Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Could you tell how was your first approach to the Eskaya language, and how did Eskayan villages in Bohol become a field site for you?
Piers Kelly: Way back in January of 1980, the Eskaya people were ‘discovered’ by agricultural advisers in the highlands of Bohol in the southern Philippines. These isolated people were wearing clothes made of plant fiber, speaking in an unknown language and writing in a strange script. The story of this encounter spread quickly, prompting a series of informal visits from tourists, adventurers and tabloid journalists. Some of the subsequent reports they made about the putatively lost tribe became infused with local folklore traditions of lost worlds and lost treasures. Eventually a hard-nosed journalist from Manila came and wrote an exposé in which she argued that the Eskaya were in fact a rural cult speaking an invented language. In the years that followed Eskaya people started to defend their interests in terms of access to land and resources. They would eventually make use of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act to do this and from the 1990s onwards they began identifying themselves as Indigenous people. It was through this process that I first came into contact with the community.
In 2005 I had been working for the travel publisher Lonely Planet in Melbourne when a job opportunity came up in an Australian government aid program to document an undescribed language of the Philippines. I reached the Philippines at the end of that year and worked out of the service center of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples in Tagbilaran, the main township of the island province of Bohol. My role was to produce linguistic reports to help evaluate an Eskaya claim for legal recognition.
When I got to the Eskaya villages I began working very intensely, making recordings, photographing traditional Eskaya manuscripts and trying to learn the language. I was already aware that the status of the Eskayan language was controversial. Some were saying that it had been fabricated to attract government funding to an underdeveloped corner of the highlands. Others were making even stranger claims, for example, that the Eskayan language was really Hebrew or Etruscan.
At the end of ten months I wrote up a report in which I concluded that Eskayan was likely to have been created within a single generation, and that this theory was consistent with the speakers’ own origin stories that attributed the creation to a heroic ancestor. I also suggested that this creative event likely occurred some time after Spanish colonization in the 16th century. This was on the basis of the fact the Eskayan appeared to share the same morphosyntax as Visayan (the dominant language of Bohol), but with a radically different lexicon, and that this lexicon exhibited a strong influence from Spanish even in core vocabulary. In other words, there were Spanish loanwords turning up in parts of the lexicon that don’t usually attract loans, for example, in body part terms. It looked very much like the creative ancestor had taken Visayan morphosyntax as a basis but systematically replaced all the lexemes with newly devised terms. In doing so, the ancestor was influenced by Spanish as a model of linguistic foreignness.
I was worried that these findings would reinforce a narrative that the Eskaya people were inauthentic since their language was recent. But in fact the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act is less about establishing indigeneity and more about finding evidence for ongoing occupation and cultural continuity.
I was still very interested in this topic but my lack of qualifications ended up weighing on me and when I returned to Australia I started studying linguistics for the first time. I eventually enrolled in a PhD so that I would have the opportunity to go back to Bohol and keep researching.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: The book starts with a question you heard repeatedly from local people: “Is Eskayan real?” How did this question motivate your research on the Eskaya language and how has your work challenged previous approaches to study this language?
Piers Kelly: In some ways this question is the crux of the entire book. From the 1990s onwards Eskaya people began identifying themselves as Indigenous. This was not a category that they had used before so it involved a certain amount of adaptation to meet the administrative requirements of government. For example, each village had to appoint a chieftain and make official lists of tribal customs and laws. At the same time, Eskaya people have always maintained that their special language and script were both invented by the ancestor Pinay, whom they recognize as the first pope in the Philippines. In effect, Eskaya people had a traditional set of beliefs about themselves and their language that didn’t neatly match up with the lowlander image of an exotic lost tribe, nor with the tick-the-box requirements of a government department. All of this is to say that the answer to the question “Is Eskayan real?” depends on what you take linguistic authenticity to be.
Adding further complexity, Eskayan has never been used as a language of everyday communication but is used only in the context of schooling, speechmaking, prayer, song, and the written is used in the reproduction of traditional stories. What I wanted to do was ask the Eskaya people themselves what they thought about their language, where it came from and what their own criteria were for defining a language. Equally, I wanted to do a better job at analyzing the language itself since I was confident that its grammar, lexicon and writing system would reveal something important about the context of creation, mythic or otherwise. This was a departure from previous media commentaries that neither examined the language, nor paid any serious attention to Eskaya perspectives.
Eskaya people narrate that their created language was suppressed under early Spanish rule, but that records of it were discovered carved on tablets by their leader Mariano Datahan (ca. 1875–1949). In the wake of the devastating Philippine–American War (1899-1902), Datahan spearheaded a radical sect within the Philippine Independent Church and gained many followers in the mountains. Today such a movement would indeed be characterized as a cult but in the early 20th century, such movements were commonplace throughout the Philippines and they were highly political organizations. They asserted a desire for independence from US rule and expressed a great deal of cultural self-confidence and patriotism. My analysis—based on linguistic, archival, oral historical and genealogical evidence—places the creation of the language (or its ‘revelation’) in the 1920s and 1930s during a period of relative peace and optimism. In other words, it happened at a time when Filipinos living in remote or isolated areas were invited into the national conversation. It was also a time when both elites and non-elites were imaginatively reaching back to a time before colonization and trying to restore a more authentic and uncorrupted Filipino culture to embody aspirations for independence. Throughout traditional Eskaya literature, written in both Eskayan and Visayan, there is a real struggle to articulate a language ideology that reconciles the supposedly natural and the artificial. The Eskayan language, after all, is understood to have been intentionally created and then recuperated, but the act of creation is regarded as organic. It comes directly from the human body and it can’t be falsified or misrecognized. In this way, the language itself is a political statement that embodies a claim to cultural sovereignty.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Your book offers a brief history of language ecology in Bohol. How is language diversity and linguistic contact traceable in Eskaya manuscripts? What do you mean with “sources of inspiration”?
Piers Kelly: The language of Bohol is called Boholano-Visayan and it’s one of several varieties that make up the Visayan language. The Eskayan language has the same morphosyntax as Visayan but a radically different lexicon. I was interested in taking the traditional account of a creative ancestor seriously and then asking, how did he go about making this language? What was his theory of language? What resources did he draw on? It’s clear that he drew on Visayan primarily including regional varieties like Hiligaynon, but when it came to innovating a lexicon he took inspiration from Spanish, especially in the syllable structure. There is also an influence from English. What’s fascinating is that the influence from outside languages doesn’t conform to typical patterns of borrowing. Filipino languages certainly draw on Spanish or English models when it comes to lexifying products, species or technologies introduced during the colonial encounter. But languages in the Philippines and elsewhere do not generally borrow terms for really basic concepts, like ‘air’, ‘water’, ‘head’ or ‘hand’. Eskayan bucks the trend. It relies on Spanish and English words for core vocabulary like body parts (the Eskayan word for skin is piyil from Spanish piel), while creating native terms for new technologies like ‘airplane’ (the Eskayan word is kanis) or introduced animals like ‘horse’ (the Eskayan word is bril). So innovation goes right through the language. The creative ancestor, and his prophet Mariano Datahan, were not concerned with replicating naturalistic patterns of borrowing but rebuilding the lexicon from the ground up.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: Could you explain more how the Eskaya writing system is unique among world’s scripts and how it has enabled the Eskaya people and their knowledge to be protected in the Philippines?
Piers Kelly: Unlike languages, all writing systems of the world are artificial. At the same time there are only a limited number of ways that a writing system can encode language, so the typology of writing systems is relatively narrow. What’s interesting about the Eskaya writing system is that it combines so many different typologically distinct methods of representing language. It has alphabetic, alphasyllabic, syllabic and even morphographic characteristics, and there are more than one thousand individual signs. The outward form of the script is said to be inspired by human body parts and in some cases you can recognize this iconicity. There is a symbol that represents an ear, and another that represents a brain and another that represents an esophagus. Interestingly too, the script is visually complex to an almost excessive degree and there’s no evidence that it has been simplifying as other scripts tend to do over time. What I argue is that this complexity if a feature not a bug. It is designed to be cryptic and hard to learn. It acts as a natural barrier to acquisition, so if you learn to read and write in Eskayan it proves that you have passed through a challenging intellectual process. At the same time, the complexity of the script is presented as tangible evidence of cultural sophistication. I see this dynamic at work throughout the Eskayan language and literature, and I use the term ‘mimicry and rejection’ to describe it. It’s all about replicating a colonial model but then ratcheting it up to a more complex formation to then stand in opposition to the original model.
Carolina Rodriguez Alzza: How does the Eskaya language encourage us to rethink “what is a language”?
Piers Kelly: The creation of Eskayan might represent an extreme situation but it’s one that I think brings the politics and aesthetics of language into sharp relief. Learned from infancy, language is understood a natural and even instinctual aspect of human development. At the same time we’re always forming analogies between linguistic phenomena and social phenomena, and we love manipulating language to do things other than straightforward communication. In a very stark way, the Eskayan lays bare the kinds of language ideologies that underpin language use around the world.
Hazal Corak: Waste Siege focuses on multiple forms of waste which accumulate and assume political status in Palestine. It introduces us to waste professionals who design landfills, ethical anxieties about unwanted bread, and Palestine’s flea (rabish) markets where objects that are discarded by their previous users in Israel are given second lives. Still, I am wondering what happens to the valuables that Palestinians discard. Take, for instance, the construction waste and objects such as metal scrap which retain economic value despite their discarded status. Given the sanctions and limitations towards the Palestinian Authority, are these re-introduced into global markets by Israeli companies and authorities? Who profits? What sort of economics and politics of waste-ownership are at stake in Palestine when it comes to such discarded valuables?
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Shuqba village offers us a telling case. Palestinian hospitals from the Ramallah area send x-ray films to Shuqba to be burned down for their silver. We can assume that the x-ray films’ pathway goes something like this: Ramallah hospital, truck to Shuqba, arrangement with a Shuqba landowner who allows dumping on his land, burning to extract silver, silver sale to someone presumably outside Shuqba, possibly in Israel, melting of that silver (again) to turn it into something else, sale of that object, and so on. Data on how much cash is exchanged and where it ends up would offer a fuller sense of the political economy of waste in this settler colonial context. I heard stories of Israeli mafia connections to certain Palestinian discards like bottles. Other Palestinian discards may “leak” through into Israel or go farther afield. But other questions offer other, equally useful, insights. For example, some people, processes, or systems benefit indirectly from the revaluation of wastes. Understanding them is a way to understand how accumulations produce conditions of possibility for world-making. For example, Ramallah-area medical wastes supposedly disappearing into Shuqba allows the Palestinian Authority not to have to worry about increasing the management needs of those landfills, which means increased costs and scrutiny from Israeli actors, international donors, and local communities. It allows people in the villages around Jenin’s Zahrat al-Finjan landfill, whose land was taken by it, to feel slightly more secure that groundwater is not contaminated by hospital wastes and perhaps to tolerate the landfill despite its odors. It likely extends the landfill’s lifespan, and perhaps the lifespans of landfills in Palestine more broadly, which has its own implications. Smoke puffing out of a Palestinian village allows Israeli government officials to confirm that Israeli interventions on Palestinians’ waste management is necessary for the common good. A Palestinian truck driver who makes $40 to haul wastes from al-Hilal hospital near al-‘Amari refugee camp, like the Shuqba landowner who receives a similar sum to allow the dumping, does not exactly profit from that act even if a few paper bills make their way into his pocket. Settler colonialism and racism do profit, on the other hand, even if the flows of money to their primary supporting institutions (such as the military) are not so easily apparent. Comparing the “profiteers” and the processes and affects that gain their conditions of possibility makes visible that it is equally or even more important to follow paths less direct than the financial outcomes of circulations. Sometimes the interests of the people who profit are not served by that profiting in the long-term.
Hazal Corak: Rabish goods, namely the secondhand items that travel from Israel to Palestine, evoke contradictory emotions and senses of the self among buyers and sellers alike. As you report, they open up imaginaries about the contemporary life in the ancestral lands that are now out of reach to many. They create intimacy with and humanize the colonizer. Yet, using them also elicits senses of humility, lack, and embarrassment. The notion of shame has historically held a central place in the ethnographies of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. As Andrew Shryock remarks (2019), this notion is making a fresh return after almost three decades of abandonment. What sort of intersubjective relations of not only shame but also shaming are at work in your interlocutors’ engagement with rabish and waste? In what ways does the Waste Siege participate in such regional debates in the anthropology of the Middle East and the Mediterranean?
