CaMP Anthropology

Summerson Carr on her new book, Working the Difference

September 13th, 2023

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo201564143.html

Ilana Gershon In what sense do you see the focus of your book, a therapeutic intervention called motivational interviewing (MI), as a distinctively American approach?

Summerson Carr: I should begin by saying that many of my interlocutors in the world of MI will likely object to my characterization of the method as distinctively American. They would probably begin by pointing out MI’s significant international presence, with strongholds in the UK and Scandinavia as well as in the United States. They may then go on to remind me of the number of languages into which MI’s foundational textbook has been translated (28) and that approximately 40-45% of the membership of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT) do not reside in the United States. These things are true, though they have very little bearing on my argument. From the start, I take the “American” to be much more than a straightforward matter of national demographics; it is always also the ideological product of institutional and political history. By way of this history, many American products, including therapies and counseling methods, travel over lands and seas. That they do so with apparent ease—as if unaided by labor, capital, and other geopolitical inequities—has rightly interested many other contemporary anthropologists.

MI’s American founder and lead developer, Dr. William Miller, recounts MI’s origin story by way of his own international travels. According to him, through a series of serendipitous overseas encounters, he was gradually able to specify and articulate what he already knew deep inside: that is, a “spirit” of engagement that can be operationalized through a set of conversational techniques. It is this combination of spirit and technique that Miller, his colleagues, and his many acolytes developed as MI over the last forty years. Furthermore, MI proponents in the United States commonly frame MI spirit as transcendent and MI techniques as if they are features of a universal language, allowing the method to “speak” to people regardless of where it is practiced.

It is for all these reasons that I expect some significant pushback to my argument—developed over the course of the book—that MI draws on and manages historically-specific Anglo-American norms and values. This includes translating paradigmatically American tropes of democratic governance into therapeutic exchange (Chapter One); MI’s adoption of rhetorical forms and formula that were developed by white colonial settlers since the establishment of the republic (Chapter Two); MI’s implicit grounding in American Protestant ideals, including its spirit of capital accumulation (Chapter Three); total quality management in production of MI’s “evidence-base,” (Chapter Four); and MI’s vernacularization of American Pragmatism (Chapter Five). Less surprising is the way that MI, as a therapeutic intervention, draws on two school of American psychology—American behaviorism and the client-centered (or Rogerian) tradition—that had long been at philosophical odds and have organized the ways that psychotherapies have been trained and institutionalized in the United States. A throughline of the book is the remarkable way that MI seizes upon and defuses ideological differences, such as those that had so many U.S.-based psychologists at loggerheads for decades. Accordingly, I suggest that in MI we also find a classically American way of managing difference.

Ilana Gershon: I see your two books, Scripting Addiction and Working the Difference as very much in dialogue with each other. I am wondering if you could discuss how therapeutic practices shift when the therapist moves from viewing the client as in denial (as in Scripting Addiction) to being ambivalent.

Summerson Carr: As with your question above, it is hard to contain my response! I cannot overstate how profound MI’s shift to ambivalence is, given that denial has long been the organizing concept of U.S. addiction treatment. As I document in Scripting Addiction, the idea that addicts are the kind of people who cannot see and read their own inner states—aka, denial—means that traditional treatment entails engaging them in a clinically supervised regimen of inner reference. Practically speaking, this means that the typical clinical encounter is one in which the professional more-or-less explicitly relays that 1) they already see and know the “truth” that the addict denies and 2) that recovery will be measured by the client aligning their self-descriptions with the professional’s perspective. Not surprisingly, this state-of-affairs commonly leads to therapeutic stand-offs and is frustrating for both parties. It is also, arguably, violent, not just to the extent that it inherently grants the sovereign vision to the professional, but also because that professional is often the primary link to critical resources and services (housing, food, and so on).

Having documented these conundrums in my first book, and searching the field for alternatives as I was writing its conclusion, I became fascinated by MI, which began as a treatment for people labeled as problem drinkers (and has since spread to many other fields). You are right that MI replaces denial with “ambivalence,” which means both the client and the professional have more room to maneuver in searching ways to understand problem behavior. After all, the “could be” or “sometimes seems” of ambivalence is far more capacious than the “it is” of denial. Moreover, in MI, denial is understood as a difference between two people’s ways of looking at some problem—that is, the professional’s and the client’s—rather than a psychic attribute of the latter party. As an epistemological shift, this radically re-grounds the question of an individual’s suffering and the practical means of resolving it. More specifically, once interaction rather than interiority is taken as the grounds of therapeutic work, the professional becomes someone who can help conversationally rebuild what is taken to be real about a problem as well as a possible course of remedy. Mind you, this does not magically level the playing field, as I am careful to point out through the book. I do think it feels a bit better and more constructive to those involved, perhaps especially the helping professional.

Ilana Gershon: What does “paying it forward” mean for MINTIES, (what version of pay it forward do MINTIES adhere to), and how does it serve as a guide for behavior in contexts where people are often making calculations around boundaries?

Summerson Carr: Readers of Max Weber may remember that he identified Benjamin Franklin as personifying the ideological convergence of American Protestantism and American capitalism. Interestingly, some say that Franklin was the one who coined the term, “paying it forward,” when asking a friend to whom he made a loan to lend the amount to another in need rather than return it. The term paying it forward also has special resonance in Protestant communities in the United States, who define it as loving and giving to one’s proverbial neighbor, thereby mobilizing spirit. Note that in both these definitions, “paying it forward” means extending oneself out of already established relationships of reciprocity into less predictable future interactions with unknown parties. This means that the logic of investment is primarily oriented not toward accumulation and but rather continual expansion. This is very consistent with the work of MI proponents, particularly trainers, who devote themselves to disseminating MI and therefore, also, MI spirit for the good of others, whether proximate or still unknown. In this sense, for MINTies, paying it forward means not observing boundaries, even considering them to be a dangerous conceit. For them, to do otherwise would be to caricature an unknown audience, or think some are unworthy or unable to appreciate what they so value—that is, the spirit of MI. Of course, disseminating MI, whether to doctors in China or the State of California’s corrections system, is also profitable. But once that dissemination is understood as paying it forward, given the resonances of the term, any accumulation can be seen as a side effect of generosity and reinvestment.

Ilana Gershon: In one of your chapters, you start discussing what an evidence-based practice means in bureaucratic terms, the answer clearly surprised you.   What was the surprise, and how do different MINTIES engage with this bureaucratic category?

Summerson Carr: Perhaps one should not be at all surprised that “evidence-based” is at least as much of a bureaucratic as a scientific qualification of a practice method. My student, Hannah Obertino Norwood, and I have also recently written about this in Social Science & Medicine—expanding select sections of Chapter Four’s discussion of MI science. Hannah and I detail how the production of evidence-based practices centrally involves a wide range of extra-scientific actors—charitable foundations, public and private insurers, state and federal agencies, health and human service organizations—who work in tandem to register and legitimate certain programs and practices as “evidence-based.” Once officially attached to a method like MI, the designation of “evidence-based” acts like a kind of passport; it green-lights the adoption of that method not just by various service agencies, but also by entire states in large part because it renders that method reimbursable. The real surprise for me was how little “evidence” the designation of “evidence-based” requires. As William Miller himself shared with me, a method can be registered as evidence-based based on a single study as long as that study is conducted in what officials consider the most epistemically virtuous way—that is, by way of a randomized controlled trial (RCT). What is more, that single study need not show that a method is effective in the sense of producing positive behavioral outcomes. Rather, the method must simply be shown to have an “observed effect” by way of an RCT, even if that effect is a negative one. Notably, while keenly aware of how important MI’s status as an evidence-based practice is to its spread, Miller was very forthcoming about this all in my conversations with him, saying that the main federal EBP registry for behavioral interventions at the time of his applications had “a very low bar.” At the same time, he emphasized that this did nothing to diminish the spirited labor of MI researchers, who have produced almost 2,000 RCTs of MI over the last 30 years. As for the MINTies who disseminate MI, there is a wide range of perspectives on the scientization of counseling methods, from true believers to those who think the whole EBP movement is a “whole bunch of crap” (to quote one of my interlocutors). However, surely all US-based MINTies are aware that for MI (spirit) to successfully circulate, MI must also be recognized as scientific. This is in part because, for decades, “evidence-based” has been practically synonymous with “reimbursable”—whether by private or public sources. In this sense, and as I argue in the book, the EBP movement is as neo-Keynesian as it is neoliberal.

Ilana Gershon: You talk about many of the paradoxes that practitioners eagerly say “Yes, and . . .” to in this book, but in reading this book, I was struck by yet another paradox which I wondered if you could address. MI is a both a fairly standardized set of rules for conversational interaction that is closely monitored by auditors, at the same time that the training itself stresses a strong commitment and attention to the context, and presumes that the therapist is a perpetual apprentice, always learning and transforming. I wonder if you could say a little about how standardization and localization/constant change interweave in MI practices.

Summerson Carr: Hmm…this is an interesting question. First, I think we need to unravel what an “attention to context” means in the world of MI, which is quite different than how an anthropologist or sociologist might think of it. Indeed, one is reminded of the shade many linguistic anthropologists have long thrown at conversation analysts. Put simply, the MI-trained professional is supposed to be rigorously attuned to the context of each interview they conduct. So, yes, there are a set of standards for how one conversationally engages, but if standard MI skills are not calibrated and applied relative to what a particular client says and does, the interview fails. Or, to put it in my interlocutors’ terms, the professional practices MI skills without MI spirit. As a conversational style, MI is a way of listening as well as speaking, which itself suggests a commitment to localization.

