precisely immanent theories from my etic vocabulary of explanation. Ethnographic terms came already with their own theoretical genealogies. Centrally, I had to position theory not as an analytical phenomenon outside of the field but as a practice constitutive of it.

Matthew: I really appreciated your descriptions of how practitioners ground their intellectual activities in “rehearsals,” in which cultivating and practicing Haltung [attitude] seems central to the Theater an der Ruhr’s broader political and ethical aspirations. As you note, rehearsals are less oriented toward preparing to address public audiences. How then do they enable practitioners to circulate their politics and ethics?

Jonas: Rehearsals, as I witnessed, are the principal modus and locus, that is, the main means by which and place in which the values and forms of the tradition of this theatre are negotiated. This became fairly evident in everyday forms of labor in the organization: the days are structured, morning and evening, around this social institution, important decisions regarding plays are made therein, but they are also forms of ethical reference points for the way in which the actors and agents in the Theater an der Ruhr articulate their professional and personal lives.

Consider the tensions around the different translations of the verb “to rehearse” (which, by the way, is fairly similar in French, répéter). In German, one speaks of “probieren” or “proben,” both of which have English correspondents in the verbs “probing,” that is, trying, experimenting, peeking into a different way of doing things. In the context of the Theater an der Ruhr, proben was precisely not a matter of repeating, learning by heart, as in fact many European theatre traditions since the 18th century have instituted, during which the utmost precision in repeating gestures as intended by a director, or words as written by a playwright, were to be respected. Instead, the rehearsal (die Probe) is a form of enactment—an actual practice that aims at creating a corporeal posture, but also an intellectual conduct, and an ethical stance. It is a forward-facing, prefigurative practice, which combines the work on body with the work on one’s relation towards a role, or a political theme that is being addressed. Rehearsing is a professional, extra-ordinary practice that seeks to incorporate and craft future capacities of being, and in that sense of course speaks, as a social practice, to other forms of everyday and non-quotidian behavior.

All of this crystallizes in the most frequently used term—a term with quite some modern theatre baggage, as it was used by Brecht, albeit in other way—, the notion of Haltung. Haltung is precisely the combination of the corporeal, the emotional, the intellectual, the social, ethical, aesthetic. To cultivate one’s Haltung, the principal aim of rehearsals, means to cultivate a certain capacity for becoming otherwise. It is a term aimed for my interlocutors at the Theater at overcoming the all-too-common assumption that acting is predominantly being a different person and remaining in that role (epitomized by method acting), or being entirely yourself, without any recourse to fiction (epitomized by documentary performance). Cultivating a Haltung means being able to be and not to be, to be in a role and reflect that constant becoming towards another. This is precisely where the political rests—rehearsals are here understood as the training of a capacity fundamental to acting: the capacity to remain reflexive about one’s comportment, posture, stance in life, whilst also training to be able to be otherwise, to be open to alterity, empathic to other ways of being.

Matthew: You conclude the book with a reflection on the stakes of art as an ethical field, highlighting the significant risks perceived by Theater practitioners in attempting to make their cultural-political expertise accessible to lay publics. How should we think about such desires among artists to produce culture in closed and restricted ways, in a moment where, for example, our own academic work is saturated with demands to make knowledge public?

Jonas: The longer I worked on and with this artistic field of cultural production, the more it struck me just how many parallels there are between the developments in an increasingly economized academic university setting and the affordances of artistic work. Of course, each national context, or each field of artistic production, just like every academic context, has their different forms of relationship between the call to “open”, “render accessible”, or “democratize” their results. In the field of theatre, which I studied, a series of very specific cultural historic elements played a particular role. Centrally, the experience of the Gleichschaltung (forceful coordination) of the arts to fit a particular Aryan ideology during the Third Reich prompted a very strong reaction against the public instrumentalization of art. This was embedded in a critical reflection expressed most clearly by the Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer in his The Eclipse of Reason (1947), when he criticized the collapse of public reasoning through purely instrumental means-ends logic. The Theater an der Ruhr founders argued that theatre should catch up with the other modern arts precisely in its autonomization from an instrumental reason of providing a particular function in society. Its function, they argued, lay in a becoming conscious, or Bewusstseinswerdung, through which actors could prefigure a wider social process.

In this sense, though avant-garde art has certainly also developed forms of inward-looking elitism that contradicted a critical process of reasoning on its own goods, the Theater an der Ruhr, I argue, offered a view to think about the act of cultural production as a process of becoming ethical, becoming conscious through social interaction and inter-reflection. (Besides the archived fact that it was a pioneering institution in its street-theatre, youth projects, and engagement with severely marginalized and ostracized communities.) The questions the actors, directors, and cultural workers in the Theater an der Ruhr asked themselves were thus not about scale—how many people you reach—but about intensity, depth, and understanding—who actually understands so that the conversation can be carried onwards. This is not per se a stance against audiences or against a wide democratic participation, as it is often misunderstood, but against an instrumental logic of the functionalization of culture that I think we would do well to heed as scholars, too.
David Griffin discusses page 99 of his dissertation

January 29th, 2024

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

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

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

January 22nd, 2024

https://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/9780826504814/tirana-modern/

Shinjung Nam: Your representation of everyday life in Tirana Modern felt surprisingly close to my current home, here in Seoul. Though vehemently “anti-Communist” rather than “pro,” South Korea’s military dictatorships (1950s–1980s) also built a country dependent on extractive urbanism, authoritarian hierarchy, corrupt nepotism, propaganda of all kinds, and ultimately, a normalization of capitalist desires. Continuing these traditions, South Korea’s electoral democracy has proven no better, especially for those without social, cultural, and educational capital.