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: I understand shame in the honor-shame dyad in structuralist framings of the Middle East and Mediterranean to describe a sense applying simultaneously to a group and an individual. In this it resonates with the kind of shame that some people felt in Jenin, for example, when they worried about it being known that they shopped in the rabish. The shame was my friend Dana’s when I mistakenly asked her too loudly on the street whether we were going the rabish that day. Her face went hot with fear that we had been overheard. It was also a classed shame, forging a connection to her working class status that her family was trying to escape. It was a national shame stemming from humiliation she and others experienced at the thought that Israel as a society was dumping its discards on Palestinians as a society. One difference is the fact that rabish shame was understood as a failing, yes, but less as a moral failing (which is pronounced in the honor-shame dyad) and more as a failing to have prevented the harm in which one lives. It is helpful to understand it as political shame, implying knowledge of an otherwise not accessed—whether that otherwise is found in histories of collective rebellion like that which occurred in the two intifadas or in a decision to resist wanting the goods Israelis discard across the Green Line. Even if other paths not taken (rebellion, nondesire) are implicitly superior to the one taken (buying colonial discards), honor is not the term that best characterizes their superiority. The honor-shame dyad has been used to offer what were understood to be cultural explanations for why people made some decisions and not others, why fathers killed their daughters and families feuded. The shame I witnessed, mixed as it was with desire, playfulness, ambivalence, historicity, and pragmatism, was neither pure as a structure of feeling nor cultural in the sense that it somehow existed before or outside of politics, for example in the form of occupation or history. It was an interpretation of one’s gendered, classed, and political location in the world and in relation to past and future.
Hazal Corak: I would like to go back to the very beginning of the book in order to touch upon some theoretical implications of how waste siege works and what it does. In the introduction, you distinguish between experiential and structural forms of violence. Can you tell us some more about how you see the distinction between the two and in what ways the waste siege is specifically facilitating an experiential form of violence rather than a structural one?
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: Living in Palestine made me curious about the discrepancy between what people sensed about waste and how they understood accountability and politics in relation to waste. I was puzzled that, on the one hand, waste was so pervasive in the spaces that Palestinians traversed daily that it seemed impossible not to sense it through one’s body. People did sense it in that they closed taxi windows as they passed sewage-saturated valleys. Shopkeepers swept incessantly in front of shops. People cursed the cheaply made objects like toasters that broke during use and made connections between their miscarriages and the dumps smoldering around their villages. Yet somehow this inundation by waste often obscured what I would describe as the structural violence that was its condition of possibility. Waste was irritating, confounding, worrying, generating of endless attempts to manage it. But something about it created a kind of noise in the signal that makes clear to Palestinians that settler colonialism, for example, is to blame for other experiences like a house demolition. Each time I traced the origins and flows of waste I found connections to the Palestinian Authority’s vision of a capitalist Palestinian future state, or to Israeli efforts to settle the West Bank, for example. But these connections were not as visible to the person whose lungs were clenching from trash fire smoke or to the person smelling sewage and who was stuck—and this is the crucial point—in Palestine. Accountability was shrugged off as opaque, if often still related to the general situation, meaning occupation (al-wadi’). Or it was attributed to poor management (on the part of the PA) or irresponsibility (on the part of a neighbor). Political analysis brought into so many other conversations about life in Palestine did not often extend to what I call waste siege. One of the goals of the book was to try to name this thing that was not named as a siege, to gather many disparate experiences together and give them a name. Another goal was to suggest that there are sieges that can be felt and cause suffering while differing in significant ways from the sieges that provoke mass mobilization, which this siege has thus far not done.
Hazal CorakIn the book you mention your stay at an Israeli-owned AirBnB in Palestine. Your next project is on AirBnB rentals in Palestine and Greece. Can you tell us a little bit about how your research on waste infrastructures in Palestine led to this second project? What sort of similar themes attract your attention and in what ways is this one a completely novel endeavor for you?
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: My next book explores the effects on property, family, and forms of attachment that have resulted from the saturation of Athens (Greece) with Airbnbs under austerity. My work overall seeks to answer two main questions: 1) How do destructive conditions—be they ecological, political, or economic—remake socialities and relations? 2) And how do people harness the material and semiotic properties of infrastructures to make their everyday lives livable under conditions of duress? In each of my projects I locate large-scale phenomena such as settler colonialism and austerity in the intimate details that emerge from slow ethnographic listening. Paying attention to quotidian details allows us to see how destructive conditions become braided into people’s senses of ethics, self, and possibilities for alternative futures. Palestine and post-2009 Greece have more in common than meets the eye. Both are places of foreign occupation. The forms of violence vary. But foreign states and agencies are the main determinants of the destructive conditions in which the people in both places live.
An empirical question that had come up during my work on Waste Siege was about less visible strategies people in the broader geographies of Israel/Palestine were using to mitigate besieging circumstances. One answer I found was that many Israelis and Palestinians are investing in Athens real estate. This led me to spend time in Greece with Israelis who traveled back and forth between Athens and Israel facilitating investments in Athens properties and it sent me back to Israel/Palestine for a new bout of fieldwork starting in 2020.
Middle class Israelis and Palestinians will look to secure their futures against potential war and economic crisis, and to boost chances of upward mobility through expensive European educations for their children, and so are investing outside their political borders. There is a sense that there is less and less land available to build upon, which is a condition of waste siege, and this has been an important driver of investment abroad. Palestinians’ experiences of discriminatory landownership further contribute to overcrowding in Palestinian towns like Reineh in northern Israel, where I spent time with a family of Palestinian investors in 2020. One of the attractions of Athenian apartments for foreign investors is that they can easily be turned into Airbnbs with high annual returns. Between 2010, when Airbnb had first arrived in Greece, and 2019, the number of listings jumped from a few dozen to over 91,000.
For Greek as well as foreign owners, Airbnb is an improvisation for mitigating destructive conditions. I call the relationship calibration to which Airbnb has contributed “controlled alienation.” That is the process of, on the one hand, letting go of aspects of existing relationships, ways of being and thinking that are made in relation to homes. And, on the other hand, maintaining some ability to determine the fate or workings of things. These two processes are conditions of one another. For example: a family of property owners I call the Petridous were able to maintain legal ownership of the apartment by giving up use of it (to Airbnb managers) for themselves. I think of controlled alienation as a way of managing the violence of austerity as siege. By offering stays as short as one night and flexible booking and cancelation, Airbnb allows owners to feel that they can return to their space at will. But this preserving does not achieve continuity. Nor does it cleanly replace one body (the now deregulated state) with another (a multibillion dollar company). In the process of engaging with the platform, people lose some things and gain others. My book tries to capture the sensibility that emerges in that dual loss and gain.
Side note: I have only stayed in Airbnbs within Palestinian cities run by Palestinians or jointly run by Palestinians and their expat spouses.
Hazal Corak: Finally, I want to ask about the issue of multi-sitedness in relation to the Waste Siege and your research on the AirBnB rentals. In the book we see you present at the Palestinian households, flea markets, bureaucrats’ offices, and landfills as well as the meetings with NGOs and environmentalists in Israel. Do you see the Waste Siege as a multi-sited ethnography? How do you compare the structures of multi-sitedness in your two different projects? Multi-sited research is seen crucial due to the polycentric workings of the global economy and the planetary proceedings of the ecological crisis. At times, it is also criticized for being too ambitious as an ethnographic endeavor. What would you like to share with other ethnographers regarding methods, techniques, and terms of getting related to multiple settings which constitute the different ends of one single phenomenon?
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins: A project on almost anything must be mobile. The idea of the single-sited project implies a site that is somehow ontologically bounded. As anthropologists we create the sites we claim to study by naming and reifying them in our work. The relative boundedness of any site is contested both by those in it and by those who (also) produce knowledge about it. Major elisions result from imagining a site as supposedly purely itself. Take Psari, the village in which my grandfather was born. Home to about 385 registered people (not including myself, my parents, or my nuclear family, though we have a family house there), the village of Psari is located two hours west of Athens. I would miss a lot if I were to assume that I could physically stay within the boundaries of Psari, nestled in the mountains, to understand how people experience life there. I would miss that most of the women marry in from regions as far away as Epirus. I would miss the uncounted Roma communities who pass through, the Bengali workers who sleep outside on the hills but who work the land as cheap labor, I would miss the hundreds of children, elders, and deceased self-identified members of Psari’s community disbursed in Australia and Chicago. I would miss the global swirl of private housing and anti-Communism campaigns that historian Nancy Kwak has documented and that sent American funds for homes to be rebuilt after German soldiers burned Psari down during World War II. I might miss the fact that Konstantinos Tsamados, a fourteen-year-old from a modest family, is a Youtube sensation for his incredible voice. I might miss the fact that the waters in Psari’s rocky underground—waters Psari needs to support its one economic engine, agriculture—are being pumped by private companies, with government permission, bottled and shipped to Saudi Arabia. Whether you want to study gender, class, environmental politics, or media in Psari, you would have to use some sort of multi-sitedness to do it. We have been multi-sited all along.
In studying Airbnbs, I did something similar to what I did in studying waste in Palestine. I paid attention to flows of materials, ideas, and people. Those of us who followed the network have learned that the network is endless and rhizomatic. There are only so many threads one can follow in a finite amount of time, with one body and a desire to do more than prove that things exist in networks. I think they do, and I think that many people have made the case compellingly. Within the finitude of our lives we can dig deeper into particular relations. In studying Airbnb in Athens, I learned about investors buying Airbnbs who were based in several countries including China, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, and Israel/Palestine. I followed the thread that led me back to Israel/Palestine because I knew that I was better able to say something about the worlds out of which those investors were coming, about the conditions of possibility and structures of feeling that supported the investments, and about what the investments did for investors from Israel/Palestine in return. My choice does not suggest that there is something more interesting about this investment pathway than about the pathway that leads Russians or Turks to invest in Athens; rather, it suggests that I can be more interesting in relation to this pathway than I can in relation to others. My advice would be to pursue the relations that are most obscured from public view.
Page 99 is found in my second chapter where I discuss how English becomes iconized (Irvine and Gal 2000) as an elite index through practices of learning English at private educational centers in Astana, Kazakhstan. Page 99 includes an ethnographic example of what I characterize as an ostentatious display of English—the head of a small company, a woman I call Raushan, contacted the educational center that served as my primary field site to ask about private English lessons. Raushan’s request was considered ostentatious because she wanted private (and therefore more expensive) English tutoring that would take place at her office during her lunch break. To demonstrate its ostentatiousness, I recount the educational center director, Zhibek’s, response which was to laugh at how ridiculous it was that “even the heads of tiny companies think they’re so important that everyone should accommodate their schedule and needs.” This page describes one experience of learning English at private educational centers that I try to capture in my dissertation—that of the elite, upper middle class. The remaining content chapters explore other experiences connected to English such as entrepreneurial self-development and aspirations for class mobility.
My dissertation proposes that learning English in private educational centers offers students an opportunity to take up different subjectivities, not just opportunities for finding employment or accessing higher education. I show ethnographically how learning English is one practice among many that enables students to take up elite or entrepreneurial ways of being in the world. I also argue that students’ experiences in the English language classroom reflect broader cultural and ideological shifts that are reshaping contemporary Kazakhstan. Though my interlocutors’ experiences are not unfamiliar to English students living in other areas of the globe, what makes learning English in Astana (and its many frustrations) unique are the private educational centers in which most students encounter English. My dissertation focuses on these centers and the students who frequent them in order to present an ethnographic portrait of those in the middle class in Astana. Page 99 is then one piece of that portrait and reflects a partial but relevant portion of that overall goal.
References:
Irvine, Judith T. and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, edited by Paul V. Kroskrity, 35–83. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: Your fascinating book argues that script serves as a “critical semiotic modality through which Santali speakers assert temporal and spatial autonomy from hegemonic historical narratives, administrative territories, and dominant class and caste based social orders” (26). The concept of autonomy is very central to the book. Can you speak about how a graphic politics of autonomy is distinct from identity or state-based politics of recognition that have, perhaps, been more frequently been addressed in linguistic anthropological work?