But easier said than done! It is also a deceptively difficult method of rhetorical engagement and analysis, requiring a kind of pragmatic sensibility that I describe at length in Chapter Five. This is one reason that hundreds of US MINT members—including Miller—see themselves as perpetual apprentices. Of course, lifelong apprentices are also especially reliable disseminators! Furthermore, because the method is considered subject to decay without regular practice, there are many auditing tools that are focused on monitoring whether a practitioner’s MI skills and spirit are up to snuff. But the question of managing the competing demands of standardization and localization is also a question about balancing research and practice. No doubt, standardization is especially important to MI as a contemporary scientific enterprise. Recall here the bureaucracy that MI proponents must navigate in order for the method to be officially registered and recognized evidence-based, which begins with the RCT. Now consider how critical it is that the professionals enrolled in RCTs as research subjects who say they are doing MI are in fact doing MI whilst under study. And while MINTies further removed from MI research sometimes grow weary of the latest updates to MI’s fidelity instruments, as they are regularly unveiled at annual conferences and professional get-togethers, I think most appreciate the utility of the various audits and quality controls in the work of spreading motivational interviewing. For MI to spread, after all, it must work the difference between research and practice as well as science and spirit. And, as you point out, this entails ironing out any felt disjuncture between standards and the pragmatics of local application.
Michael Silverstein’s last book, Language in Culture

September 11th, 2023

Ilana Gershon interviews Summerson Carr, Susan Gal, and Constantine Nakassis

https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/language-in-culture/3D4F3FF1DE52DC7CDC5A5B34D21B8AF1#overview

Ilana Gershon: How did this book come about and what are some of the ways you hope this book will travel into other people’s reading practices?

Susan Gal: We hope this book conveys the power of Michael’s amazing intellectual leadership to the widest possible audience. When Michael was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in the Summer of 2019, there were two things he told his close friends he wanted to do: teach one last round of his signature course, “Language in Culture,” which he did in the Fall. And finish preparing for publication the set of lectures based on the version of the course he taught at the Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America in 2017. Cambridge University Press had already accepted his set of richly illustrated lecture-notes for publication. But he knew that, like any set of notes developed over many years, they needed polishing and editing, so that the connections among the lectures would be highlighted and explained. The three of us set about doing this with the help of a marvelous group of Michael’s colleagues and friends with whom – in a series of workshops – Michael discussed each chapter in turn, as we took notes, asked questions and listened to him further develop the ideas, suggesting elaborations and refinements. The book stands as a distillation of Michael’s lifelong intellectual project, which was also, from the first Language in Culture lectures in 1970, a pedagogical project. As he told us repeatedly, legibility and accessibility were top priorities for him in this book. He wanted to reach out to readers. Working as editors, we relied primarily on his lecture notes and the workshop elaborations, but also on his previous publications. Most importantly, we were determined to render Michael’s inimitably entertaining real-life voice, not as in his writings, but the one so many generations of students had heard and been captivated by in lectures and informal discussions. It is gratifying that many people who knew Michael well have commented that the book “sounds like him.” The book includes his playful side, his delight in irony and puns, his many jokes, quips and sometimes wickedly funny comments on his contemporaries, as well as his warm appreciations of others’ work.

I think there are many ways to use the book in teaching. Different parts of the book could work for different courses. It could be background reading for the instructor. I have found it useful to unfold the more complex theoretical points by reading passages with students; discussing them in class. The many detailed ethnographic and sociolinguistic examples are compelling on their own. Reading Michael’s precise and colorful dissection of them is an eye-opener and intellectual fun. He even gives instructions at one point on how to do the kinds of analysis he advocates.

Ilana Gershon: What makes a concept cultural and where do these cultural concepts come from?

Constantine V. Nakassis: One thing that really came out in working on this book – both in the book workshops Sue mentioned, and after – was how Michael was weighing into, indeed striking directly at the heart of, a much bigger Enlightenment philosophical discussion of the nature of thought (conceptualization) and, further, how he did so by thinking through the history of linguistic thought (and his relationship to it). In these lectures Michael chides a certain philosophical tradition (from Locke to so-called analytic philosophy to modern cognitive science) for its linguistic naivete, assuming that the world of concepts and the world of things can be transparently accessed in some way or other rather than seeing how language and culture – and language in culture, and culture in language – mediate the entire problem space of categoriality, and thus conceptualization and thought. Michael starts from the Boasian view of language and culture as classifications of experience (viz. concepts); but what kind of a thing is a concept and what kinds of concepts are there? Here, Michael distinguishes between grammatical categories – and the concepts they embody (precipitated as Saussurean values or intensions that are system motivated, with scope over extensions, or instances of the category) – and what he calls, at some point in the lectures, “Bakhtinian concepts” or, more often in the book, “cultural concepts.” The call out to Bakhtin here is particularly interesting, since it suggests that cultural concepts are discursively mediated notby principles of grammar (langue) alone but, rather, through the dialogism of semiosis, through – as Sue will note in her answer to the next question – voicing structures in/across interaction as they come to serve as the (political, ideological) field within which communicable categorizations of experience are indexed, entextualized, circulated, enregistered, institutionalized, and so on. Such processes are sociocentric, historically contingent, perspectival, and their normativity is dynamic (indeed, dialectically mediated by the events in which they are instantiated and abstracted from). They are, in a word, cultural.

In saying this, Michael is laying claim to the anthropological concept of culture (a term abandoned by many in our field but taken up by others outside of it), deconstructing it by inserting himself into a longer conversation while re-signifying the term. Because if concepts are cultural, it’s not because culture is some static “system”; rather, it’s because concepts are creatures of discourse, subject to its vagaries. Concepts are achieved, tenuous phases or states of a sociohistoric and evenemential flux.

It’s important to see, though, that Michael was not dismissing the importance of grammatical concepts. Quite the opposite; he was developing a more sophisticated apparatus to relate grammatical and cultural concepts. This is his recuperation of Whorf. Going against a naive “Whorfianism,” grammatical concepts are not determinative in any way of cultural concepts. But how, then, are they related? As Michael shows in the last part of the book, grammatical concepts can serve as a certain kind of germ for cultural concepts (though the latter have roots which are not reducible to the former), but only insofar as langue is enunciated – that is, entextualized and contextualized – in/across events of discourse and insofar as discourse is itself reflexively/ideologically reanalyzed. And in passing from the virtual plane of grammar to actual embodied (and ideologically mediated) communication, concepts slip beyond any reductive grammatical mediation. One of Michael’s fabulous examples of this is color terms, where he shows that while there are cross-linguistic structuralist patterns across languages as regards to how the denotational domain of color is linguistically categorized (lexically), such an analysis can only take one so far since, while it will predict certain contours of color terminologies, it can’t tell us what those terms’ pragmatic meanings consist in (for example, in terms of indexical significations; metapragmatic stereotypy, and so on), for this is the domain of the cultural, which has a semiotics distinct from that of structuralist analysis.

Ilana Gershon: What would Silverstein most want people to understand about voicing identity?

Susan Gal: I vividly recall that “identity” was not a central term for Michael when it first became ubiquitous in the social sciences over the course of the 1990s. His focus, as Costas elaborates below, was on “event” and what kinds of social facts precipitate out of presupposed and created indexicality in events. But later, in a characteristic move, Michael reinterpreted identity in his own terms. It now serves as an important category, in a changed form that incorporates insights from Goffman and Bakhtin, along with his own innovations. I’d say it has two key aspects.

First, deliberately opposing much of sociolinguistics, Michael rejects the idea that identity consists in the demographic categories that a person might fit into, it is not even the intersection of several such, like “middle-class woman.” It is not some person’s performance. No. It is not even something individual. It is the changing relationship among participants that emerges in the course of interaction as speakers position themselves with respect to each other in a kind of ballet, choosing among small bits of language in order to formulate verbally, in response to each other, the places, times, institutions and people that they talk about. With the words they select, speakers align with or distance themselves from each other, and with/from those times and places they talk about. This is not identity as a “thing,” but what he calls identity-effects, identity work. As Michael says: “there is no announcement of identities in culture,” no one proclaims himself as, for example, intolerant or arrogant, a “twit,” or “nice” and compassionate. These are inferences participants make; they are cumulative effects of the multiple little culture-invoking verbal partials that people use in interaction.

But how do those little “verbal partials” – the selection of one name for a place, rather than another, for instance – become “culture invoking”? That’s the second key aspect. Michael notes that we all, universally, have culture-specific intuitions about the kinds of talk that belong in different kinds of situations; we have folk models of registers (in speech and in other forms of expression) that shape our expectations; violations of those expectations change the situation and often the social selves of participants. Well established and institutionalizedregisters become stereotypes: “emblems of identity.” People deploy pieces of those emblems (characteristic sounds, lexical shibboleths) in self-fashioning. But speakers do not enact stereotypical identities. It’s more complicated. Michael builds on Bakhtin’s notion of “voice.” We speakers “voice” ourselves in relation to such stereotypes – aligning with them or against them and with/against our interlocutors – in given situations. As he writes: “It is as though we are thinking/saying: This is how a social category or group member communicates.” We can (partially) inhabit various such social “figures” or stereotypes, but always via events with their interactional organization and contextualized in specific ways that deviate from or build on those stereotypes. Registers are cultural phenomena. Their existence and use depend on circulation across situations; they emanate from many different institutional nodes such as schools (from which standard language emanates), or from government (bureaucratese), fashion industry, social media and so on.

Ilana Gershon: What drew Silverstein to so many analyses of Mr. A and Mr. B and Ms. C?

E. Summerson Carr: To be sure, these dialogues are neat encapsulations of some of the most central lessons of Michael’s program for the study of language in culture. That said, I think Michael was enchanted with these interactions for their political implications as much as their semiotic ones.