Considering these similarities, your interlocutors’ outlook and way of life made me think back to my own interlocutors in Seoul. At the same time, I also thought about some of the differences characterizing their projects, especially their orientation towards the idea of a utopian community. Perhaps because Ataol and Arlind had such visceral experiences with (and under) the violence of a state-led utopian project, they have been less concerned with the problem of how to make an alternative community through their publishing activities. In contrast, many of my (now older) interlocutors in Seoul had been concerned with creating a new communal life—always dreaming of a true democratic society to come.

This comparison developed only when I began to truly appreciate your interlocutors’ self-positioning as “readers.” During my first reading, my immediate impression was, “I want to know more about their readers. Who are the readers that came to visit the bookstore and frequented it? Why did they come?” While I’m still curious to learn more about other readers, I now realize that I had lost track of your interlocutors’ identification as readers themselves. I had been identifying them by the place they occupied within the physical space of the bookstore, the way I had focused on the different positions making up the pedagogic relationship between the teacher-readers and the student-readers I worked with in Seoul. The lack of utopian trajectories in Ataol and Arlind’s reading and publishing only made sense to me when I began to focus on their love of reading and literature (as well as their clear understanding of its contradictory powers, including the ill it can serve), and not just the post-socialist conditions of Albania.

Perhaps this is all the more why I keep wondering about their imagination of “the social.” While categories of the social such as “the nation” and “the people” enter your interlocutors’ conversations on literature and writers, there is no conversation recorded in your ethnography on their explicit critique of these categories themselves. This leads me to ask how they view Albanian society in terms of the social, that is, of collective(s), how this shapes their understanding of “Albanian literature,” and how their reading practice in turn shapes their view of “Albanian society”? I note, for instance, that some of your interlocutors refer to the dialectical movement (or the tension) between “the universal” and “the particular,” with Elvis stating, “We have writers but not literature” (p. 67). Since according to the ethnography their imagination of the world and its map that both shapes and is shaped by their reading seems to be very much concerned with Europe, as well as the non-European frontiers (such as the Ottoman past), can you say more about how your interlocutors imagine “the public” and “Albanian readers”?

Matt Rosen: I’m happy to hear how reading Tirana Modern prompted you to reflect on your ethnographic experiences in Seoul. I also like to read ethnography that way. Not just to learn about social life in a specific time and place but to help me, as you said, think through matters that are closer to home. I only wish the common thread could be something other than corruption and violence!

On the differences in outlook you noted, it’s true that Arlind and Ataol rarely expressed much hope for the future. From what I could gather, they had no illusions about the structural problems in their social world. I think a lot of this goes to the critical stance they’ve developed through their reading and discussion practices. But it also seems to me a kind of defense mechanism. They might see it differently, but I think their way of always tempering expectations about their work was a way to protect themselves. By the time I met them, when they were in their early thirties, I think the harsh realities of living in Tirana had taken a toll on whatever youthful optimism first pushed them toward literature and philosophy as a way of life. Still, they saw that reading and social change could go together, and I think their work in publishing was a way to keep that vision alive.

I also appreciate how you came to see Arlind and Ataol not just as publishers but as readers. When I started the project, I felt something similar to what you described in reading the account. But when I expressed this, for example, by asking questions about how their readers responded to a particular book, they would either say, “You’d have to ask them yourself,” or they’d remind me that speaking of “our readers” was a very broad generalization and not something they were comfortable doing. I did of course ask other readers I met in Tirana for direct input, but more importantly, I took Arlind and Ataol’s refusal to generalize seriously. So although I managed to pick up some good anecdotes from many different readers, I chose to focus the ethnography on Arlind and Ataol because they were the ones I got to know best. And even though I did get to know them well, and we talked a lot of social theory, precisely because their views were so nuanced and carefully considered, I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting into my own words how they see categories of the social such as the nation, the people, or the public. Let me just say that though they were very aware of the hazards of generalization, they had clear ideas about these concepts. After all, as publishers working in a very small literary field, these were not just academic concerns. For them, talking about the future of the Albanian reading public was something they worried about in very practical terms.

Shinjung Nam: The meaning of the word “imagination,” as in “technologies of imagination,” gains new traction when considered in light of Arlind and Ataol’s narratives on the present and their avoidance of any explicit collectivist utopian prescriptions for the future. The work of imagination they seem to be dedicated to and wish for other readers to engage in is less about producing “images” (new images of the social in any specific, as in species-wise, terms) but more about opening. Some books or texts are considered “foundational” (p.71) to this opening/opening up (of oneself). Why is this so? What would the anatomy of a reader (or his/her/their soul) be like according to Arlind and Ataol’s reading of (a) certain texts and their intertextuality, and (b) the practice of reading?