Nishaant Choksi: First of all, thank you so much for the interview, and giving me a chance to discuss my work with you and the CAMP audience. Yes, you are right, I have deliberately tried to avoid using the words ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’ in the book and instead tried to outline the concept of autonomy. It is not like the struggle that the proponents of Santali language and Ol-Chiki undertook was not about identity or recognition, it certainly was. However, these notions in terms of political vocabulary are relatively recent in India, and they also, as many anthropologists have discussed, come with analytical limitations. Instead, I draw on a longer discourse of autonomy among the communities I worked with which was tied to the struggle for Jharkhand, which was a long-running struggle among indigenous communities in eastern India to have a federal region with an indigenous majority that would have a specifically indigenous political and cultural character. The struggle was both spatial in that it focused on territory, and temporal, in that it sought to emancipate the Adivasi (original inhabitants) from a temporal discourse of backwardness and primitiveness. The area of West Bengal state in eastern India where I did my fieldwork was left out of the eventual Jharkhand state but the assertion for script in this area, I found, had many continuities with the struggle for Jharkhand. While interfacing with the state for resources and institutions for Santali language and script, the discourse might revolve around identity or recognition, the everyday graphic politics practiced in the rural areas where I did fieldwork revolved more around the conceptual fulcrum of autonomy.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: While many scholars treat writing as a secondary reflection of speech, your book focuses specifically on the graphic politics afforded by the invention and circulation of the Ol-Chiki script. What does your attention to script and multiscriptality reveal beyond what a study attending primarily to language and multilingualism might find?
Too often the study of writing systems has been conflated with that of language, drawing from, as you rightly point out, the idea that writing is a secondary reflection of speech. In this book, I try to intervene by analytically separating script from language (by language I mean ‘code’ or ‘oral variety’). In doing so, I see how script carries different semiotic significations from a linguistic variety, which is important when analyzing languages written in multiple scripts. Starting from this vantage point also allows us to see under what conditions a script becomes ideologically tied to code, and what the significance of the script is for readers and speakers of a language beyond the fact that it represents a particular language. For instance, the Eastern Brahmi script is ideologically tied to the Bengali language in West Bengal, although it is also used to write Santali, which places Santali written in the Eastern Brahmi script in an inferior position to Bengali. This is one of the arguments used for the argument that an independent script such as Ol-Chiki is needed for the Santali language. Yet, Eastern Brahmi is also the most accessible script for Santali speakers and readers, and therefore it is highly visible in the linguistic landscape and in certain types of Santali-language media, where it carries different significations, such as that of local territorial affiliations and literary culture for Santali-speaking communities residing in West Bengal. Understanding the layered and complex signification of script and its multiple relationships with a particular linguistic code was not possible within prevailing analytical frameworks that focused on multilingualism alone.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: In Chapter 2, you describe a moment in which, noticing a diagram chalked at the entrance of a Santali household, you were told that the marks were writing (ol) but not symbol (chiki). This moment is suggestive of Santali semiotic ideologies about the potential properties, functions, and social indexicalities of writing that differ significantly from understandings of the nature and purposes of writing held by missionaries, state administrators, and other institutional figures Santali speakers encounter. Can you speak a bit about how variously positioned Santali writers understood and deployed Ol-Chiki?
Yes, as I argued in Chapter 2, the originator of Ol-Chiki script, Pandit Raghunath Murmu, had incorporated ritual elements into the graphic construction and rationale for the script that drew a much older practice of writing/drawing or what in Santali is called ol. The same went for other Santali intellectuals and writers who created their own distinct scripts, for instance the famous Santali poet Sadhu Ramchand Murmu also based his script, Monj Dander Ank, on ritual writing and “divine sound” (ishrong). These scripts were both modern in that they represented spoken language, but also departed from the notion that writing was an arbitrary representation of speech that informs modern regimes of literacy. Scriptmaking, I suggest, emerged in the Santali-speaking area at a time when many of the leading intellectuals of the community were experimenting with ways of how to usher the community into modern regimes of literacy and education while also preserving community values and histories. Ol-Chiki was the most successful of these new scripts to emerge during this period but despite its success, was not immediately accepted by all. Many writers still value the Roman script, while other senior writers preferred writing in regional scripts like Eastern Brahmi so their writing could be made more accessible to the widest possible audience. However, as technology changed and the politics of autonomy became more identified with the graphic domain, most writers under 50 in my field area have more fully embraced Ol-Chiki as the most appropriate script for writing Santali literature.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: In Chapter 5, while focusing on the role of print media, you introduce what you call the “Jharkhand imagination,” which challenges both Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities and theories of Indian nationalism. Could you elaborate on the concept and how it intervenes in these frameworks?
Nishaant Choksi: Anderson’s concept of imagined communities is useful in that it provides a way that we can incorporate “imagination” into our social scientific analysis, seeing how collectives can exist beyond the present status-quo, both temporally and spatially, and allows us a way to examine how media, specifically, facilitates that imagination. It is limiting in that, as many linguistic anthropologists have argued, its notion of imagination is flat and homogenous, based on a presumption of a monolingual reality. In the study of South Asia, the concept has come under criticism, famously by Partha Chatterjee, who argued that the Indian elite had a simultaneously spiritual domain of what constituted the nation, based on writings in Bengali, and material domain oriented toward the British imperial power, based on the English language. This division between English and what is viewed as the vernacular has been constant in the linguistic understanding of South Asian nationalisms and sub-nationalisms.
Such formulations do not adequately explain the multiscriptal, multilingual milieu of eastern India where I did my fieldwork. Print media was very important for Santali-language activists and writers, but the articulations of community were highly varied depending on what genre of media, and what combinations of script and language they used. Magazines and newspapers had different aims, for example, and they used different linguistic and graphic resources to fulfill these aims. “Jharkhand” as it was imagined in the regional media, especially the multilingual and multriscriptal newspapers which I discuss in the chapter, as a space not identified with any language or script, but with the idea of a convivial and co-eval multilingualism and multiscriptality. Hence the project challenged the idea of linguistic uniformity as a basis of shared community as well as the concept of a hierarchically ordered bilingualism that informs studies of Indian nationalism.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: You note in the book that digital media use has proliferated among Santali speakers since your research began in 2010. You offer an analysis of the role Ol-Chiki had begun to play on digital media during the period covered in the book, but I wonder if you can speak to any changes following this period in how digital media has been drawn into the scalar work through which Santali and other Adivasi groups create autonomous spaces that extend beyond state lines?
Exactly, so much has changed since 2010-2011 which is when I conducted my long-term fieldwork on which this book is based. At that time hardly anyone (including myself) had a smart phone. Carrying my laptop and a USB dongle, I was one of the few people who even had an internet connection. My research assistant had never even heard of email, much less social media. In the years I have been back, mobile smart phones have revolutionized the communicative situation, and now so many people, both young and old, have access to the internet and are communicating with each other through messages and social media. Filming which used to take place with cameras and VCDs has now become extended to anyone with a phone. Choices of script, which before had to be written by hand, or if typed, given to a specialist who knew typing, can now be accessed and changed at one’s fingertips. Ol-Chiki is even available as a Google font. YouTube channels also abound with Ol-Chiki script displayed prominently in the videos. I suggest the digital transformation hasn’t reduced the importance of script, and print media is still important though it is supplemented and complemented with digital media now. Moreover, digital media provides new platforms where the script can be used to different ends. I have written a little about this in the book, and more substantially in a separate journal article and a book chapter, but there is so much more to explore on the subject. I think for the study of indigenous languages in South Asia and elsewhere, this will be the most important area of research in the coming years.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway: Who are you most hoping to address in this book and what do you most want readers to take away from it?
Nishaant Choksi: Originally when I wrote the book, I had in mind primarily the research and student community in anthropology, linguistics, South Asian Studies, and indigenous studies. I wanted to place the study of script and writing front and center in the study of South Asian languages, an area still underexplored given the vast diversity of writing systems. In addition, I had hoped to contribute to the development of the study of the graphic from a linguistic anthropological standpoint, a field that has really picked up in recent years, much more than when I started my graduate studies. Thirdly, India’s Adivasi (indigenous) communities are primarily identified with oral culture and oral tradition, and this is one of the few scholarly books discussing the Adivasi communities in terms of their writing practices and encounter with literacy. For both Adivasi scholars and those working on Adivasi communities, I am happy to see that it has had some impact.
Finally, it is nice to see sometimes when you write a book it goes beyond your intended audience. For instance, I had no idea that the graphic design community would find this book useful, but recently a font designer who has worked on developing culturally sensitive Indian language fonts read my book and interviewed me for a documentary, for which he also conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand in Santali villages. I have also received an invitation to speak about the book to a design group focusing on indigenous design. It is a positive development that our work as anthropologists can also have influence in other kinds of fields, and because of the book and the conversations I have had around it, I was also able to expand my own intellectual and creative horizons.
Rahul Advani: In your book Fada, you attend to the ways in which young men in urban Niger facing economic uncertainty sign up as members of fadas where they experiment with social norms and rehearse aspirational modes of adulthood. Could you tell us more about this dynamic and the tensions it produces?
Adeline Masquelier: Waiting has become something of an endemic condition for young male urbanites unable to secure stable jobs in Niger. The fada or “tea-circle” is where they wait. Together. In the book I describe the fada as a socio-spatial formation that is symptomatic of the destitution experienced by many Nigerien young men facing limited prospects of employment. Modelled after the chief’s court, the fada is essentially a masculine space where young men fulfill their need for sociality and self-affirmation. Male youths speak of their fadas as places where they can escape the crushing weight of social expectations and just be themselves while they engage in a variety of pastimes and projects aimed at making life livable not just in the present but also in the future. What interests me is precisely how the fada constitutes a staging ground affording both sanctuary and prospect. Centered as it is on on male activities and aspirations, the fada is well suited to nurture the dreams of the good life young men may harbor. I propose that we see the fada as a social laboratory where fadantchés (fada members) experiment with who they want to be without fearing criticism. At a time when traditional avenues of self-realization are blocked, young men imagine a future for themselves, whether that means becoming a rapper or a prime minister, or simply a self-sufficient household head. Paradoxically, some fadantchés defer adulthood rather than embrace it, using dress to fashion themselves as youth, for instance. The fada, I have argued, provides a forum for playing with the boundaries of youth and testing how life might be lived.
Rahul Advani: The young men in your book – much like the young men in north India who engage in “timepass” that Craig Jeffrey has written about – make life purposeful through killing time in the face of diminishing returns on their schooling and college degrees. What is it about time and waiting that offers a useful framework for understanding contemporary experiences of liberalization?
Adeline Masquelier: Temporality is a central concern of the book. On the one hand, young men confronted with the lack of job prospects are worried about their futures. Trapped in the imposed presentism of daily survival, they feel robbed of the futurity previous generations took for granted, as is the case in India as well. On the other hand, they often have too much time on their hands. I show how the fada attends to both these temporalities. It is a place where young men marginalized by the workings of capital seek solace and wait and hope. They share their anguish at being unable to follow expected life courses. They also learn skills and how to prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood. Now, waiting may be experienced as a suspension of time but it is not, I argue, a suspension of activity. At the fada, idleness is transformed into a rewarding experience thanks to the way that the practice of tea-drinking–a central dimension of fada life which I call teatime–shapes the texture of waiting and resituates young men in the tempo of daily life. Young men are often accused by elders of doing nothing but sip tea, but we must see the fada (and teatime) as a by-product of structural inequality. Part routine, part ritual, teatime creates ideal conditions for actualizing aspirations and cobbling together new practices of self-making. The condition of jobless youth in the global south has been described as waithood–a wait for adulthood. I find the concept inadequate to capture the micropolitics of waiting. I was interested in exploring how time is lived at the fada through its simultaneities, its tensions, its trajectories. Anthropologists have long dismissed waiting as a form of inactivity, but I am, in fact, claiming the opposite. We must attend to the work that waiting requires and to the complex ways in which people customize time when they wait, whether they wait for jobs, for the end of the month, or for the tea to brew.
Rahul Advani: The book makes an important insight into how people come together to create what you term an “infrastructure of solidarity.” Could you describe the role of conversation – from the forms of speech adopted to the activities such as tea-drinking that punctuate and facilitate conversation – in how young men at the fada navigate precarity together and make sense of the world?