To back up a bit, readers may recall that Mr. A, Mr. B, and Ms. C were professional graduate students at the University of Chicago in the mid 1970s. They were also participants in a research study led by Michael’s colleague, University of Chicago Professor of Psychology, Starkey Duncan. As Duncan’s original study was designed, A, B and C – along with several dozen other graduate students – were paired off to engage in brief “Getting to Know You” conversations, with very little in the way of topical guidance given beforehand. Whereas Duncan and his coauthor, Donald Fiske, were primarily interested in turn transitions in talk (and their resulting book is filled with charts that account for sundry statistical (ir)regularities of face-to-face interaction: gaze rate, nod intervals, smile number and so on), Michael focused on semiotically loaded social distinctions: the interscalar differences between what it typically meant (and still means) to be a student at the University of Chicago Law School as opposed to a student in the School of Social Service Administration.

These intriguing coordinates naturally piqued Michael’s interest, suggesting as they did an institutional order (with which he was quite familiar, after all, as a longtime professor and deeply invested student of the University of Chicago). Indeed, if Duncan and Fiske overlooked salience of their research participants’ campus affiliations, Michael seized upon them in his subsequent analyses, not only by acknowledging the class positionalities and possibilities of lawyers and social workers, but also by showing how class hierarchy would be ritually enacted and reproduced in the students’ brief but densely diagrammatic conversation. As he puts it in the book, within the first minute of conversation, Mr. A and Mr. B “managed conversationally to double their intra-Chicago status asymmetry,” at least until Mr. A is unexpectedly knocked off his perch. For rather than simply showing how social class – as institution – is predictably rebuilt in interaction, Michael uncovered in the soon-to-be-social worker’s turns attalk – and turns of phrase – the political potentialities of linguistic virtuosity. More particularly, Mr. B and Ms. C – trained as they are in the therapeutic registers – manage to “clientize” Mr. A in their respective conversations with him, thereby gaining the upper hand. It seems quite clear, given his repeated return to these dialogues over the years, that Michael not only appreciated the play in these dialogues, but delighted in the disruption they entailed.

It is in this book, including – tellingly – its closing pages that, Michael provides his clearest parsing of the dialogues between A, B, and C to make three points central to his larger program of the study of language in culture:

1. Interactants cannot simply rely upon institutions to affirm their identities, confer role and status, and establish stable posts. Rather institutions are reforged through the dynamics of entextualization and contextualization.

2. Face-to-face interaction is ritual interaction, and the dynamic figuration of denotational material – the how of what people say – is highly consequential for participants and institutional products, and

3. Interaction diagrams how institutions order and taxonomize, if not always predictably or by participants’ plans.

So, in the end, through his reanalysis of these dialogues, Michael suggests that institutions are creatures of interaction, which means that they might – and often do – reorder people and build paradigms in predictable ways. Yet it might be otherwise, in part because interactants can draw on various genres and do so with virtuosity, yielding surprising identities and relations.

Ilana Gershon: What might Silverstein want analysts to focus upon when studying moments the analyst themself would label miscommunication or more precisely discoordination? What could be the first steps for tackling such a moment?

Susan Gal: That’s a great question about Michael’s actual analytical methods, which emerged in the workshops as something he wanted very much to emphasize. The book in fact starts with an example of what you might call miscommunication! But he was more interested in the participants’ assessment of “miscommunication” or “discoordination,” than the analysts’. How people react to each other is the revealing thing. When there is something that seems like discoordination to analysts, he would advise that we attend to what participants make of it; what are the uptakes, the alternate interpretations, are there attempts at repair? What future possibilities emerge for relationships, identities, institutions? As we worked through the lectures, it was clear that on the one hand, he emphasized that we can sketch out how social process works, at many scales. But on the other hand, there are no guarantees. Indeterminacy is everywhere (as his discussions of Mr. A and Mr. B reveal). Rituals sometimes fail, people often fail to convey or attain or even know their interactional goals. Intention is a poor guide to outcome, and outcomes are contingent. That was why he was strongly drawn to analyses of courtroom trials and political speech. Even firmly institutionalized practices like those must be reproduced, recreated in interaction, and subject to change. In Peircean fashion, Michael showed there is always a next moment of interpretation. So, I’d say his first step – as in the examples in the book – is to see how the participants react. The moments when participants are seen by themselves or others as violating expectations are the richest ones for understanding culture as a continuous chain of indexical and therefore interpretive process, and vice versa!

Ilana Gershon: What is the sign’s eye view?

Constantine V. Nakassis: This is one of the major innovations in Michael’s work, and the book, and like so many of Michael’s innovations reveals his sense of intellectual lineage. In particular, it always struck me how Michael saw his own work in relationship to Roman Jakobson, whom he always referred to as his teacher. In fact, I recall him once downplaying some of his own contributions to linguistics and linguistic anthropology by saying that he saw himself as just unpacking the implications of what Jakobson (and his other teachers) wrote! There is something to that, but I think Michael was also being overly modest. The “sign’s eye” is an example of that. In Lecture 1, Michael introduces this idea by way of his reading of Jakobson’s model of the speech event. Like the Saussurean speech circuit, in that model – visually, at least – we are not in the diagram per se but hover outside of it, indeed, over it, from the “bird’s eye” (or God’s eye, or the positivist linguist’s eye). From this perch, the speech event model is a kind of objective, etic grid. It’s static. Michael described this vision of communication as like a ball (the “message”, famously diagrammed qua Signifer/Signified in the Course in a ball-like shape) being lobbed back and forth from “sender” and “receiver.” Part of the problem with this view, among other things, is that it takes for granted what a “message” (or a “text”) is, and in doing so also takes for granted what a “context” is; or, as Hymes also pointed out, that the speech-event “factors” are straightforwardly, always already, “there” in an interaction and that our job as linguists/anthropologists is simply (simplistically!) to figure out how the factors are “filled in” in any particular instance or how they correlate with each other.

Michael turned this whole model inside out by instead reading the speech event model as a field of possible indexicables. That is, he read it from the point of view of the sign itself, asking what are all the things a sign, a message (or text), might ‘point to’ (index) as context for its construal? Speaker? Code? Channel? (Or, what must a sign be such that each such “factor” could be a relevant context for its construal?) To take the sign’s eye, then, is not to assume that there is a pregiven, static context for any particular sign. Rather it suggests that context is that which is projected by a sign, that is, that which a sign invokes as a relevant principle for its intelligibility, meaning, force. Since such an invocation takes, as its semiotic ground, a relationship of ‘pointing to’ (or making contiguous, co-present, existentially related); that is, it is indexical. The sign’s eye, then, repositions our analysis to ask how text and context are made through indexical sign activity, and in so doing puts us “inside” the speech event rather than just observers standing outside of or above it. And this move also thus takes us from speech event to indexicality, and from there to the dialectic of entextualization and contextualization, circulation, enregisterment, emanation, and so on and so forth. So this one move opens up a whole space for rethinking semiosis, discourse, language.

It’s a brilliant move, and typically Michael; he simultaneously sutures his own theoretical apparatus within the history of linguistics (in this case, Saussure to Jakobson to …) while inserting his own unique spin on it (here, by leveraging Peirce, but also a particularly anthropological sensibility which positions analysis within the phenomenon under study). In so doing, he works within a tradition but leaves the point of departure completely transformed, figuring his own contribution (a next-sign in a genealogical chain) as its fuller realization.
Kailey Rocker takes the page 99 test

September 4th, 2023

When I reflect on Ford Madox Ford’s statement, I immediately think of branching trees and river bends. Each branch is self-similar to its predecessor, demonstrating both infinite relationship and fragmentation. While I could comment on the self-similarity of page 99 to my dissertation as a whole, I think it more apt to focus on what it tells us about the iterative or branching nature of writing. In my dissertation that touches on various local, state, and extra-state actors’ definitions and applications of communist-era history in Albania, page 99 represents a moment of transition between the project that I had initially imagined to the one I came to know during the fieldwork and writing process, from a statement on collective memory production to one on transitional justice.

“As interviews with project staff and media responses to their projects make clear, both the communist past and the future of Albanian youth (and Albanians more broadly) as they stand are infused with a quality of uncertainty that stems from Albania’s narrative of democratic consolidation, one of permanent transition (see Introduction). The past as an uncertain subject appears to have no truth…” (Rocker 2022, 99).

On page 99, I introduce two of my key nongovernmental organization (NGO) collaborators – whose work inspired me to begin this project on the afterlives of 20^th century history. Since the 2010s, both organizations have found a place in Albanian civil society promoting the discussion of topics such as cultural heritage, history, and democracy and both have identified young adults born in the 1990s and later as important targets of that work. I had initially viewed their efforts as a response to decades of State Socialist control over history and its interpretation (Kodra-Hysa 2013) and a drive by international donors in the region for democratization. Gradually, I realized that NGO workers’ efforts were also responses to earlier attempts to address past wrongdoing following the end of single-party rule (transitional justice) in the 1990s within a present that was not living up to the potential that had been promised at the start of the country’s political transition (Nadkarni 2020).

The Page 99 test ultimately encouraged me to think about the iterative and branching nature of research and writing. While I had set out to study collective memory efforts, I learned even more about transitional justice, and its ongoing translation by various actors, especially NGOs and young adults. While many Albanians, scholars and media included, have characterized Albania as stuck in “permanent transition” (Pandolfi 2010), my interlocutors pushed against this idea through their projects aimed at the past. Instead of mourning for the loss of futures promised in the 1990s, they focused on the work they could do in the present to engender new futures for themselves tomorrow.

References

Kodra-Hysa, Armanda. 2013. “Albanian Ethnography at the Margins of History 1947-1991: Documenting the Nation in Historical Materialist Terms.” The Anthropological Field on the Margins of Europe, 1945-1991. Edited by Aleksander Boskovic and Chris Hann. UK: Global Book Marketing, 129-152.