Matt Rosen: I’m glad you brought this up. I also see the work of imagination here as being about opening up new spaces of possibility. In the introduction (p. 11), I related this idea to the work of cultivating “good readers” in the Borgesian sense. By this I meant that the books in Pika pa sipërfaqe’s catalogue were places where Albanian readers could now go to encounter new ideas, which in turn could be the starting point of further translations and even new social arrangements. Considering your question now, having recently reread The Aesthetic Dimension (1977), I think something very close to my understanding of Arlind and Ataol’s view of what they were doing in publishing comes through in Marcuse’s notion of the permanence of art as measured by its nearness to the simple but elusive criteria of showing the reader a truer truth or a realer real than what we tend to get caught up in due to the stresses and demands of everyday life. Calling a book “foundational” in this context is both a shorthand and a result of multiple translations. I chose the word foundational for the English rather than other potential fits, including “fundamental,” “essential,” or “most important.” But thinking about it now, I might just as well have said “good books” or “must reads” as these were also words Arlind and Ataol used when I tried to press them on the question of why they chose to translate and publish this or that title.

Shinjung Nam: Tell us about what it was like to create an ethnography that is in a way a product of collective reading and reading nearby (you mention how your interlocutors have had a chance to read your drafts and respond to them, to the point where some of the details were omitted, making a reader like me thirsty for them precisely).

Matt Rosen: It was in many ways a very enjoyable way to spend time. I really like talking with Arlind and Ataol and listening to what they say about the books they’re reading and working on. I think most of my best reading experiences since 2015 have come out of—and returned to—conversations with Arlind and Ataol “in the field.” Being conscious of my desire to represent the richness of these conversations in writing did cause me some internal tension though. I would sometimes jot or scrawl a few words in a notebook while we were together, but for the most part, I tried to be present and attentive and relied on writing fieldnotes at the earliest opportunity, often in the company of my partner (Smoki) or daughter (Simone) in the Mulliri vjetër coffeeshop near Arlind and Ataol’s office. On the practice of dialogic editing you mentioned, I can’t stress how grateful I am that Arlind and Ataol read drafts of the work in progress and helped me improve the account. With reference to the spicy details I decided to omit from the eviction narrative in chapter 5, I have to say, this was really on me. It wasn’t because they asked me to remove any specific material or because I wanted to make things mysterious. It was more to do with my own anxieties about fixing those details in print.

Shinjung Nam: One of the reasons I loved reading your ethnography is that it rekindled in me the sense of reading ethnographies as an anthropology major back in college who was less concerned with the reproduction and promotion of anthropological theory and more engrossed in the stories of the people I have yet to encounter and their making/unmaking of realities. Theoretical concepts enter your ethnography as frames and lenses. And then your ethnographic narratives on your interlocutors’ work and life—and their words—re-turn your reader (me, in this case) back to these concepts so as to re-read them in yet another fashion (my second question is proof of that). Tell us (your readers) about your choices in foregrounding ethnographic narratives (over theoretical advances) in your text.

Matt Rosen: Thank you, it’s very nice to hear this! I think I just follow the writerly advice of trying to make the kind of work I would want to read. Some of this also has to do with what feels comfortable for me. Let me put it this way. Though I can appreciate a snappy dresser when I see one, I’m not the kind of person who can “pull off” a very fashionable look. Similarly, while I like to read and absorb challenging theory and philosophy, I don’t think of myself as the one who should write it.

Shinjung Nam: Your biblio-ethnography walks and makes a renewed path in today’s literary and media anthropology. It also re-appreciates classic texts in the field that may be considered by many as outdated, creating an intertextuality unforeseen in contemporary anthropology. Having said this, can you walk your reader (back) through the current “trends” in literary and media anthropology, if any, and elaborate on some of the challenges and promises that such trends might be bringing to the proliferation of more works in line with your imagination of biblio-ethnography?

Matt Rosen: Yes, though it’s difficult to put the answer in brief. In the process of researching and writing Tirana Modern, I tried to stay as close as I could to studying “what people actually do” with books, and what books in turn do with people. At bottom, the idea I developed of biblio-ethnography is grounded in my reading of practice theory as packaged for anthropology by people like Pierre Bourdieu and Sherry Ortner. In that regard the 2010 collection Theorising Media and Practice edited by Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill was a touchstone for me. And though this is not necessarily one of the usual references for literary and media ethnography, I found Bruno Latour’s brand of actor-network theory to be an extremely helpful and readily applicable way to get at what he called “the event of the social” in relation to the event of reading and the medium of text. Although there is not room here to go into more detail, I tried to be as clear as I could about the theories and methods I brought together in the account, and I sincerely hope other readers will pick up and give their own twist to this thing I call “writing the relationship between books and people.”