Adeline Masquelier: The term “infrastructure of solidarity” was inspired by AbdouMaliq Simone’s concept of human infrastructure, by which he means the use of people’s bodies in combination with objects, spaces, and practices to create nodal points between individuals and make cities work more effectively. In urban Niger, one cannot but notice groups of young men, huddled together, that take over the street at night. They fill the space with their tea-making, their conversation, actualizing their togetherness through the clusters their assembled bodies make; once they return home, however, there is no trace of their presence, save for the name of the fada written on the wall against which they sit. The fada then has no permanent structure. As a place of and for conversation, it offers the kind of support needed after a romantic setback, a failed job search, a quarrel with one’s parents, or simply to unburden oneself of the daily humiliations inflicted by a life of precarity. Such conversation is best accomplished while waiting for the tea to brew. Tea is said to untie tongues: it enmeshes people in comforting intimacy while energizing them. Significantly, there are rules regulating fada life, including teatime. I have tried to highlight that, far from constituting “anti-societies,” most fadas have a moral code–an ethos centered on solidarity and loyalty, that, in the absence of conventional modes of generating value, lays an alternative path to masculine dignity.
Rahul Advani: In your chapter on the naming of fadas, you discuss the overseas locations and global popular culture that fada names draw inspiration from. As you note, these inscriptions reflect how young men in urban Niger project their imagined fantasies and at the same time, in spite of their social immobility, engage in their own politics of exclusion.In what ways do names materialize young men’s claims for inclusion in the city and the world beyond while also excluding other men?
Adeline Masquelier: Once a fada is founded, fadantchés typically give it a name that reveals something of their ideals, ambitions, or pastimes. Finding a name that fits the fada is critical. Names have intrinsic potency. They fix the identity of thing they are attributed to, endowing it with substance while also “activating” it. In documenting how marginalized young men affirm their presence in the city, I came to see the fada as a locus of self-narration. Fadantchés often draw inspiration from figures of heroic masculinity or they select names that conjure distant elsewheres. Names like Delta Boys, Cowboys, Dragon Show, Young Money, Texas, or Territoire des Milliardaires (Territory of Billionaires). I was particularly interested in the connection between image, topography, and language. By branding the neighborhood with the name of their fada and decorating the walls with symbols (hearts, dollar signs, and so on) and images (a rapper, a cobra, and so on) fadantchés strive for visibility: they want members of other fadas to notice them. It’s about inserting themselves in a famescape. The practice also provides a vehicle of self-realization, by putting the accent on young men’s accomplishments or future projects–chimeric as they may be. In this regard, the martial art hero and the black US rapper embody audacity and virility, signaling that fadas are microcosms of social aspirations. While they procure stability in the face of the volatility of everyday life, they also serve as experimental grounds where samari can test out a range of possibilities while nurturing aspirations of the good life. Let me stress that not all fadas are forward-looking projects. Some I’ve visited bear names like L’Internationale des Chômeurs, that put the accent on the marginalization of youth, but they are in the minority.
Rahul Advani: Anthropology has, until fairly recently, only occasionally examined men as men – that is, as engendered and engendering subjects. While your initial research intended to focus on women’s lives, upon visiting fadas, you “switched course and embarked fully on a study of the lifeworlds of young men on the streets of Dogondoutchi.” How did the fada as a fieldsite inform your method and approach, and how did your decision to focus on men and masculinities determine the kinds of research questions you asked?
Adeline Masquelier: When I started this project, I saw the fada as the mere setting for young men’s conversations around a pot of tea. Eventually, I realized that far from being a container of activities, the fada was at the very heart of young men’s preoccupations and projects. It was a world unto itself that needed to be problematized from a variety of angles. Given all that goes on at the fada, the fada turned out to be the right forum for exploring dimensions of urban life in Africa — in particular, ethical, aesthetic, and existential dimensions — that are frequently eclipsed by concerns with crisis. From the beginning, young men stressed the sense of homeliness the fada provided. I therefore tried to orient my questions towards the practices of solidarity and belonging young men fashioned. That meant focusing on the experience of teatime (which I had previously ignored as unimportant) and exploring the (spoken and unspoken) moral codes regulating fada life, something fadantchés were keen to impress upon me in the face of elders’ constant criticisms. In observing fadantchés’ diverse forms of engagements, I also came to rethink the experience of waiting. Now, questions about temporality are rarely straightforward. I turned my attention to the emergent and the unresolved, which meant considering less obvious “empirical” findings. There were lots of small but revealing moments. Often, it was the fadantchés themselves who oriented the conversation and shaped it with their concerns and questions. In the end, I did a lot of waiting and listening! In the process, I became interested in the intersecting and overlapping modalities of engagement that waiting entails, that ranged from longings for ever-receding horizons of possibilities to efforts to keep life projects alive to more ordinary struggles to navigate uncertainties, all the while stitching together discordant temporal regimes.
Toni Nieminen: First of all, thank you! Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age is a brilliant and a profound piece of work. For all of those who haven’t read it yet, I strongly advise you to do so. To hit things off, I want to ask you two questions about the form of and method behind this book. First, you largely use memoirs – written or ghostwritten by either persons living with neurological conditions or their relatives and caretakers – as your ethnographic data. This choice is an interesting and productive one. You do discuss this in the introductory chapter, however, for the readers of the blog, could you elaborate more on this choice and the implications it has had for this project? How does a memoir as a literary format work as an ethnographic data set? And how did you decide which memoirs to include?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Thanks Toni—I’m glad that you found Unraveling generative to work with. It was a challenging book to write, so learning that it’s helpful to people is always gratifying.
Unraveling really started as an exploration of why the capacity for “normal” modes of communication had become so foundational for the conceptualization of disability in the US in the twentieth century and its implications for clinical practice, the lives of disabled people, and social scientific theorizations of subjectivity. I had been doing fieldwork related to the project for several years, which included participant-observation in a neuroscience laboratory, a neurology clinic, a psychoanalytic training seminar, a special education school, and parent support networks. In many ways, it was very traditional fieldwork. As I started to write up that work, I found myself recurrently dissatisfied: the clinicians or neuroscientists or psychoanalysts kept appearing as a problem and the experiences of disabled people and their families served as some kind of correction. It felt very predictable in the “weapons of the weak” tradition that ethnography is sometimes drawn to, and I was very sensitive to how it reproduced ideas about power and resistance that satisfy some readers and really bother other ones (like me!). I was also increasingly troubled by my positioning myself as speaking for disabled people who were atypical communicators; it reproduced the problem I was seeking to solve. I wanted to find a way to attend to how disabled people were communicating on their own terms. So, I scrapped that version of the project.
In working through how to build the project differently, I started to read memoirs written by disabled people who were diagnosed with “neurological” disabilities or the memoirs of family members of people with “neurological” disabilities. I was especially interested in texts written by people who were atypical speakers, which ended up creating a corpus of books that were mainly focused on experiences of autism, deafness, and stroke-based aphasia. It’s an unlikely set of disabilities to put together, but as a way to get at the relationship between communication, the “neuro,” and disability, it created a big canvas. My interest in the “neuro” is why I put “neurological” in quotes above: central to what Unraveling tries to do is work against the reductionism that insists that we are our brains. It’s a weird feature of contemporary science and disability activism, where neurological reductionism serves as the basis for both a medical model of disability and the basis of neurodiversity, that is, some brains are just different and lead to behaviors that are intrinsic to an individual. Unraveling tries to tackle that biological reductionism and reconceptualize how we can imagine disability without reliance on the neurological as a source of intractable difference. In making that argument in the book, I wanted to focus on how disabilities framed as neurological have been mobilized in the US over the twentieth century and tell a story about the brain and its role in American conceptions of personhood and subjectivity.
That commitment to telling an American story led me to methodologically limiting myself to memoirs by Americans and in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, since I wanted to locate the project in the U.S. and focus my attention on modern neuroscience and psychiatry. In the end, there were several dozen memoirs to choose from, and they ran the gauntlet from self-published pamphlets to mass marketed literary memoirs. They covered experiences from the 1930s through the early 2000s, were pretty evenly distributed between men and women, and were overwhelmingly white and middle class. Those last elements were a problem in terms of sampling, but were useful in working through the relationship between whiteness and normalcy, particularly as they work together to uphold ideas about legitimate forms of communication. In the end, I selected a set of memoirs that mobilized a way of conceptualizing an interactive practice—and they usually had language to describe that practice. That led to pairing memoirs as parallel cases in each of the chapters and the development of the chapters into discussions of “connection,” “modularity,” “facilitation,” and “animation.”
For some anthropologists and ethnographers, Unraveling might seem like more of a literary analysis since it’s so focused on memoirs. For me, it’s much more in line with person-centered ethnography, and I treated the memoirs as if they were long-form interview transcripts. They also provided descriptions of atypical forms of communication that grew out of intense forms of family intimacy that participant-observation would have a very hard time capturing, which addressed my concerns with speaking for atypical communicators. Rather than addressing the literary elements of the text, I was interested in the text as a form of data in itself and worked to elaborate the nested theories in the texts while also situating the experiences of disabled people and their family members alongside modes of practice in American neuroscience and psychiatry. In the end, each of the chapters is organized around one of the above-mentioned ideas that is drawn out of a memoir or two and puts those ideas into dialogue with other ethnographic, archival, or theoretical work. As a whole, Unraveling builds a cybernetic model of disability, subjectivity, and personhood that each of the chapters is integral to developing, and which draws its inspiration from Gregory Bateson’s work on consciousness. It has become very hard for me to conceive of the chapters as discrete entities—they feel inexorably woven together (which may just be the effect of my having read the book so many times during the revision and copyediting process!).
Toni Nieminen:Second, by choosing to work with memoirs as your primary ethnographic data set, what are you adding to, commenting on, or reconfiguring within anthropological writing more broadly? How does this choice of data and the analysis it enables speak to your own positionality as a researcher and writer on the topic of neurological disorders?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: In terms of positionality and ethnography, I’m not sure that I have any easy answers.
I write in Unraveling about how atypical communication and neurological disability are things that I’ve had to work through, first with my father’s experience of Alzheimer’s and memory loss and later with my son’s apraxia. But I didn’t want the book to be about them as people, nor about my experience as a son and father who would speak for my father and my son. Those kinds of accounts of disability exist and I find them unsatisfying. That might be because they falsely substitute the experience of the writer for the experience of the written about, which is a form of refusal of what Cassandra Hartblay refers to “disability expertise” and Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer refer to as “cripistemologies.” Or it might have to do with how they substitute a sample size of one for a wide swath of human experience. Or maybe it’s both! But, in any case, my experience is important to the analysis but the analysis is not of my experience, which is a critical distinction and I try and make that clear in the book. Many of the memoirs resonated with me—and that may have done some subtle work on why I selected the books that I did—but assembling them into the evidentiary body of Unraveling was very grounded and organic in that I really wanted to focus on accounts that gave language to otherwise ignored elements of communicative interaction.
In terms of ethnography as a practice and written form, I might have too much to offer in response. My early training was in literary analysis and historiography, and I came to anthropology late and only in my Ph.D. work. As a literature student, I grew increasingly tired of just reading books and treating them as representative of something. Ethnography drew me in as a way to triangulate between texts, everyday experiences, and my role as an analyst, and in the beginning I was really drawn to the ethnographic work that motivated the Birmingham school of cultural studies. When I started my Ph.D. program and had to read E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer, I was astonished at what anthropology actually was. These days, I’m troubled by how much ethnography solely focuses on what people say in interviews and what ethnographers observe—as if there are no other forms of data available to them. If anthropology really is the study of humankind, you have to spend a lot more time watching TV, reading books, and scrolling social media—or else you’re ignoring the integral role technology has always played in human experience (which Evans-Pritchard was actually pretty good at!). Some people might object that these are phenomena of different orders and that may be true—but it’s true based on your ontological position about what phenomena are and how they can be categorized. If, in the end, you rely only on human speech, you’ve successfully cut a wide swath of people out of being part of the humankind you’re interested in studying or representing, which is either explicit or implicit ableism. Either way, it reinforces particular kinds of people and forms of expression as “normal” and others as abnormal or pathological.