Nadkarni, Maya. 2020. Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Pandolfi, Mariella. 2010. “From Paradox to Paradigm: The Permanent State of Emergency in the Balkans.” Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Intervention. Edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi. New York: Zone Books, 104-117.

Rocker, Kailey. 2022. Translational Justice: Facing the Past to Take on the Present in Albania. University of North Carolina, Phd. https://doi.org/10.17615/5414-9q81
April Reber take the page 99 test

August 28th, 2023

Page 99 falls in chapter two of my dissertation. This chapter, “Moments of Disruption,” describes how members of the radical right group, Alternative for Germany (AfD), message a different view of Germany’s Nazi past to promote patriotism. Messaging refers to the crafted image political actors communicate through broad communicative methods such as video, clothing, gestures, and speech patterns (Lempert and Silverstein 2012).

In chapter two, I describe Germans’ changing perception of history, including German victimhood during World War II alongside narratives of the country’s aggression. AfD members participate in these changing narratives to disrupt how Germans think about Nazism. The two ethnographic examples in this chapter focus on how people across the political spectrum took part in AfD meetings to sonically and linguistically disrupt, silence, and articulate competing narratives about Germany’s past to gain control over its future.

Since page 99 is the last page of the conclusion, the “page 99” test is only slightly accurate. Page 99 is the final page of this chapter’s conclusion where I iterate my discussion of structural nostalgia (Herzfeld 2016). I understand structural nostalgia to be “a competition between hegemonic and counter narratives, images, and interpretations of Germany’s past and future which openly reveal the nation’s imperfections and through which, one can see Germans’ changing self-image” (Reber 2022: 99). Structural nostalgia is one way that AfD members message normalcy and democratic legitimacy. It creates a societal space in which members can draw on and substantiate already-existing normative notions in Germany.

In the broader dissertation, I examine how radical political actors messaged normalcy and democratic legitimacy to reframe their image through social media, in-person campaigning, and repurposed everyday materials and national symbols. These emergent radical politics, framed as “normal,” reveal schisms and skepticism about nation-building, liberal democracy, and national identity. The intellectual intervention I make is to examine ethnographically how radical political actors engage time-sensitive projects of normalcy and democratic legitimacy in structures that already support these actors. I build on contemporary scholarship that investigates how democratization is a process of exclusion (Partridge 2022), leading to already-partitioned democracies built on historically normative notions in each country. The social intervention I point to in this dissertation is that normalcy and democratic legitimacy, being unwieldly terms, can be and are manipulated by political actors to transform the future of communities and countries.

Lempert, Michael and Michael Silverstein. 2012. Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency. Bloomington:Indiana University Press.

Partridge, Damani. 2022. Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin. University of California Press.

Reber, April L. 2022. “The ‘Extremist’ Next Door: Normalcy and Democratic Legitimacy in Germany.” University of California, Santa Cruz.
Antti Lindfors contemplates page 99 of his dissertation

August 21st, 2023

Page 99 of my dissertation, titled “Intimately Allegorical: The Poetics of Self-Mediation in Stand-Up Comedy”, consists of the thesis’ reference literature. More precisely, this page showcases some of the authors consulted in the thesis whose last name starts with the letter B. From Regina Bendix to Charles L. Briggs – illustrating my dissertation’s rootedness in the borderlands between folklore studies, linguistic anthropology, and European ethnology – through Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, and Lauren Berlant – reflecting my thesis’ indebtedness to cultural studies more broadly – I relied on writers from a variety of disciplinary traditions in devising my perspective onto the genre of stand-up comedy as poetic form in social context.

Upon retrospective reflection, four years after the defense, my dissertation really revolved around the two main features (or rather ideals) of this poetic form that has recently seemed to experience another resurgence in popularity (this time globally): its metaphysics of presence and its desire for immediacy, to borrow Derrida (1976). As elaborated on page 31 with reference to the constitutive tripartite relationality between the stand-up comic, her routines, and audience:

While the former relationship (between the comic and routines) is perceived in terms of authentic self-presence—the comic’s routines referencing or deriving from her “real” self, in that stand-ups “play themselves”—the latter relationship (between the comic and audience) is perceived through the immediacy of being together in place and time by way of direct interaction.

Undoubtedly, stand-up thrives on the reappropriation of these very ideals, as comedians deftly engage in layers upon layers of self-referential commentary on the intricacies of their own performances. Come to think of it now, it probably had something to do with this mercurial nature – coupled with affective intensity – of stand-up comedy that initially captivated my interest and led me to embark on its study, although it took me several years to explicitly articulate just that.

Oh, and in case you were wondering why the thesis seems to come to its conclusion already on page 99, it’s an article-based dissertation with four peer-reviewed articles besides the introduction.

REFERENCES

Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology. Trans. G. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

You can find the dissertation here:

https://www.utupub.fi/handle/10024/147073
Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas on her book, Genres of Listening

August 14th, 2023

Interview by Sarah Muir

https://www.dukeupress.edu/genres-of-listening

Sarah Muir: In the book, you describe the extraordinary history and contemporary status of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, Argentina. For those who haven’t yet read the book, how does examining this psychoanalytic culture (in local terms, la cultura psi) help us understand broad questions about Argentine society and politics?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: The book makes two important claims. The first is that psychoanalytic listening, both inside and outside of the clinic, can be understood as a genre of listening. At the most basic level, what I identify as the genre of listening follows a particular structure and differs from other forms of listening, such as denotational listening, for example. Sound reception is not neutral, it always involves an ideological and practice intervention, and it is never automatic. The book explains in detail how this process ensues. This has far-reaching consequences beyond the Buenos Aires context, since the proposition is that just as there are many ways of speaking, there are many possible ways of listening. Therefore, any social situation can potentially be analyzed from the receptive end of communication through the analysis of how social actors position vis-à-vis sound production.

The second claim the book makes is that, in the city of Buenos Aires in Argentina, a form of listening based on psychoanalysis (above all, unconscious practices and resonances) circulates outside of the clinic. The idea is that Porteños (as the inhabitants of Buenos Aires are called) have developed a sort of psychoanalytic ear that they deploy freely in varied settings and that emerges through the responses during dialogic encounters in everyday interactions. After a statement has been made, porteños usually offer different readings or interpretations of the hidden meaning of the words, trying to get beyond the denotation to find the what is understood as the unknown in speech. Consequently, it is not uncommon to hear statements such as “I think you mean something else,” “I don’t hear your voice in what you are saying” or “what you said sounds strange,” during everyday conversations. Thus, in Buenos Aires there is a culture of listeners whose personal identities, conceptions of citizenship, and constructions of the political are rooted less in the performativity associated with speaking than in a particular form of listening based on psychoanalysis. And this has important political consequences, because the understanding of the selves as interconnected poses a direct challenge to the liberal ideal of a bounded and self-sufficient subject. In Buenos Aires, people understand the interconnectedness of personal experiences and don’t react negatively to the idea that people other than themselves can potentially have knowledge about their own lives.

Sarah Muir: Within linguistic anthropology, one significant conversation has explored listening as an embodied, socially variable, and ideologically regimented practice. In developing the concept of “genres of listening,” how do you speak to that conversation? What do you hope this concept can draw our attention to and open up for analysis?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: Most of the discussion of listening in linguistic anthropology has been centered on the concept of uptake, understood, following J.L. Austin, as the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention, which sometimes reduces the hearer’s role as that of a ratifier. For Austin, uptake is a necessary condition on performing illocutionary acts, because if the hearer does not understand/accept the intention of the speaker, then the felicitous conditions for a successful act of communication would not be present and communication would therefore fail. See for example the work of Chuck and Candy Goodwin, and the conversation analysis scholars: they understand listening as an important role for communication, but as a way of giving cues to the speaker for the next turn of speaking, that is, how an interlocutor reacts by adopting a particular stance, body disposition, or verbal approval (sounds like “aha,” “mm,” and the like). From this perspective, the speaker, by expressing a particular communicative intention, predetermines what kind of illocutionary act the interlocutor might perform. Communication appears as a dialectic process of producing/receiving signs with the goal of attaining felicitous acts.

What I am proposing is very different. Running against the current focus on intertextuality, I am proposing to conceptualize listening as generic; that is, as having a sort of bounded (even if ephemeral) quality that helps delineate and create particular contexts, just as much as language do. The idea is that we don’t listen the same in every social situation—for example, we do not listen the same way to a professor as we do to a lover or a family member. The way we listen alters the social situation and, in some cases, helps creating it. That’s why I think it is important to focus on the productive side of listening because, as my book shows, in Buenos Aires people listen in a way that sharply differs from other places by listening to what the words invoke in the listener rather than the denotation. I also discuss how listening is performative, in that it creates social positionalities, like when we anthropologists listen to our informants through what I call an anthropological genre of listening. Hence, in my conceptualization of genres of listening, listening is productive in every step of the way: creating social identities, generating the context of interactions, and sustaining social relations.

Sarah Muir: Your book charts the far-reaching, mass-mediatized dissemination of psychoanalytic listening across a wide variety of contexts. In what ways does this process of recontextualization transform psychoanalytic listening and talking? How does this recontextualization also transform the other genres of listening and talking with which psychoanalytic listening comes to be juxtaposed?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: One of the interesting things about Buenos Aires is how present psychoanalysis is in a variety of forms. You can find comic strips depicting the analytic encounter in the daily news, commercials that show psychoanalysts in their most iconic representations (glasses, beard) to sell potato chips, car insurance, furniture, and so on. Psychoanalysts are also invited to TV shows where they “psychoanalyze” showbiz celebrities and fútbol players and comment on political issues ranging from the recurrent economic crises to the presidential elections. Let me be clear: I do not claim that these iterations of psychoanalytic discourses that circulate in the media are actual psychoanalytic practices. Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic method that requires a clinical setting, should generate a transferential relationship, and other things. What these mediatized forms of psychoanalysis produce is a kind of didactic map for how to listen psychoanalytically. In all of these mediatized examples, listening is always key, and it is always spelled out. The most important feature of these psy-discourses is that they tell the consumer that words have meanings beyond their intended referential meaning. For example, when a TV host asks an analyst to explain to the audience why a star in a reality show said the name of a male actor, Fernando Bal, instead of the word aval, which in Spanish means grantor. Or when in an interview a famous psychoanalyst says that communication is a miracle because words never express the real intentions of the speaker, and thus is developing an interesting metalinguistic theory of language. The idea is that words have meanings beyond their mere denotation. Hence, without trying to establish a causal relationship, I think that being exposed to these ideas in a variety of contexts allows for psychoanalytic ideas to circulate. People in Buenos Aires have more or less accepted that words can have multiple meanings, and that some come from unconscious practices.

Psychoanalysts, generally speaking, don’t like the hyper-dissemination of psychoanalytic discourses. The psy (psico in Spanish) suffix has become so prevalent that in Buenos Aires you can encounter psico-tango, psico-tarot, psico-transmusic, and many other forms of corrupting, in the view of many psychoanalysts, legitimate therapeutic practice, and allowing the proliferation of what some describe as charlatanerías or quackery stuff, or at the very least, practices that certainly are not psychoanalysis. According to many analysts, these iterations are worrisome in that they de-legitimize an important practice that has helped millions of people worldwide. But at the same time, and paradoxically, the circulation of these mediatized discourses expands the audience and, perhaps, the market for psychoanalysis.

Sarah Muir: One important feature of your book is that psychoanalysis is both an object of analysis as well as a source of theoretical insight that helps to frame and animate your analysis. Given the long history of exchange between anthropology and psychoanalysis, could you say a bit about how your work contributes not only to linguistic anthropology but also to psychoanalytic theory and praxis?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: Psychoanalysis and anthropology share some critical features. Contemporarily to and independently from Sigmund Freud, Franz Boas developed an argument against the racialization of mental differences by coining the expression “secondary rationalizations,” or patterns of habitual behavior transmitted inter-generationally that social actors practice unconsciously, to the extent that there is a lack of reflexivity. We can think of Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus as a continuation of Boas’s proposition. From this perspective, the role of the anthropologist is to disentangle the “secondary rationalizations” produced by the communities we study. Psychoanalysis proposes something similar, from a different approach. Rather than focusing on concealed patterns of social behavior, the psychoanalyst tries to enable the analysand to see the individual patterns, guided by unconscious impulses, she or he are reproducing. In both cases language is key. But what I am proposing is that listening plays a role as important as language and, in some cases, an even more important one, to understand social behavior either conscious or unconsciously produced.

In my book I propose four qualities of psychoanalytic listening: first, it is cumulative (a trait shared with anthropological listening). Sound images will find a concept (or not) through a resonance, that echoes inside one’s self, triggered by something that surpasses the conscious dimension. This listening is not linear, and while it develops in time, it possesses its own temporality. Second, listening practices can be cultivated: they require a long process of habituation, which in the case of psychoanalysis are learned by suspending attention to the denotation of the words and focusing on what the words invoke in the listener. Third, the prosodic enunciation of words matters and, in some cases, it trumps the denotation by focusing on what I call “the music in the words”—what matters is how words sound (and resound) inside one’s self, rather than their specifically referential meaning. Finally, in psychoanalytic listening one focuses in lo vivencial, a sort of experiential listening that includes a polyphony of social voices. The producer of an utterance embodies different social personae through a single sound. These categorizations can extend to other fields, so my hope is that anthropologist find these categorizations as helpful guidelines in their exploration of listening practices.

Psychoanalysts have of course developed their own categories of listening within the psychoanalytic encounter. For example, Salman Akhtar developed the concepts of objective and subjective listening, emphatic listening, and intersubjective listening. I’m not sure how my book will be received by analysts, but my hope is that they engage critically with it, and hopefully we can establish a productive dialogue.
Scott MacLochlainn on his book The Copy Generic: How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds

August 7th, 2023

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo182881918.html

Interview by Lynda Chubak

Lynda Chubak: Scott, thank you for writing this wonderful book! Central to The Copy Generic is your contention that the generic is a potent conceptual space. On the one hand, with an appearance of neutrality, generic is considered the universal, the unmarked, the non-specific, or the general. Alternatively, generic may be negatively valenced as the discarded, the copied, the mimetic, or the inauthentic. How has exploring the intersection of these two loosely congregated parts as a conceptual space been productive for you, and where do you see future applications?

Scott MacLochlainn: It was this intersection that drew me to the generic in the first place. I was fascinated by how much ground the concept of the generic covers without really ever drawing attention to itself, and how most of us live with the generic in one way or another. We all live with ideas around generality and types, and universals to allow us to understand and make sense of the world. But we also use the generic as a means of evaluation, often seeing the generic as the unauthentic and overused. And so I became interested in this intersection between the generic as the ubiquitous and as the culturally diminished.

In the book, I describe how this isn’t a coincidence, or just an overlap of the term “generic,” but that these different spaces mingle and co-constitute each other. This book is trying to make sense of that mingling, and explores how people depend upon and cultivate social action through specificity and nonspecificity. I describe how the generic is a strange thing, in ways a weakening of something, a dissipation, a loss of specificity and of uniqueness, of authenticity and originality. But on the flip side, the power of the non-specific is a force to be reckoned with. And so, in order to explore the complexities I move through multiple different conceptual, ethnographic, and archival spaces in the book. These range from different genealogies in anthropology, NFTs and movie prop designers in LA, to 19^th century colonial world’s fairs and architectural design, and especially Christian communities in the Philippines, with whom I conducted the majority of my fieldwork for the book.

It was in one of these spaces during my fieldwork, a Bible translation workshop in the Philippines, that I first thought about the generic as something that needed to be ethnographically accounted for. For these Bible translators, who were trying to translate the Bible into six different indigenous Mangyan languages on the island of Mindoro, the problem of the specificity of metaphors in the Bible, and their ability, even when translated, to resonate with people was an ongoing concern. For a number of the translators, the goal was to strip away these metaphors, and arrive at a language that was more generic, and so could then be better understood by people across very different linguistic and social worlds.

In terms of application, I hope that the concept of the generic allows us to perhaps better attend to those ethnographic spaces in which people are not necessarily engaging with the forms of specificity that we are accustomed to seeking out. Moreover, I do want the book to speak at least in part to anthropology’s own relationship to what is ethnographically compelling, to its own engagement with generality and specificity, and to what is deemed new.

Lynda Chubak: As you argue, if formal categories are socially powerful forces, covert ones are often even more so. Thinking in terms of naming and unnaming, how does returning to the semiotics of markedness or unmarkedness speak to the generic in a way that can help us better understand contemporary media and identity politics?

Scott MacLochlainn: Well, firstly, it’s very true that the theory of the marked and unmarked are perhaps surprisingly present throughout the book. The cover of the book, while appearing to just be two pleasant looking geometric circles, is actually a replication of the diagram used by Linda Waugh in the 1980s (“Marked and Unmarked: A Choice between Unequals in Semiotic Structure.” Semiotica 38 (3–4)), where she discusses Roman Jakobson and the uses of un/markedness in semiotics and linguistic theory.

As to why the marked/unmarked speaks to the generic, it is because markedness theory always emphasized the vast power and potential of the ubiquitous and taken for granted. When something is so ubiquitous, it has a force all to itself that no longer needs to be articulated. While markedness theory has a particular history in anthropology, semiotics, and linguistics, as I describe in the book, the dichotomy has become an increasingly useful and popular way to understand everything from political echo-chambers and media bubbles, to our relationship with technology and identity writ large. One really important aspect of markedness theory is grappling with collective, unspecified backdrops.

Roman Jakobson himself saw the use of marked/unmarked outside the remit of linguistics. It’s an immensely attractive way of framing things. And for all the difficulty it gets one into in terms of thinking about linguistic features, I think in its more popular guise, it actually does allow us to think in useful ways about generic types, and the assumptions we make, from everything about positionality and ideology in speaking, to how we frame our social worlds.

For example, in thinking about naming, and the push to remove the gendered forms of certain words such as Latinx or Filipinx, or the unmarked forms of whiteness in the US. These spaces have catapulted thinking about the un/marked in very different ways than it was in linguistic theory, foregrounding the asymmetries and practices of exclusion. I would argue the generic is very much key to understanding how majoritarian forms of sociality circulate.

In my own research, and in thinking about the generic, such markedness, even on a lexical level was hugely important. In Chapter 4, for example, I describe a remarkable Philippine Supreme Court case in 1919 about the forced imprisonment and relocation of indigenous Mangyan groups in Mindoro, and how the case revolved around the proper usage of the term “non-Christian” to describe indigenous groups. Configured in terms of inferiority to an ostensibly civilized and Christianized other (or self), and enabling the withholding of basic rights, one can see how the unmarked forms of Christianity helped constitute generic forms of Christianity. And continues to do so!

Lynda Chubak: I particularly enjoyed your eclectic range of ethnographic evidence. For example, Chapter 2 describes the work of movie and television prop designers who create fake and generic alternatives to branded products, a practice that entails “indexical leapfrogging”. Can you describe what that expression means in relation to the role and importance of the generic in the world of shorthand and proxies within and beyond branding?