Which leads me to my grumpy feelings about contemporary written ethnographies: There’s been a generic shift away from the old functionalist models of Evans-Pritchard where “kinship” and “political structure” motivate individual chapters and toward a model of ethnographic writing where each chapter has an idea based on an extant theory and each chapter feels separable from the others in the book because they don’t really build on each other. I express versions of this with some regularity, but a chapter about the Freudian uncanny next to a chapter about Foucaultian technologies of the self is theoretically impoverished—they believed in fundamentally different conceptions of subjectivity, consciousness, and power! Books should be ontologically consistent and change the way readers interact with the world. I don’t know if I accomplish this, but it’s what I strive toward. And it’s what we should all work toward as scholars. If we want to forward knowledge, there needs to be some consistency in the ontological basis of that knowledge. Otherwise, it’s just a mishmash of theoretical concepts and examples. That said, I’ve learned over time to subtly invoke my ontological commitments—which are to a Spinozist materialism—because I find their invocation to be disruptive to generic conventions and they ruffle the feathers of peer reviewers. But they’re there and motivate everything from why I do what I do to how I analyze what I’m analyzing.
Toni Nieminen:You position epiphenomenal communication in opposition to symbolically, historically, and culturally significant communication and language. You suggest that – especially in the context of neurological disorders – epiphenomenal communication can be used as a modular technology to facilitate different kinds of speakers, hearers, and interpreters, thus making space for what you call cybernetic subjects. Would you like to gloss these concepts, how and why do you use them in your book? Further, could you say more about the possibilities for facilitating cybernetic subjects in institutional settings that privilege – and in many ways gain from privileging – certain kinds of (neoliberal, normative) subjects?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: You’re right to focus on epiphenomenal communication as the heart of the text. It’s my attempt to offer a corrective to the idea that communication is always embedded in a continuous and transparent, individualized subjectivity. In the US (at least), the dominant assumption is that what we communicate is based on a version of the self that is consistent over time and that how we communicate is with language that is straightforwardly interpretable to an audience. So, when I ask my partner what she wants for dinner tonight, what and how she answers is indebted to a version of her self and culinary desires that are continuous and transparent—and that I’m intimate with. If she says “pasta” or “tacos,” I know that there is a subset of both of those categories that is meaningful to her (and to us as a family): serving her pasta con le sarde or carne asada tacos would be upsetting to everyone involved and would be a betrayal of both her history of desire and her present expectations.
For the most part, assumptions about continuity and transparency are just fine in our everyday lives, but when you’re living with someone who doesn’t communicate in those ways—say a toddler who is new to speech or a person with dementia for whom language is not as referential as it once was or a disabled person who communicates atypically—you can’t rely on interpersonal history or the conventions of interpretation to do the heavy lifting of communication. Instead, you need a practice that attends to needs and desires in the present, which communicative interactions provide a window onto. My call for epiphenomenal modes of communication is meant to draw attention to that and to how our interpretive labor is always working through what we know about the past of a person and what they need in the present.
Language is a technology, and like other technologies, it obscures a wide variety of labor through its efficiency. When we obscure all of the labor that is embedded in language, we run the risk of naturalizing language as a necessary feature of communication. But attention to nonhumans shows how diverse communication can be. And attention to varieties of human communication—including gestural forms—demonstrates how unnecessary spoken and written language are to subjectivity. Focusing on disability experiences of communication opens up what communication can be—and is a challenge to anthropology’s reliance on speech as a transparent medium of communication and semiotics as a unproblematically isomorphic mode of referentiality.
Displacing the naturalness of language as the basis of subjectivity and personhood also serves to describe subjectivity and personhood in more complex ways. Anthropologists from Marriott McKim to Marilyn Strathern to E. Valentine Daniels have been invested in the idea of the “dividual,” or the necessary interdependence of personhood on connections between bodies, which American forms of individualism obscures. Similarly, disability studies scholars like Mia Mingus and Alison Kafer have long drawn attention to how interdependence is a better description of how human sociality works—rather than the rugged independence that underlies American ableism. Unraveling tries to describe how dividualism and interdependence work as the foundation for communication, and reliance on ideologies of transparent communication of the self tend to obscure this. Cybernetic subjects—and I’m really indebted to Bateson on this front—are comprised of (at least) processes of connection, modularity, facilitation, and animation as described by the memoir writers who make up the spine of Unraveling. Focusing on those processes provides ways to describe how subjectivity and personhood are made through ongoing interactions between people, between people and institutions, and between people and their environments.
My hope—and this is the kernel at the heart of my critique of value and discourses around “quality of life” in Unraveling—is that drawing attention to the processual aspects of subjectivity and personhood serve to disrupt the dominance of neoliberal models of subjectivity that rely on the individual as a discrete individual. It’s wild to me how many anthropologists want to critique neoliberalism and then fall back on the individual as the base unit of analysis—and as the base unit of interpretation through a reliance on self-representation through speech acts. It’s also wild to me how many people want to critique capitalism and yet rely on “value” in their analysis: we have to find ways out of capitalist imaginaries and their compulsory terminology. That doesn’t mean foregoing critiques of capitalism, but finding means of critique that actively help to build new imaginaries that are inclusive and sensitive to the needs of others.
In the heat of postmodernism, polyvocality was a key interest, but we seem to have lost that. One way to regain it—and use it as a means to unsettle the dominance of neoliberalism in our imaginations—is to adopt methodologies that disrupt the univocity of the subject, both the people who make up our evidentiary cases and our interpretive roles as social scientists. Incorporating disability expertise is one way of doing this, which treats disabled people as theorists. Participatory and community-led models of research do similar work. On some level, resisting the individual as the unit of analysis—and neoliberalism as a cultural dominant—depends on a willingness to be uncomfortable and to make other people uncomfortable, and too few scholars are willing to do this. Unraveling is purposefully disturbing. If a reader gets through it without being disturbed, I’ve done something wrong!
Toni Nieminen:You seem to suggest that facilitation – one of your core concepts – as an interactional and ethical practice builds on epiphenomenal communication on the one hand, and a kind of future oriented collaborative effort on the other hand. I might be wrong here, however, this seems to contain a tension: how is communication to draw both on immediate meaning-making in the present whilst also anticipating a kind of publicly shared modular futurity, without producing dysfunctionally functional webs of communication, as you call them? Put in other terms, how are we to scale up your analysis of epiphenomenal and modular communication beyond the interactional event?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: This is thorny, but I’m not sure that we should scale up past the interactional event of communication. Or, if we do so, we need to know that that’s what we’re doing and what the dangers are.
One of my influences in the book—and really, in life—is Mony Elkaïm, who was a family systems therapist that was heavily influenced by Bateson. Elkaïm was of the view that most families are dysfunctional, but also that most families find that dysfunction to be functional: dysfunction serves a purpose and part of kinship is finding people whose assumptions about the world complement your own. Dysfunction can be a problem when it leads to actual harm, but for the most part, some dysfunction serves as a motor to human relations. To describe how dysfunction works, Elkaïm makes a distinction between “worldview” and “official program,” which are the difference between desire and need. Sometimes, desire and need are isomorphic; but, sometimes, they directly contradict one another, which is what Bateson described as the basis of schizogenesis, that is, meeting one contradicts meeting the other, and as a result, I’m trapped in either betraying stated desires or working against needs. For Elkaïm, surfacing the latent needs and desires of a dysfunctional family system is the work of family therapy, and is necessarily a historical project: only by knowing the history of needs and desires in a family can that surfacing work be accomplished.
I say all of that because there are times when history and continuity are important to address, but it is often the case that most communication is a response to present conditions and bringing in historical understandings of an interactional partner might just confuse things or obscure possibilities. When my younger son says he wants to watch something, I could put on the latest episode of the last cartoon he watched, but I could also allow him to express his desire by picking something new. When we only fall back on what we think we know about a person, we limit the possibilities of their desire.
The future is a collaborative act. On the micro level, epiphenomenal communication is about building a shared future between participants: we build a future to inhabit through our communication of desires and needs and the ways that those desires and needs are responded to as the basis of a shared animation. And we can scale up from there, to how we build our kinship, to how we build and interact with institutions, and to how we sustain and change our environments. When we moor our desires and needs to history, we limit the possibilities for the future—which is one of the reasons why I’m drawn to speculative fiction, which many anthropologists are. We have to find ways to be open to new desires and needs, which is about how we theorize the subject, how we make research projects, and where we seek to intervene (and how) in dominant theories.
Scaling up beyond the interactional event has a lot at stake, and what’s needed is a commitment to articulating the various needs and desires that are at play. Family systems therapy provides one model to do this kind of deliberative work, which both acknowledges the past while also seeking to articulate a livable future. But it depends on a commitment to participation and building something new, which, again, can be really uncomfortable. And we need to be committed to being uncomfortable if we’re going to build more inclusive futures. I know that’s pretty far from addressing atypical forms of communication, but it’s all part of the same project: if we want to build more inclusive futures, we need to address the forms of ableism that foreclose specific people from participation in society as full persons. We need new ways of collaborating.
Toni Nieminen: Finally, as Unraveling was published in 2020, what have you been working on lately and in what kind of ways does the work build on the thinking behind Unraveling?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer: Unraveling came out six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and it really felt like it was a book out of time and place—there were just more immediate things to worry about. Maybe Unraveling’s time and place is returning for better and worse, since it feels like we’re returning to an old, exclusionary “normal” rather than having built a more inclusive one in the interim that the pandemic provided us in 2020-2022. As I tried to bend the lessons from Unraveling into more immediate applicability, I put together an edited volume called Proposals for a Caring Economy, which I hope comes out sometime soon. It has chapters from a wide variety of people who are working with ideas of connection, modularity, facilitation, and animation as they apply to the arts, agriculture, immigration, and more—all to demonstrate how the ideas in Unraveling are applicable outside of disability experiences.
And then I started working with Denielle Elliott on a book that comes out next year called Naked Fieldnotes, which is pretty much what it seems like it should be: a huge compendium of ethnographers’ fieldnotes and contextualizing essays, which makes apparent how ethnographers do the work they do.
The big thing is a new book called American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within, which comes out in spring 2024. It was a backburner project for several years, which started with a little project on fecal microbial transplants, and then developed into this sprawling project about American dietary recommendations, racism, the use of biologics in medicine, and how settler-colonialism informs American disgust. It ends with the recent rise of fecal microbial transplants in the US and contextualizes the resistance to their use in the US as based in longstanding ideas about bodies and contamination that has motivated people like John Harvey Kellogg and is apparent in things like the inclusion of yogurt into American diets.
A lot of the last three years has been spent supporting my partner and kids—first through the early days of the pandemic and then during a year abroad in Finland as a fellow at Tampere University’s Institute for Advanced Study—and I’m kind of surprised that I’ve gotten anything done. It was really due to working with other people—either in collaborations or peer pressure—that anything got done, which has also been a great way to work against the individualization of academic labor conditions. Someone recently suggested that I should work on a project about historically important collaborations and at the time I dismissed the possibility—but I increasingly think I just might. But before that I need to finish a book called Living Technologies: Designs for the Biology of Everyday Life, which is an attempt to build social theory through bodily processes (like the dormancy of sleep) to disrupt biological deterministic ways of thinking about people and their capacities. It’s been a slowly simmering project and just needs to be put into the world, particularly because it seems like we’re constantly confronting revanchist forms of determinism that skirt—if not outright embrace—racism, sexism, and ableism in the worst ways.
In writing all that out in the context of revisiting Unraveling, you get a pretty good sense of where I’m coming from: I have some real frustration with where we’ve been as anthropologists and socially (especially in the US), but real hope that things can be different. And part of the role of the social sciences isn’t just diagnostic, but utopian. If we want a better world, we need to help build it.
Ilana Gershon: What does focusing on listening and ideologies of listening among people living in Yopno Valley in Papua New Guinea allow you to examine? What assumptions do you have to disrupt?
James Slotta: The study of political speech has a long and venerable history, going back at least to Plato. Rhetoricians, philosophers, anthropologists, communications scholars and others have all probed the role that speech and speaking play in political life: the power of words to influence and affect others, the importance of voice as a tool of politics, the role of public discourse in democratic politics, and much else besides.
I myself went to Papua New Guinea to study political oratory, a topic that has attracted a fair amount of interest among anthropologists. But right from the start of my research, I was struck by how ineffective the oratory I had gone to study was. Community leaders would make public speeches announcing a community meeting or some construction work to be done on the community school, and I would show up at the appointed hour to find only a few people there. We would sit around for a bit, waiting to see if others would come, and then give up and go our separate ways.