Scott MacLochlainn: I am really interested in the uses we make of shorthands and substitutes. We don’t take people through the steps of our thinking, but often used shared generic forms to help us fast-forward through the chains of semiosis and our logics. And “indexical leapfrogging” is part of that. What forms of indexicality can one skip through, with the knowledge that others can still understand? But that has always been part of Charles Peirce’s framing of semiosis. That is, meaning aggregates and connects, the lines of legibility extend, so of course people can use forms of indexicality to leapfrog explication, and employ shorthands, proxies, and substitutes as a means of communicating. Of course, equally important is how indexical meaning also diminishes and fades, and indeed ossifies, which is where we might also start to think about the generic in semiosis. But at the heart of thinking about the generic here, for me at least, is the reliance on shared repertoires of knowing that enable us to enact these shorthands. And how we use social categories to sort through things quickly and easily.

In the context of television and film, we might think here of the classic “establishing shot.” With just a two-second shot of a skyline or street, or whatever it might be, so much is conveyed to the viewer, seamlessly and immediately situating them within a particular context. So it needs to be very precise, but also remarkably legible and conventional in order to work. The establishing shot only really works if the viewer already understands the shorthands that are being used. Not only the genre, but specifics of nonspecificity that are at play. It’s also about sorting and categorizing, trying to find the quickest and cleanest referents to particular genres. I think one can quite quickly see how such a reliance on generic forms then takes us into the worlds of algorithms and AI, where sorting and categorizing of information have assumed an increasing presence in our lives, but in very different ways.

Lynda Chubak: Lastly, there are often stories attached with book title selection. Is there one behind yours?

Scott MacLochlainn: I have a tortured relationship with titles! I had originally just wanted it to be The Copy Generic as to have some connection to the wonderful literatures on mimesis and copies in anthropology and social thought, but also center on the generic. Initially, I didn’t want a subtitle. But then my editor helped me come to my senses. Interestingly, in those conversations with my editor, and the process of the coming up with a title actually brought to bear many of the things I am fundamentally concerned with in the book. It’s interesting how book titles come to be. They are indeed a play between specificity and nonspecificity. How legible will the title be to people, while at the same time having some originality to it? And so, a really interesting question here is what do we mean by legibility? What shared and collective repertoires is a title and subtitle predicated on? For the marketing of the book, it needs to be readily apparent to a reader what the book is about. More than that, it needs to locate itself within particular genres and disciplinary subfields. So how can we slot the book into a legible space for the reader, but at the same time, be compelling? There is so much going on with titles, even in terms of current fashions. For example, and my book is an example, the popularity of having the subtitle begin with “How…” is really common. Similarly, I could be mistaken, but there definitely seemed to be a previous fashion ten or twenty years ago for using word reversal (or chiasmus) in academic subtitles (“the rhyme of reason and the reason of rhyme,” and so on). And of course, in terms of the visuality of any book cover, there is equally a remarkable set of factors that are playing with genre and the generic. I personally think there is something slightly 1970s pop-science about mine, like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Or indeed, to keep it within anthropology’s wheelhouse, the paperback cover for Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. One of the great covers!
Reighan Gillam on her book, Visualizing Black Lives

July 31st, 2023

Interview by Karina Beras

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=36yhr7ew9780252044410

Karina Beras: What motivated you to pursue this ethnographic participatory research with Afro-Brazilian media makers in Brazil? What was this experience like for you?

Reighan Gillam: I developed an interest in the study of race and blackness in Brazil from my undergraduate classes at the University of Virginia. I had taken classes on the African Diaspora, race and ethnicity in Latin America, and Brazilian history and culture with professors like Mieka Brand Polanco, Brian Owensby, David Haberly, Wende Marshall, and Hanan Sabea. I went to graduate school intending to study Black social movements in Brazil, but I lacked a lens through which to focus. TV da Gente (Our TV) was founded during my early years of graduate study. It was the first television network in Brazil with the mission to racially diversify its programming. I decided to pursue the topic of Black activism in Brazil through media production.

Once I settled on a topic I was able to make connections with those involved with the network. During my second summer in São Paulo doing preliminary research, friends and acquaintances put me in contact with media producers who worked at Our TV. I was able to continue to meet with people and interview them about their experiences and aims with this network. I then expanded outward to other media projects by Black Brazilians. Finding people and Black media projects beyond Our TV was not easy. Since these producers and this media received little attention and recognition, I had to rely on word of mouth and chance encounters to find them. But once I found the projects and reached out to the producers, many people were open to sharing their experiences and I had very positive encounters at film screenings and during interviews.

Karina Beras: You note that Afro-Brazilian media productions are a medium for antiracist visual politics. While reading the book, I wondered what guided your description of this work as antiracist and in turn, how are you defining racism?

Reighan Gillam: It was certainly a challenge to channel the dynamic nature of this media through an argument that seems to narrow things down to the concept of antiracist visual politics. I came to see this media as articulating a form of antiracism from the producers’ intentions to challenge the visual field of media and television that largely excluded Afro-Brazilians in front of and behind the camera. They insisted on rendering their narratives in visual ways. I defined antiracist visual politics as how “media producers and the visual media they create identify, challenge, or break with racist practices, ideologies, and structures” (2). Drawing from several scholars, including Stuart Hall, and Joel Zito Araújo, I found that mainstream media perpetuates racism through the stereotypical representations of Afro-Brazilians, the low numbers of Afro-Brazilian workers in the media industries, their inability to contribute their vision to mainstream media production, and the mainstream media’s limited depictions of racism. Afro-Brazilian media producers represented racism in complex and varied ways, insisted on controlling the means of media production, and ascribed meanings to their own identities through their image creation.

Karina Beras: You make note of the diasporic connections that were made in order to help TV da Gente come alive. Can you speak a bit more about what you make of this connection and what prompted you to mention this transnational relationship in the book?

Reighan Gillam: TV da Gente was the first television network in Brazil with the mission to include Afro-Brazilians in key positions as producers and on screen. They hired Black directors, writers, and producers as well as Black program hosts and guests. They began in 2005 and went off the air a few years later. The network came about through economic support from Angola, inspiration from the United States, as well as agency and imagination from Afro-Brazilians. I explain these connections in the book to give a full accounting of the genesis of the network. The network exemplified a web of exchanges across borders between Black people that many understand as the African Diaspora. These exchanges between Black people can create the conditions that make possible certain sites for social change in other places, such as television networks.

Karina Beras: I think the matter of representation always finds centrality in conversations about racism, inclusion, and so on. However, representation can only take us so far in changing systems. This brings me to the question of, who in the Afro-Brazilian community gets to make decisions about representing Black Brazilian life? Which Afro-Brazilian groups are left out? Where and how do you think Afro-Brazilian media can continue to grow? What would you say are the limitations of this alternative media in terms of representation?

Reighan Gillam: I think there can be a struggle between the idea that representation can only take us so far and that it is important because we know the harm of erasing Black (and other) people from mainstream depictions. I view representation and media as another front in the struggle for Black expression, asserting a Black presence, and self-determination. Many of the media producers were college educated professionals who had achieved a middle-class status. Yet, people were not on the same page about how Afro-Brazilians should be represented in the media. Individuals had their own ideas and some visions came to fruition and not others. The media I included is produced by small groups and the person who put forward their vision were the people in the positions of director, executive producer, and sometimes show host. In the book I talk about producers privileging middle class, professional images of Afro-Brazilians at TV da Gente. Short films tended to focus on the lives and experiences of Black children and chapter 3 examined how racism was represented through the lens of irony. Alternative media may not reach large audiences, but it does offer a space for Black expression, creation, and experimentation. There is plenty of opportunity to hear more stories from LGBTQ Afro-Brazilians, working class Afro-Brazilians, women centered stories, comedies, and documentaries about individuals, historical events, and specific issues. Brazil is a country where at least half of the population is of African descent. Film and television have only scratched the surface of their experiences leaving plenty of opportunity for interesting and innovative Black stories to emerge.

Karina Beras: In describing the film Cores e Botas, you write that “Joana receives messages from television and those around her that do not affirm her appearance and communicate her inability to belong” (90). I was drawn by the word belong and curious if in any of your conversations people used that term to describe their efforts. And if so, how did they define belonging? What does it mean to belong in Brazil?

Reighan Gillam: This is a great question. I use the word belonging to describe how Joana, a young Black girl, desperately desired affirmation through participating as a backup dancer for Xuxa. Xuxa was a white, blonde entertainer of German descent in Brazil who had backup dancers that resembled her. This wall of white, blonde women defined an aesthetic, affirmed whiteness as a dominant measure of beauty, and implicitly communicated to Joana that she did not belong on television. I don’t recall my interlocutors using this term. Many of them expressed that they constantly had to assert their presence in different spaces by insisting on entering rooms where they were excluded and speaking up for themselves and their ideas. In the film, Joana finally embraces her own vision by acquiring a polaroid camera and developing her own pictures. The film Colors and Boots or Cores e Botas describes belonging for Afro-Brazilians as finding one’s own voice and using it. Many of the media makers were producing belonging for themselves by making a pathway as they walked along.

Karina Beras: In any of your interviews, did producers and other media workers explain why they perhaps felt the need to use humor, irony, and parody in order to depict racism and the absurdity of its denial? Are those common forms of communication or expression in Brazil?