Needless to say, this did not seem like a very auspicious context to study political oratory and the power of words. But it helped me to appreciate something that other ethnographers of Melanesia—Bambi Schieffelin, Don Kulick, Joel Robbins, Lise Dobrin, Rupert Stasch—have remarked on: in the region, it is often listeners who are regarded as the powerful and important figures in communicative events. As I was discovering, that’s because they are!
In the literature on political communication, listening doesn’t often figure as an activity of much importance, perhaps because it is typically associated with passivity and submission. But in the Yopno Valley, people are attuned to the power and consequentiality of listening. Every time community members failed to heed an announcement, it was a reminder of the power of listeners—and a reminder of the impotence of speeches and the would-be leaders who made them. As we sat around waiting to see if others would show up for a meeting or a community work project, talk inevitably turned to why others weren’t coming. And that often focused on listening—how people should listen, why they should listen, and especially how they don’t listen.
So, I started to pay attention to norms and practices of listening in Yopno villages—how people think about it, talk about it, and do it. That gradually revealed what a complicated and fraught activity listening was for people. It also became clear that many of the listening practices involved in local village politics were also part of people’s dealings with actors and institutions from outside the valley: missionaries, government officials, environmental conservation NGOs, anthropologists, and so on. Listening became an important lens not only for understanding village politics, but for understanding colonialism, globalization, and missionization in the region.
Ilana Gershon: What is your approach for studying different ways of listening?
James: Listening is difficult to study because, unlike speaking, it doesn’t leave an immediate trace. Perhaps that’s one reason speech and speaking have received so much more attention from scholars of political communication. But people’s listening practices do leave their mark. For one, they can be glimpsed in the way people talk about listening. In the Yopno Valley, people talk a lot about listening and there are characteristic ways of talking about it—a kind of lexicon of listening—that shed light on local ideologies and norms of listening. There is also much effort made to explicitly advise and instruct people on how to listen, which puts this lexicon to use in illuminating ways.
Different practices of listening are also evident in the ways people respond to others’ speech. When few people show up for community meetings, that’s a clue to how people are listening to the speeches of community leaders. In my research, verbal responses proved to be a particularly important resource for looking at how people listen. Community meetings are important political events in Yopno villages, and much of what people do there is talk over other people’s proposals. In this talk about others’ talk, we get a palpable indication of how people are listening and a public performance of a kind of listening that is central to the politics of Yopno villages.
Finally, I focus a lot on the kinds of speech that people want to listen to. Early in my research, I was often asked to speak at public events, which made me pretty uncomfortable. As I saw it, I was there to listen, not to give advice and make speeches. My ethnographic desire to listen, you might say, blinded me to my interlocutors’ desire to listen. Eventually, as it became clear that listening was an activity worth attending to, I started thinking about why people wanted me to speak and what kind of speech they wanted from me. And I could see that often what they wanted me to talk about echoed the kind of speech that people in Yopno villages are often looking for from each other—namely, expert advice. Why is that the sort of thing listeners in Yopno villages seek out? Working out the answer to that question helped me understand why listening is such an important part of Yopno political life.
So, even though this book is about listening, it is filled with speech! Speech about listening, speech about speech, and speech that people listen to.
Ilana Gershon: Why do you call the listening practiced by people in Yopno Valley anarchic?
James: As in many rural parts of Papua New Guinea, political life in Yopno villages is largely anarchic in character. I mean this in the etymological sense: it is a political environment without rulers, without people or institutions with the power to issue commands, adjudicate disputes, or enforce laws. Community leaders do not have the means to coerce people to act, nor is the Papua New Guinean state really able to do so in this out-of-the-way region.
The book focuses on the critical role that listening plays in sustaining this anarchic political environment. For instance, ignoring the public speeches of community leaders is a way listeners subvert the authority of would-be rulers. But other listening practices also play a part. To organize community activities consensually, without a leader calling the shots, requires a different sort of listening.
Of course, listening is important in other domains of Yopno life as well. I concentrate on anarchic listening in the book because listening plays such a visible and vital role in Yopno political life.
Ilana Gershon: Telling others what to do appears to be a highly charged speech act for people living in Yopno Valley. Why do you think it is so highly charged, and what social strategies develop as a result?
James: Telling others what to do cuts right at the heart of the anarchic, egalitarian ethos of Yopno political life. Adults, particularly men, value their self-determination and they guard it closely.
But it is important to specify the limits of this. First off, telling others what to do is not universally disapproved of. People are constantly telling children what to do and have no qualms about doing so. To an extent, husbands boss their wives around without compunction, though they often get pushback if they go too far. As Michelle Rosaldo says of Ilongot households, directives might be the paradigmatic act of speech within Yopno kin groups. Concerns about self-determination and equality really come into force in dealings among adults, especially those without kin ties to one another.
Secondly, the kind of egalitarianism one finds in the Yopno Valley and many other parts of New Guinea is what James Woodburn termed “competitive egalitarianism.” Equality among people is not presumed; it must constantly be proven. So, people must be careful to ensure they are not being pushed around, even as they are often trying to get the better of others. As Anthony Forge noted, in New Guinea “to be equal and stay equal is an extremely onerous task requiring continual vigilance and effort.”
The result is that those men who try to verbally direct other men in the community must be very very careful. Historically, community leaders tended to die young, the targets of occult violence from angry community members pushed too far. Today, with the advent of Christianity, sorcery and witchcraft are less common. Leaders may feel less besieged, but now they too don’t have recourse to threats of sorcery, which were one of the key tools leaders in the past used to get people to listen to them.
At the time of my research, efforts to direct others often involved the communication of expertise, which is a fascinating and seemingly contradictory speech act. Leaders share their purported expertise with listeners as a way to steer their actions. At the same time, listeners seek out this expert knowledge as a way to empower themselves. In other words, the communication of expertise is a way leaders attempt to exert power over listeners while enhancing listeners’ self-determination. Such a seemingly contradictory speech act is a fitting instrument for those who play the seemingly contradictory role of leaders of anarchic communities.
Ilana Gershon: What role does repetition play in Yopno Valley communicative life?
James: Repetition is a ubiquitous part of verbal life. In community meetings, the same issues are discussed and the same points made week after week. Community leaders make announcements and when no one listens they make the same announcements again. As people step out of church on Sunday, church leaders launch into a summary of the sermon everyone just heard. And throughout all of this, speakers comment on how repetitious they are being.
There are a variety of reasons for all this repetition, a primary one being that speakers assume listeners are ignoring them. They repeat themselves in the hopes that eventually their message will get through. People are attuned to how listeners listen and they fashion their speech accordingly. Repetition is one very visible result. The communication of expertise is another. Norms and ideologies of listening are part of an ecology of communication and so they shape the ways people speak. The upshot is that any analysis of speech—from research on speech registers and genres to the analysis of conversations and texts—really needs to attend to the way participants think about and go about listening.
Katja Politt: The book is not about cats alone, but also about science. It introduces many important concepts relevant to studying and describing language empirically and even provides a clawssary of them. In a nutshell: What is the most important takeaway one can gain for engaging with phenomena like purrieties in a scientific way?
Edith Podhovnik: Good question. I think, the most important takeaway is that looking at language is fun and that we can look at whatever phenomenon we want – as long as we know what we doing and how we are doing it in science. If we are interested in a phenomenon, let’s go for it. And if it is a fun subject, there is no reason not to research it. On the contrary, it makes science more relatable and approachable for a wider audience. I had a few eyebrows raised at me when I said I was looking at online cats – as if online cats were not a science-worthy subject. To be honest, that made me even more determined to research cat-related digital spaces.
The fun side of cats aside, it is important to do a proper scientific study with a proper research design and methodology. At the same time, the more theoretical approach to science and scientific thinking is nothing to be afraid of. I have been teaching undergraduate students in research-related classes and have been supervising Bachelor’s and Master’s theses, so I have encountered students’ questions about research first-hand and I always try to take away their fears of doing something wrong.
Another aim for me was to offer a comprehensive linguistic description of the purrietie, in the same way as we would describe a language or a dialect that exists in the offline world. It’s like a linguistic treasure trove: we find examples that show us how language works in general, like phonetics/phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. We can also go into more specialised fields, like computer-mediated communication. Language in the cat-related digital spaces is a living breathing thing: purrieties are evolving and changing, and that is fascinating.
I also show that online cats are not just a shortlived Internet fad but are part of our online culture. For some people, online cats might just be a silly social endeavour, but I have always thought that there is more behind the online cats than just the memes and funny cat videos. This is also what I wanted to bring across.
One final point I would like to mention is that we can do our research also on our own without, say, institutional support. There are open source tools out there. I have been working on the purrieties as an independent scholar in my free time. Admittedly, this is hard sometimes, but absolutely worth it.
Katja Politt: During the process of writing, how has the book changed from what you had originally planned, e.g. by feedback from colleagues, cats, and your survey respondents? You seem to have made a great effort in including feedback, e.g. by including the constructive additions of Purr Reviewer 2.
Edith Podhovnik: Before I started writing, I had a clear outline of what I wanted to include in which chapter, say dialectology and lexicology should be covered in Chapter “The Feline Territory of Language” and the attitude studies should be in Chapter “Cattitude and Purrception”. There was quite a lot of preparation before I started writing, and it took some time to create a good workable outline.
Additionally, I was doing fieldwork to get the data: I collected data – scraping from social media and communicating with cat account holders. This is a cyclical process: we analyse a phenomenon, get feedback and more input from the people actually producing the data, we go back to our analysis of the data, then back to the respondents, and so on.
I received really good feedback on the first draft I submitted: additional resources to include, then the narrative approach to social media to complement my chapter on computer-mediated communication; I had inconsistencies in style as my draft was too academic in some parts and too informal in others. Well, and there was Purr Reviewer 2, who was only happy when I included him in the chapter. [Purr Reviewer 2 is sitting next to me on the radiator while I am writing this. Apparently he is happy because he does not use the keyboard on his way across my desk],
The reviewers were always very encouraging and made really helpful suggestions. Based on their comments, I restructured the book. For example, it was not clear why I had a whole chapter devoted the real language of cat, and the reviewers felt that it did not quite fit in with the other chapters. That made me think about my reasons why I had included this chapter in the first place. I scrapped that chapter in the final version and kept only the bit on cat phonetics. I used the cat sounds as an introduction to phonetics in the chapter on phonetics/phonology – one reason being that I wanted to include the figure with the cat vowel chart.
Instead of the chapter on the real language of cats, I included the narrative approach that we can use to study social media, which was something I had not really touched upon in the first draft. So all the changes were geared towards filling in bits and pieces to come up with a fuller picture of the cat-related digital spaces.
I also asked authors whose data I included in my book to check if I could use their data for my book. Even though their data is freely available on github, I wanted to let them know that I was looking at their data for my own purposes and to have them give their OK to the context in which I was including their data. They also plotted some data visualisations for me, which I am really grateful for.
Katja Politt: The book features chapters on phonetics/phonology, meowphology, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. As a researcher, which CATegory here is your favourite to research and analyse?
Edith Podhovnik: I like all the CATegories, to be honest. They were all fun to research and to write about. And going through the cat-inspired language data was very easy to do because the purrieties and the cat-related digital spaces are lighthearted and fun. Showing the underlying linguistic processes by using the many feline examples I had come across in my research was just entertaining.
My absolute favourite CATegory is – and has always been – dialectology, I had specialised in social dialectology in my PhD, and I wanted to apply the same approach to purrieties. I just love dialects in all their variations, and with the purrieties I could study online language variation. Additionally, I was so happy when I found all the lovely dialect expressions in the English Dialect Dictionary and in the Survey of English Dialects. Well, it is phonetics and lexicology really.
When I went through the literature in the respective fields, I found that cats had already sneaked in. That meant that I could include cat-related linguistic quotes and cat-related material other linguists had used in the respective context. So, in addition to the linguistic content, I was on the lookout for cats. I am still doing that: checking if authors use cats in one way or another in their studies.
I would also like to mention that I love linguistic fieldwork. Going out to people and asking them language-related questions is something that I really like because I am fascinated by their answers.
Katja Politt: Would you say that there is also a way to describe semeowtics from a purrieties point of view?