Reighan Gillam: In chapter 3, I examine how different projects depicted racism in ways that expressed and challenged the contradictions of Brazilian racial ideologies and attitudes. For example, one program depicted racism as the producers lived and experienced it, which called into question common Brazilian ideas that downplay racism or outright deny it. They were aware that they used irony and many times they wanted to undermine common Brazilian ideas around race and racism. Humor, irony, and parody are common forms of expression and they have been explored by other anthropologists, such as Donna Goldstein. The Afro-Brazilian media producers who engaged with me lived and experienced the contradictions in Brazil’s racial ideologies. They constantly heard others saying that racism didn’t exist in Brazil or that racism was so much worse in the United States. Yet, they experienced and were the targets of racism when they were at work, at home, and generally living their lives. They also saw racism enacted through the increased numbers of Afro-Brazilians in poverty, their lack of access to education, struggles over land, and as victims of police violence. Irony emerges from exposing contradictions in the system, which they did by depicting racism in a society that denied its existence.
Sonia Livingstone on her co-authored book, Parenting for a Digital Future

July 24th, 2023

https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/parenting-for-a-digital-future-9780190874704?cc=us&lang=en&

Interview by Ashley McDermott

Ashley McDermott: Your work looks at how technology provokes anxieties in parents about agency, values, and tradition while simultaneously offering hope for a better future for children. You argue that parents’ approaches to the digital are about more than just the immediate needs of the family, but rather parents’ past memories and “visions of the future” and that the digital is the terrain upon which parents are negotiating their identities as well as their children’s identities. Could you speak more about how family approaches to digital technology became laden in additional meaning? Also, how has the question of technology use in individual families become so contested in the media and a concern of society at large?

Sonia Livingstone: Lively debates about our digital age, the economics of innovation, platform regulation, the digital divide, emerging landscapes of risk and opportunity all have, at their heart, and often unacknowledged, an account of how ordinary people are learning about and engaging with digital technologies. But it would be a mistake to take for granted that one knows how people are living with technology, or to assume that others live like we do. One aim of our book is to shed light on the experiences of families, to recognise their diversity, and to listen to what they have to say. Another aim is to link families’ stories with the societal processes in which they are not only embedded but which they also, collectively, shape.

In ‘Parenting for a Digital Future,’ we foreground the dimension of time, theoretically and methodologically, showing that parents’ imaginaries span a century, more or less – for they readily look back not only to their childhoods but also to those of their grandparents, and they often look forward to their children’s adulthood (asking themselves, who will they become, and what role have I in determining this?) but struggle to look further forward than to their children’s grandchildren. A century encompasses considerable change – in childhood, parenting cultures, education and, of course, technology. So, asking parents to look back and then forward was a great way to get them talking, eliciting their ideas of social transformation, their own power to shape this (or not) and, for sure, their hopes and fears for their child. Often, ‘memories’ of the past are tech-free, while ‘visions’ of the future are more science fiction than grounded predictions. Even in the here-and-now, tech is foregrounded because it seems relatively controllable (buy the latest kit, learn to code, follow the screen time rules) – certainly by comparison with the many challenges parents face (we explore poverty, divorce, migration, disability). And thus, tech seems to hold out the promise of managing, optimising, children’s futures. But at the same time, its very complexity, opacity and constant change threatens that promise, focusing anxieties not only on the tech and children’s engagement with it but threatening children’s very futures.

Ashley McDermott: One of the many things I enjoyed about your work was how it bridged so many disciplines in the social sciences, and the collaborative nature of the research. In anthropology, it seems like much ethnographic research is still done largely by one researcher and is grounded in the literature of primarily one discipline. Could you tell us about how the project came about, and what led you to design your research in this way?

Sonia Livingstone: I like to pick projects that face in multiple directions as a way of enriching the research and engaging diverse audiences. Families’ digital lives might seem rather insular, and an ethnographic lens might seem primarily to engage anthropological questions, but for me, quite the opposite is the case. Not only is the combination of children plus technology an explosive one for the general public, but it speaks to multiple debates across the social sciences too. Digital technologies bring the public into the private realm (for example, extending education – and the pedagogy of school – into the home) and the private into the public (for example, sharing intimate experiences on social media, as we explore through the experiences of parent bloggers). Technologies also blur two senses of private by providing an appealing infrastructure for intimacy and care in family life, but then rendering it commercialised and datafied.

As you can immediately see, to understand how families enable and respond to these transformations, we needed to read widely in sociology, psychology, education, media studies and, yes, anthropology (especially the burgeoning field of digital anthropology), as well as deploy different research methodologies. It helped that Alicia and I were trained in anthropology and sociology/psychology respectively, and that we met in the interdisciplinary formation that is media studies, where it is well understood that one must read and engage with ideas wherever they are useful, bringing them to bear on a shared interest (digital technologies, digital lives, digital futures) rather than to shore up the boundaries of any particular discipline.

Parenting for a Digital Future was conceived as part of the Connected Learning Research Network led by Mizuko Ito and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The idea of the network was to explore whether and how digital networks are reshaping possibilities for child-led, interest-driven, open and collaborative learning and interaction. A lot of the focus was on the potential of informal or nonformal learning to complement and even compensate for the problems of formal schooling. We wanted to bring parents more clearly into the picture: when children arrive at digital media learning spaces, for instance, we asked: why did their parents bring them, and what did they hope for; and when the children went home, we asked ourselves whether the parents followed up with related activities, and how social class differences might stratify the possibilities available to them. Our research revealed a host of missed opportunities, as educators and parents misunderstood each other, with children burdened as the go-between, and with misplaced hopes in technological mediations also tending to exacerbate rather than ameliorate inequalities, disconnecting as much as they connect.

Ashley McDermott: I really appreciated the intersectional lens of your book, and how the families you described are carefully presented in ways that do not homogenize the families or their experiences. Could you speak more about the way you wrote against stereotypes in the work and the challenges of working both inside and outside of generalizable categories such as socioeconomic class and ethnicity in research?

Sonia Livingstone: I confess that there was a moment during the fieldwork when I despaired of drawing out larger themes, finding each family unique in its own way, and struggling to fit our research participants – selected for diversity, after all – into neat demographic categories. But then we thought more deeply about London as our setting: we were researching family life in a global city, one that precisely attracted non-normative lifestyles (for instance, we interviewed educated families engaged in low-paid creative labour, ‘geeky’ families attracted to London’s tech scene, ethnic minority families who found a foothold in London’s subcultures and migrant neighbourhoods, and more). Not only did this help us critique standard classifications of family life by class (which is not to say that our participants’ experiences were not classed) but also to focus on the notion of family itself. Empirically, we took our lead from our interviews – who did participants refer to, connect with, or feel distance from. Theoretically, we drew on theories of late modernity, especially Giddens’ idea of the democratic family, recognising the transition for many (not all) away from the Victorian authoritarian family towards more horizontal relations of negotiated power and agency. Theorised more pessimistically by Beck, whose focus on the risk society sees families as burdened by ‘institutionalised individualisation’ as they are neither supported by the welfare state nor by the traditions that preceded it.

Our argument is that digital technologies intensify the dilemmas that arise, because they are so risky, highly demanding, and yet they hold out a fascinating promise of control and future success. For the theorists of late modernity, familiar demographic classifications are precisely what is being reworked, demanding fresh thinking from the public as well as academics. As we show, people negotiate these changes through the lens of the digital, for this affords alternative pathways, values and forms of knowledge which, once explored, can shake up traditional ideas of expertise (now, children may know more than their parents) or hierarchy (after all, those who can code may do better in life than those who know Latin, as one of our participants put it).

Ashley McDermott: One intervention you make is on the topic of screen time limitations, which you complicate by discussing the complex ways families negotiate digital activities and the varied activities that children and their parents participate in. Could you discuss how managing screen time became the go-to intervention for many concerned about the risks of digital technology and your own practical steps for parents concerned about the use of digital technology? Also, has the discourse around screen time changed in light of the pandemic?

Sonia Livingstone: Screen time has become the go-to phrase for parents to manage their children’s digital activities. We scholars can argue, with good cause, that what matters is not how long children watch a screen but what content they engage with, in what contexts or for which purposes, and as part of what kinds of social and learning connections or networks. But for parents, in the midst of their busy and often anxious days, screen time is easier to observe, and to talk about. We found this disconnect between what parents knew (for in practice they would make nuanced judgments about the parameters of their children’s digital lives) and what they said and did (sustaining an explicit discourse of screen time with their children, even when it generated conflict, or judging themselves and each other for the screen time they allowed, notwithstanding that its meaning is so contested). Indeed, despite becoming a language of shame and guilt for parents, we show how parents use screen time to create moments of love and comfort within the family (playing video games together, family movie night, laughing together at memes or short videos on the phone). After all, for many busy families in late modernity, finding ways to come together, and share mutual understanding, is as mor more important, and challenging, that finding spaces of separation and individual privacy.

I’ll just add that the pandemic taught all of those who believed that ‘kids nowadays’ are glued to their screens that, first, this is for good reason (it’s how they learn, get information, connect with others, participate in the world) and, second, it’s not enough (they want to go to school, see friends in person, hang out with family, be in the world).

Ashley McDermott: In the end of the work you propose six recommendations to support parents in digital technology use: offering parents realistic visions of children’s technology use instead of scare-mongering, providing support for parents that encompasses the digital environment, recognizing the contribution of parents at school, listening to parents’ voices in policy making, increasing attention to the design and governance of the digital environment, and ensuring that policy and technology design is based on evidence. Reading your work now, during the coronavirus pandemic, the findings seem especially relevant. In the light of large-scale switch to online learning and lockdowns that led many adults to work from home while being full-time caregivers of their children, would you change any of the policy recommendations at the end of your work or add to your recommendations?