Edith Podhovnik: Oh yes, definitely. Looking at semiotics with cats makes absolute sense – at least to me – because social media is full of cat pictures and videos. We have the memes, we have the vernacular photos, the cat gifs, cat emoji, cat stickers, cat videos, and the like. In the offline world, when we take into account the linguistic landscapes, we find cats, too: on T-shirts, on mugs, on various other consumer goods. Cats are used in advertising because they convey certain messages for us.
People are using purrieties, which means purrieties are not an isolated phenomenon but quite widespread. And they occur in other languages, too, like in French or German.
Katja Politt: Is there anything you would have loved to add to your book that you have come across since submoewtting [submitting] it?
Edith Podhovnik: Definitely. I keep coming across more examples of meowlogisms, I have found a new meowpheme (‘chonk’ as in ‘to dechonkify”, which means for a big cat to lose weight), I have collected more contributions in the digital spaces of academics and their cats, there are more books (of the fiction kind) featuring cats). As a dialectologist, I want to record all the different cat-related word formations, so I am still doing that.
I also find more meowlogisms in languages other than English, and I enjoy adding cat-inspired varieties in, say, German, French, Italian, and Russian, to my ever expanding cat-related linguistic repertoire. As the book is already submitted, I write posts about meowlogisms and purrieties in my research blog (https://meowfactor.hypotheses.org).
A conversation between Slava Greenberg, Michelle Pfeifer, Vijay Ramjattan, Pooja Rangan, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar
In 2021, as our co-edited book Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice entered production, a Silicon Valley start-up began advertising an app that uses AI to modify accents in real time. As one reporter put it, “rather than learning to pronounce words differently, technology could do that for you. There’d no longer be a need for costly or time-consuming accent reduction training. And understanding would be nearly instantaneous.” Thinking with an Accent offers a sorely-needed alternative to this vision of a world where communication and understanding happen automatically, and seemingly magically, without translation or friction. Taking as our point of departure the idea that an accent is not an unfortunate thing that only some people putatively have, but rather a powerful and world-forming mode of perception, a form of minoritarian expertise, and a complex formation of desire, our volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice.
Thinking with an Accent was published in print and Open Access in February 2023. This summer, a few of us co-editors and contributors gathered online for a conversation about our respective contributions to the book and our thinking on and after its publication. Highlights from our virtual roundtable appear below.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (co-editor): It’s been six months since the publication of Thinking with an Accent (TWA). In the intervening time, I’ve been tremendously excited by how many of us are already extending and expanding our interventions in the accent volume: in new articles, in video essays, and even in just-published or forthcoming monographs. I know that my own recently completed book manuscript, on the pedagogy and accented reading of Indian English literature in the Anglo-American university, could not have been written as it is without TWA.
Pavitra, you’ve just written a book (congratulations!) in which you theorize the practice of “listening with a feminist ear.” Relatedly, your chapter for TWA theorizes “listening with an accent” as a “queer kind of listening.” In a recent video essay, you perform “listening to listening.” How do these four forms or modalities of listening relate to each other?
Pavitra Sundar (co-editor): Thanks for this question, Ragini! As you know, I was working on my book and our accent volume around the same time, which meant that I was circling around similar issues in the two projects. Both “listening with a feminist ear” and “listening with an accent” are animated by a kind of critical utopianism. Enfolded within them is a critique of current sonic regimes – of what Jennifer Stoever, for example, calls the racialized “listening ear” – as well as a challenge to those regimes. My concepts turn on the belief that we can re-tune the listening ear. In my book, Listening with a Feminist Ear, I bring a sonic sensibility to the analysis of Bombay cinema, examining how specific voices, languages, genres, and sounds come to be understood as they are. So the questions at the heart of my monograph are similar to the ones we ask in Thinking with an Accent: how do we hear accent/cinema? Can we hear it differently?
In my essay for TWA, I play with a wonderful poem by Aracelis Girmay to re-theorize accent in relation to place. Accent is often thought to be tied in place by place. The aural trace of the place in which we were born or raised is taken as a sign of our national, ethnic, and/or racial identity. I take that potentially essentializing notion and apply it to myself (the listener or reader) instead of the accented speaker. Rather than listening for the place audible in others’ tongues, I ask how my own listening is placed. From where do I listen? In your feedback on my draft, you noted the proximity of my framework to standpoint epistemology. You’re absolutely right! But where standpoint epistemology tends to mobilize visual metaphors (regarding how one sees the world) I emphasize the aural. How does my social location, including and especially my experiences with language, shape the ways in which I listen? To what extent is that place from which I listen fixed? How might I re-orient – or, better yet, disorient – the standpoint I habitually occupy as a listener?
In these projects and in my recent video-essay work, I’ve been inspired by Nina Sun Eidsheim (another of our TWA contributors!), who, in her brilliant book The Race of Sound, calls on us to “listen to listening.” To shift attention away from the sonic object (voice, in particular) and to the naturalized ways in which we make sense of voice through listening. Relatedly, I’ve been thinking about your work on voice, Slava. One of the things I love about your TWA chapter, “Accenting the Trans Voice, Echoing Audio-Dysphoria,” is that it forces us to think about voice and accent in relation to each other. Could you say a bit about how your thinking on either or both of those categories developed over the course of writing the essay?
Slava Greenberg: Thank you, Pavitra, for the opportunity to share my writing process, some of which was inspired by conversations with you, Rigini, Pooja, and Akshya, and which have also influenced my work on the unauthorized biography of gender dysphoria. When I first sat in front of a blank document to write my chapter, a childhood memory from preschool in Kyiv typed itself. It was about hearing a disembodied voice that sounded like my mom, speaking Ukrainian, which drew me out of the classroom and onto the school grounds, where I found a child on a tree on the other side of the school fence being scolded by my teacher in Russian while surrounded by my classmates. I told the kid to wait for me because my mom would be able to understand. The next thing I remember is the three of us eating sweet strawberries in our kitchen. What was actually at the core of that memory was my dad’s condescending jokes about my mom’s Ukrainian accent. It wasn’t that she gladly spoke Ukrainian – with whoever was willing (or not), particularly her two siblings, at any and all occasions – but her accent that became the punchline of his jokes. My mom laughed along, paying it no attention and carrying on with pride.
I deleted the story, realizing that I had conflated voice and accent because they were both the butt of my dad’s jokes, and the kid was just speaking Ukrainian in a Russian-speaking-dominant city, not Russian with a Ukrainian accent as I initially remembered. I also deleted the bit about my dad’s favorite joke merging the two by provoking my mom to respond with a word that sounded like a bark to a Russian-speaking ear (how). As an accented speaker, I am experienced with training for vocal assimilation. As a trans man, I am experienced with the transition of my voice on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) into a deeper, yet somewhat grinding-sounding and, as I elaborate in the chapter, feminine-sounding voice over the phone. The accenting of my voice and speech are intertwined.
Activating and then deleting this childhood memory was how I knew that the only representation of this entangled voice-accent phenomenon that resonated with me was in a film centering an accented trans woman who does not utter a word but sings one karaoke song, echoing someone else’s words and muffling her accent and trans voice at the same time. Hiding an accented trans voice for safety has brought back to me the memory of the child up on a tree, proudly yelling back in their own voice and language, and the taste of those strawberries my mom sprinkled sugar all over, which we shared.
Michelle, I would like to extend the same opportunity to you now, to share a shift in your thought process as you were writing your chapter, “‘The Native Ear’: Accented Testimonial Desire and Asylum.” Is there a deletion, omission, perhaps a scene or moment of forgetfulness that you’re now rethinking? I’d love to know more about the motivations behind your thinking through the synthetic voices and the possibilities of migrant testimony.
Michelle Pfeifer: Thank you so much for your question, Slava. I started working on linguistic analysis and migrant testimony in 2015 when Germany took center stage in the so-called European refugee crisis. While Germany was hailed as a benevolent, liberal, and humanitarian center of Europe – supposedly “welcoming” refugees with open arms – what we were actually observing on the ground was an intensification of border and asylum regimes. One way in which this intensification took place was through different technological, biometric, and data-driven tools that were used to determine the identities and countries of origin of people seeking asylum in Germany. One of those tools is a dialect recognition software that supposedly can distinguish between different, mostly Arabic, dialects on the basis of a speech sample with an average length of 25 seconds. This software was used to contradict the statements people made in their asylum interviews and ended up further restricting the right to asylum in Germany because people’s claims to asylum could be and still are regarded with suspicion.
As I started to research this dialect recognition software, it became apparent that its use, development, and functioning were shrouded in intentional secrecy and obfuscation. So, the motivation for my research was twofold. First, I wanted to find, collect, and publish information on linguistic analysis and asylum in order to expose and challenge how it reproduces and intensifies the precarity of people seeking asylum. Second, I wanted to dig deeper into the underlying assumptions and claims of linguistic expertise of voice recognition and asylum to show and critique how applicants are placed in a double bind: they are incited to speak during asylum procedures, and then simultaneously have their testimony scrutinized and placed under general suspicion. My contribution to TWA shows one of the directions of this research. I focus on predecessors of dialect recognition software and the convergences of linguistic expertise and law, as well as the longer colonial continuities that produce what I call a linguistic passport that, like other passports, distributes both possibilities and impossibilities of movement and mobility.
Since writing my chapter, I’ve been thinking about linguistic mobilities more broadly, including within the classroom setting. Vijay, your chapter, “Accent Reduction as Raciolinguistic Pedagogy,” ends with a discussion of possible strategies for a counterpedagogy to accent reduction programs. This discussion was very generative for my thinking on my own pedagogical practice and experience navigating educational institutions. Would you like to share an example (or examples) of these counterpedagogical strategies from your teaching, research, and/or writing practice?
Vijay A. Ramjattan: Thanks, Michelle! As someone who teaches listening and speaking to international students, who may experience anxiety about their accents and thus seek out accent reduction, my counterpedagogy attempts to alleviate this anxiety by challenging the alleged effectiveness of accent reduction. While this service is marketed as a means to become intelligible, its conceptualization of intelligibility is problematic, to say the least. Instead of being a quality of an individual, intelligibility should be understood as a goal requiring the collaboration of speaker and listener (in the case of oral communication). The problem with accent reduction, then, is that it requires the speaker to undertake the entire burden of communication without ever considering how the listener needs to put in some effort as well. This is particularly concerning when listening practices can be informed by ideologies of oppression and thus unfairly position certain speakers as orally deficient no matter how they sound.
In my chapter, I imagine a counterpedagogy in terms of and at the scale of institutional change. However, as an educator, I realize that counterpedagogies first form at the micro level. To counteract the idea of intelligibility as an individual trait and place more importance on listening, I try to have students develop listening strategies, which can range from paying closer attention to the context of an utterance to decipher unclear words, to recognizing how other semiotic practices such as gesture help to communicate a message. Wherever possible, I also have classroom discussions that explore how accent helps to reproduce racism, xenophobia, and other interlocking systems of oppression in educational contexts and beyond. Inspired by these discussions, students have given presentations on accent discrimination.
To return to the matter of scale, I continue to imagine how what I do in the classroom could be translated into a collective effort to undo the pernicious effects of accent reduction. Ragini, I wonder if you might similarly describe your chapter “Is There a Call Center Literature?” as a micro-instance of a larger possible intervention. In your chapter, you use the idea of call center literature to pursue the accentedness of reading. For example, your discussion of Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning highlights your own accented perception that Majumdar is writing for a non-Indian Anglophone reader. For readers who may be uninterested in “call center literature” as such, what are some key takeaways from your chapter that you would like to emphasize?
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan: A terrific question, Vijay. You’re very right that I hope my essay on call center literature might offer an intervention at multiple scales. On the one hand, it is an inside baseball response to academic debates on World Literature. On the other hand, I intend it to be a more generally applicable performance of thinking and argument-formation that takes seriously the ways that all of us variously pronounce our desired interventions into any critical conversation. Call center literature is an archive, a method, and an object of desire. It is also, I argue, a literature of accommodation that draws our attention to what we might call, following Jennifer Stoever, the “reading ear” and how it is primed to perceive the non-Western Anglophone text. To repeat Pavitra’s questions about listening with a difference: from where and how do we read, and how do our own accented readings in fact produce the texts we read?