Sonia Livingstone: One of the many consequences of the pandemic, highly interesting to me, is the shift in policy focus from a concentration on (and valorisation of) high level macro-economic and political deliberation about digital technologies to recognising, also, even if still too often marginally, that people’s lived realities matter, and that digital policies must encompass parental guidance, ethical digital design, critical attention to education technology, and youth voice. In my current work, I embrace these under the umbrella of children’s rights in relation to the digital environment. And I think there are small signs that families’ hopes and fears are being listened to.
Marlene Schäfers on her book, Voices that Matter

July 17th, 2023

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo183627808.html

Andrew Bush: The book makes crucial interventions that connect the study of liberal governance in Turkey to the comparative study of oral traditions in places that include Africa and South Asia. But these several interventions are possible, it seems to me, because the work is also quite clearly grounded in a specific locale—the city of Wan. Can you describe how Wan became a field site for you, and how it stayed a field site for you, and how that locale sets up the main arguments of the book?

Marlene Schäfers: I think that Wan became a fieldsite for me partly because I was interested in exploring forms of Kurdish politics and subjectivity and cultural engagement outside of the well-known locales. In Turkey, and in the Kurdish region more broadly, the city of Amed or Diyarbakir is often seen as the Kurdish capital, which is very central to the imagination of Kurdish community and Kurdish politics. Wan is more marginal to that Kurdish political imagination, so I was interested in what was happening there.

It is also in some ways a place that is quite ambiguous when it comes to questions of identity and belonging. We should not forget that it was a site of genocidal destruction. Wan was majority Armenian until the genocide in 1915. Today it is a border town, close to the Iranian and Armenian borders. The Kurdish presence has always been there, but even that has been by mobility and migration. Some of the biggest Kurdish tribes in the Wan region actually moved from the Caucuses in the early twentieth century. So it is a place with an ambiguous and fluid identity more than something settled and fixed.

It seems to me that this fluidity might allow for forms of experimentation in self-expression and new forms of subjectivity-making that I explore in the book. Precisely because identity is not as fixed here as it might be in other places, there is perhaps more of a demand on voices to articulate a more bounded, distinct identity. The book explores how oral repertoires have been answering those demands and burdens, and how voices have become more and more intelligible as an index of the interiority of the people who pronounce them.

Andrew Bush: At least in their predominant expressions, kilam are meant to have a particular emotional, corporeal, and sonic impact on listeners. In the first chapter you argue persuasively that what you call the “social potency” of the singing has a lot to do with form. What drew your attention to the notion of form that you develop there? The book names three factors there—the multiplicity of voices that compose the narrative element, the way poetic imagery is stitched through the work, and the melodic mold that encompasses improvisation on recognizable genres. Reading that section of the book, I couldn’t help but wonder what other ideas you left on the shop floor, as it were, in working through those particular elements. Could describe the process of identifying and naming those formal features?

Marlene Schäfers: I must admit that that was the most difficult chapter to write. One reason it was so difficult is that I lacked the training and vocabulary to properly engage with vocal form. I was not trained in ethnomusicology or linguistic anthropology as such. I felt that I needed to engage the question of form, but I lacked the training, the language, and even the ear to do so. Linguistic anthropology and ethnomusicology opened doors for me. For a long time, I was focused on the narrative of the kilams that I heard – mainly narratives of pain, suffering, and tragedy – so developing a sensibility to approach the more formal aspects was somewhat of a breakthrough for me personally.

At the same time, what didn’t make it easier is that the women I worked with did not have an elaborate vocabulary for the formal aspects of their repertoires either. When I asked them to explain an element of a melody to me, for instance, they often didn’t have a meta-level terminology to explain how they used their voices. And I think that itself says a lot about how Kurdish women have long been marginal to the urban centers of cultural production where those elaborate meta-level vocabularies would have been developed, as is the case for Arab or Turkish repertoires, for instance, or for the southern Kurdish urban culture of poetry you worked on. These women were also marginal to forms of public and political speech historically dominated by men. So women really operate in a minor key within that culture of musical and poetic expression and that made it extra difficult to develop a vocabulary.

But why do I focus on these three elements you mention above – multiple voices, poetic imagery, melodic molds? In some ways it’s because they are the elements that struck me the most, or that were most foreign to me. In the book I show that these are the factors that remove voice from self and therefore make it difficult to decode songs as expressions of personal feelings, interiority, will, or desire. And that’s exactly why these elements made kilams initially quite opaque to me. They upset my expectations about how a narrative should give expression to the person who pronounces it.

At the same time, these were precisely the elements that local listeners would seek out, and take pleasure in. Kurdish audiences often say that a good singer is one who makes you cry. These were the elements that did that, although I don’t think the three factors I identify are necessarily exhaustive. I hope the book will open a conversation to further inquiry about what other aspects of form might make voices powerful social forces.

Andrew Bush: The conventional description of fieldwork and writing that says fieldwork is when you listen and writing is when you analyze. But in your case, the listening was always troubled or confusing in the field, and it was in the process of writing that you found the ear.

Marlene Schäfers: Definitely, the listening that I did in the field often troubled the discourses I heard there. I was told, women raising their voices is “a form of resistance,” or “a form of empowerment.” Well, yes. But then when you listen carefully, things become more complicated. Suddenly voices no longer function so easily as expressions of resisting or empowered selves. So the listening actually interrupted some of the narratives that were transmitted to me during fieldwork, and it was only through writing that I was able to make sense of that interruption.

Andrew Bush: You just mentioned how marginal women were to some genres, and that reminds me of how gender and law appear intertwined in different ways in the book, especially in ideas of theft. There is the idea that voices can be stolen, or the deserved fame of a performer can be stolen, and most interestingly to me, the idea that dengbej is really a women’s form that is subject to men’s ventriloquizing. There seems to be an impasse between the invitation women receive to become part of a new kind of national public (alternately Kurdish, Turkish, or Armenian) and the fact that the kinds of social change those publics call for—especially some idea of gender equity—is almost foreclosed by the technology of participation that women are afforded. So there is some faith that law might restore authorship or ownership, but it is a limited faith. How do you understand that impasse, and how do women themselves describe it?

Marlene Schäfers: This is a crucial point, I think. During fieldwork, what caught my attention was how my interlocutors would be adamant about the violence and oppression they faced for raising their voices as Kurds and as women. And yet despite this recurring legacy of violence, they remained immensely optimistic with a seemingly never-ending hope that things would get better, that they would eventually reach the fame, the income, the recognition that they felt they really deserved. The book tries to understand where that hope or insistence comes from, and what animates or nourishes it. It argues that it is precisely because of the way liberal politics elevates the voice to an object carrying immense promises of emancipation, recognition, agency, which is what makes the hope and perseverance possible.

You asked about the law, and it seems to me that the law is one site where these liberal promises become articulated or even codified. In the book I look particularly at copyright law, which some of the women hoped would allow them access to the value that had become attached to their voice. Law was like a mechanism used to make voices deliver on the promises that they hold. But it would often fail to deliver. So the women found themselves always on the cusp of having that promise delivered, but then they would find it taken away at the last moment. For example, some music producer would sell their voice without their permission, or male performers would once again become famous for repertoires that women said belonged to them.

The women I worked with experienced these disappointments lived in embodied ways: there were tears, sadness, lethargy. But somehow these down periods were always overcome. What I found remarkable was the energy women mustered in the face of continuing disappointment. There is something here akin to what Lauren Berlant called cruel optimism in the sense that people remain attached to structures that might actually harm them. It seems to me that the law, and copyright law in particular, functions as that structure that promises equal access to voices’ value, but nonetheless keeps disappointing.

Andrew Bush: The book is about the voices of Kurdish women who perform as dengbêjs, but it is a book written in a distinctive scholarly voice as well. In the acknowledgements you name the hope that the book will “keep alive the reverberations of [Gazin’s] voice.” Can you describe some of your collaboration with Gazin, and how that work impacted your scholarly voice?

Marlene Schäfers: Gazin was one of my main interlocutors, who, together with some other friends had founded the women’s singers association in Wan where I did a lot of fieldwork. She was the heart and center of the association. She had a modest background, she had never been to school and had had five children, but then she also had this extraordinary taste for experimentation and adventure.

She was one of the first women of her generation who had entered the professional music industry but was essentially scammed by producers and received too little for her work. Nonetheless, she had a very distinct sense of the value of her voice and of the voices of Kurdish women more generally. She would often talk about the voices of Kurdish women as a “treasure,” which someone urgently needed to salvage, because they would disappear as older generations would pass away.

And to do this work of salvaging, she wanted to engage in what she also called research—to go find women’s voices, record, document, and archive them. So we would set off together to different villages and towns and meet women and do interviews and recordings. The collaboration was sustained by the fact that we each had resources and skills that the other didn’t. We complemented each other in that sense. I had access to writing, which she did not. I had access to some modest funding—not much as a graduate student but it was there. I had a computer and a voice recorder. And at the same time, I benefitted immensely from her access, her knowledge, the fact that women knew and trusted her. She was from there, she knew her way around, and obviously her presence opened so many doors. As much as we complemented each other, our projects were also very different. She had this mission of archiving and documenting. But I could not be and cannot be the kind of archivist of Kurdish culture that she was looking for.

For me what became important instead was to understand what was driving her—why it was so important for her to archive, record, and document. That can tell us something about the contemporary politics of voice in Turkey more broadly, I think, and about how liberal politics interpellate people like Gazin to engage in this work of archiving and documenting voices. In that sense, I also don’t see my project as “giving voice” to Gazin or any of the women I encountered. In the acknowledgements I write that I hope her voice will reverberate, by which I mean that I hope the book will let the voice of people like Gazin reach new audiences, and show what kinds of stakes are attached to these voices.

While I don’t see myself as an archivist, I am in fact currently involved in a project that seeks to archive, document, and edit Gazin’s repertoires. Gazin passed away much too early, in 2018, and left behind an entire archive of Kurdish voices on cassette tapes and digital voice recorders. We have now started a project with the Orient Institute in Istanbul that seeks to organize, catalogue, and transcribe these sources, and make them available to the public. So in that sense, I did come back to the archive in the end.