I mentioned earlier that I recently completed a book manuscript on the pedagogy of Indian English literature. In that work, I try to further develop a method of accented reading that combines close textual exegesis of literary texts with discursive analysis of critical debates and responses to the texts. The result is a metacritical mode of engagement with literature that strives to attend to the cross-pollinating and co-creative dynamics of reading and writing. When we read any work of literature, we have to ask not just what the author is saying, but rather what they are saying to whom in what disciplinary and curricular contexts – or, for that matter, what the text is being made to say by a critic or pedagogue in order to advance some particular argument. In this way, I seek to build on TWA’s signal revisioning of the relationship between listening and speaking through an elaboration of accent as a non-indexical mode of perception, and not simply as an identitarian marker.
It’s been such a joy to do this work alongside all of you! Looking forward to our next opportunity to think together with and about accent.
Xiao Ke: Thank you so much for accepting my interview invitation. After reading this book in detail (again), I just want to reaffirm what I said in our personal conversation – that I admire this book, and I believe, for many years to come, this will be an indispensable reference for people who work in China-related topics and beyond. My first question is the following: Your dissertation, which Terror Capitalism is based on, is titled Spirit Breaking. I was wondering, in both the research and writing stages of this book, how you were able to reflexively balance your witnessing of unprecedent psychological trauma of a people (possibly the totality of 11 million Uyghurs and 1.5 million Kazakhs) and generalizations of terror-colonial-capitalist processes that are “more complex than interment camps” (p.5)?
Darren Byler: Balancing the obligations I feel toward the people who shared some of the most difficult moments of their lives with me and scholarly impulse to analyze the colonial structure they were dealing with was one of deepest challenges I faced in my work. One of the ways I dealt with this was by committing to engaging my interlocutors as complex social figures and as storytellers. I strove to frame the book around their stories, allowing them to narrate its shape, and use their voices to develop the concepts such as enclosure, devaluation, and dispossession that I, and they, saw driving the capitalist-colonial structure. But, of course, at times it still feels like the language of social science overwhelms the affective dimension of their worlds, and there was a great deal of their emotional labor that I was unable to adequately represent in a single book. As I mention in the final chapter of the book, that ethnographic storytelling can evoke the pain of others, it can help readers sit with it, but in the end it really cannot offer much protection to them. I suppose that one of the ways I balance my witnessing of all this, is not much of a balance at all, but rather a practice of holding onto the affective experience of the powerless rage that some of my Uyghur friends felt, and letting it shape my own outrage at the capitalist-colonial structures that still dominate the world.
Xiao Ke: Following proposals in your book, what is both the purchase and difficulty of thinking China’s Xinjiang, Apartheid South Africa, Palestine/Israel, India’s Kashmir, US’s War on Terror together? In making analogues between these historical-geopolitical entities now, what are the arguments to be made trans-regionally (possibly beyond Robinson 1983 and Stoler and McGranahan 2007)?
Darren Byler: This is such a great question. I do want to be careful about shallow comparisons that can flatten out the particular histories and dynamics of particular colonial situations in the world. I’m inspired for instance by the work of scholars such as Iyko Day and Peter Hudson in looking at specific genealogies and applications of concepts related to racial capitalism and settler colonialism. For me the most fruitful way of thinking beyond analogy is related to both discourse and materiality. The first has to do with examining the specific transfer of colonial and policing strategy, the ways in which Chinese politicians and police are reading and emulating Israeli, European, and U.S. policing and colonial theory in their own words. The second has to do with the way specific technologies are built, transferred and transformed beyond the nation form. So for instance I see the Chinese state contractors buying U.S. and Israeli counter-terrorism equipment and then developing versions of Palantir and Cellebrite of their own. Or I see them hiring graduates from the same computer science programs. That sort of thing can provide a grounding to the claim that these are interrelated phenomena, that Chinese policing and anti-Muslim racism is different not in kind but in scale and intensity. I also find the internal forced migration and labour, the racialized banning of certain populations from positions of economic and political power, and the global economic forces, that were present in 1970s Apartheid South Africa, especially useful for understanding the capitalist-colonial dynamics of contemporary Xinjiang. But of course there are some major dynamics that set Xinjiang apart from all of the places you mentioned. A colonial project centered around a mass thought reform campaign that utilizes cutting-edge automated surveillance systems and is carried out by a post-Maoist state, that is also itself a former semi-colony made up of 1.4 billion brown people (here a comparison to Kashmir could be made), is a singular structure. That is to say, contemporary Xinjiang, is both an outcome of the contemporary global world system, and yet in its specifics, it is unprecedented.
Xiao Ke: One of the really interesting features of your book is how you tie literary and ethnographic figures together, for instance: Yusup and “Iron Will…” (p.82-92); Ablikim, The Backstreets and the sad “ending” of an anticolonial homosocial friendship (p.148-162); or even Chen Ye and his reading collection of the lone, critical poet Bei Dao (p.179). How does thinking with and talking about contemporary literature help your ethnographic research and writing of this book?
Darren Byler: I remember rereading Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities in graduate school with the anticolonial scholar Chandan Reddy, and really being struck by the way Anderson discussed the work of literature as staging, for a mass audience, something that is held in common. Great literature condenses and makes sensible things that many readers experience. For someone like me who grew up outside of both the Uyghur and Chinese world, their literature gave me a way of accessing deeply felt experiences of life in rural Xinjiang. It showed me how Muslim migrants on the run in the Chinese city, and also Chinese poets, could evoke a refusal of the pull of the authoritarian, ethnonationalist project of the state. Literature and poetry gave me a language, an archive of evocative portraits of times, places and people that would have otherwise been inaccessible, but which spoke to the life experiences of the people I was building relationships with. So, in that way reading and translating literature with my Uyghur and Han friends helped me to ground my writing in the concepts and experiences of people whose worlds were not my own.
Xiao Ke: You described the longer history of utilizing social media among young men to share Islamic teachings in Xinjiang. The initial media optimism makes a stark, almost ironic, contrast with the later digital enclosure they find themselves in. How do you see your book contributing to the field of media anthropology, its turn to digitality, as well as contemporary discussions of surveillance and artificial intelligence?
Darren Byler: The transition from techno-optimism to techno-pessimism that the narrative of Terror Capitalism presents mirrors a similar growing unease that many technology consumers and a minority of technology producers experienced over the past decade. As I completed my dissertation I was surprised to come across Shoshana Zuboff’s book Surveillance Capitalism and to see how quickly it found a mass audience. I was seeing similar things in a radically different space and independently developing my own conceptualization of “Terror Capitalism”—as a technology driven frontier of the global economy that centered on the production of the terrorist data subject and terrorist-worker.
The primary difference between the two frames, is that in my research I was focused on the way racialized minorities are differentially affected by the same, or similar tools, to the ones Zuboff examines among white middle class global North consumers. The rise of smartphones as digital tracking devices of online behavior has literally decimated Uyghur society—resulting in more than a tenth of the population being placed in forms of material confinement as well as a dramatic subtraction of Uyghur knowledge production and autonomy among the remaining 10-11 million yet-undetained. In this sense, the Uyghur experience functions as a limit case for the way population management technologies can be used to aid already existing colonial-capitalist systems. So, the story is useful in media anthropology, in that sense, as a worst case scenario.
At the same time, over the same period of this study, colleagues of mine such as Carolina Sanchez Boe and Michael Jefferson have shown that similar technologies are also being used in ostensibly liberal political systems such as the United States to target asylum seekers and other racialized groups. This simultaneity—and the blurring between intentional racialization in illiberal spaces and the so-called misuse of similar tech in liberal spaces—will, I hope, push media scholars and technologists to signal the alarm and demand accountability from technology companies and governments who incentivize the building of harmful technology. It’s gratifying to see scholars like Brian Massumi and technologists like Signal’s president Meredith Whittaker engaging my work precisely in this manner.
Xiao Ke: When reading your writings about how Uyghur male bodies and desires (bonding over anticolonial homosocial solidarities) are placed at the intersection of Native/indigenous dispossession, proletarianization, racialization, demographic subtraction, as well as global Islamophobia, I cannot help thinking this is almost an exemplary case for Jaspir Puar’s (2007) observation on how “queer terrorist corporealities” are produced against the normative white patriotic imperial expansion. Can you help us make sense of the differences and relations between whiteness (that US-based scholars often talk about) and Chinese-ness in the context of your book?
Darren Byler: Scholars such as Iyko Day have shown precisely how Chinese-ness is racialized relative to whiteness as having a supposedly machine-like automaton quality, a permitted, even model, difference that could be put to work to build the infrastructure of the U.S.’s internal colonial empire. This framing of the Chinese other was also in play in semicolonization of the Chinese mainland by the U.S., and other global North powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
However, within China, before and after the Maoist revolution there has been an acceleration of something that Shanshan Lan frames as racial learning. Even as Chinese leaders strove to build Third Worldist solidarities with the formerly colonized—something well examined by a recent book by Jay Ke-Schutte, they also drew on what Nitasha Kaul refers to as the moral wound of past colonization as a way of justifying their colonization of non-Chinese within the borders of the revolutionary nation. The modernist project of sub-colonial nation building and the racial learning it entailed was really first operationalized with something Grace Zhou conceptualizes as settler socialism in the 1950s, but was radically accelerated I argue in Terror Capitalism as China became a capitalist nation in the 1990s and 2000s
All this is to say that within China, Chinese-ness has taken on all of the features of an ethnonationalist racial supremacy—something that is similar to the Hindutva movement we see in India. At the same time, outside of the nation state, Chinese bodies are still racialized relative to whiteness. What I hope my book shows is that the racialization of normative bodies relative to phobias directed toward queer, terrorist others is temporally and spatially situational, nested in the nation state form which are themselves within the world system.
Xiao Ke: Not to get into the nitty-gritty of the digital enclosure system in your book, but I have a set of remaining questions: When large volumes of biometric data of ethnoracialized subjects are collected (say, in order to detect embodied signs of religiosity), how is this data marked, sifted, and categorized, according to what kinds of metrics and thresholds? Where do these metrics and thresholds come from? Did the system often succeed or fail in achieving its goals? And finally, what other consequences might we expect from such installations under which Xinjiang might be a global frontier?
Darren Byler: The automation-driven digital forensics tools I have looked at most closely are devices that were built originally to utilized cyberhacking software from the Israeli company Cellebrite, but were then adapted to the specifics of the Chinese campaign against so-called “foreign” or normative Islam. These systems were trained to detect images, text, and video content that seemed to be connected with Islam, images of women dressed in hijabs, men with beards, Arabic script, that sort of thing. Having downloaded or sent such images, texts or recordings in the past would be a reason to be interrogated and likely detained. If a user possessed a certain quantity of such items—5 or 10 or 20 or more, depending on how they were categorized—they would likely be criminally prosecuted and sentenced on terrorism related charges. Having a certain quantity was taken to be an indicator of intent to distribute. Such people could be characterized as the ringleaders of “black” or “evil” terrorist gangs.
That is to say, as in U.S. policing, when it comes to the quantification of intent much of the rhetoric around the war on drugs has been applied to the so-called war on terror; and though blackness or darkness has a different genealogy than the racial discourse of the U.S. slave economy it is nevertheless attached to Muslim difference and thus participates in the same global discourse of anti-Muslim racism. So called extremist ideas, and the digital possession of particular quantities of such ideas by racialized people are taken to be not only a predictor of future violence but being suffused with violence itself. These tools produce a shift from what Brian Massumi might describe as policing of imminent danger to a policing of imminant threat that demands and endless process of elimination.
Because it is part of a colonial elimination project, the system is often used in an extremely blunt way. Many assessments which might be described as false positives—like a student using a VPN to upload her homework to a University of Washington Canvas server for instance—nevertheless were taken to be positive indicators of terrorist guilt. What this signals, is the danger of the blackbox effect of technology evacuating the space for critical thought, and instead being taken at face value as an indicator of truth. This is particularly the case in racialized, colonial spaces where technological assessments are simply reinforcing preexisting prejudice. Police in the United States who successfully detain black and brown men using such tools, like police in Xinjiang detaining Muslim men, would undoubtedly say that such smart tools have accelerated their work and given them greater confidence in the precision of threat elimination. They refuse to recognize the sweeping and intimate violence that these tools strive to hide. One of the lessons of Xinjiang for me is the way technology can be used to accelerate and justify racialization processes. Powerless people everywhere suffer when this happens.
CaMP Anthropology 