https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo45558255.html

Robyn Taylor-Neu: So, my first question is pretty standard: how would you explain the overarching argument of the book?

John Durham Peters: The overall argument of the book is probably inseparable from the process of how it came to be, but I’ll bracket that for now. The argument is that knowledge has always been leaky, has always exceeded its bounds, and that the history of knowledge—at least since the 17th century, which is the range that we’re looking at, with the closest focus on the 19th and 20th century—is a history of containers of various kinds such as peer review, images, encyclopedias, universities, institutional fields, Title IX rules. There are so many different ways of corralling this thing called knowledge. The obvious impetus for writing a book about promiscuous knowledge was the internet. I think it started when Ken Cmiel, my co-author, discovered that his mom had been looking online trying to diagnose her own heart condition. This was fairly early on in internet history, but he was kind of freaked out. What did it mean that she was getting mixed advice from certified experts and freelancers online? This concern has obviously ballooned in the age of authoritarian populism and internet “truthiness,” as Stephen Colbert would call it. 

I don’t think we’re shrugging and saying, oh, knowledge has always been leaky, let a thousand flowers bloom. Rather, I think we’re trying to say: knowledge really matters, but you have to figure out its containers in each particular time or context.  In fact, you want containers to leak or at least open up.  This is a point made in a brilliant essay on container technologies by the Australian feminist Zoe Sofia from 25 years ago. We’re not throwing up our hands in a kind of postmodernist glee about promiscuous knowledge. It’s more ambivalent—an appreciation for new openings and a worry about expertise, gatekeeping, discerning true and false. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: I am curious about the form of the book—about what the form of the book does. You mention that Kenneth Cmiel’s vision was that “nothing but the cat’s grin” would remain, a kind of extreme reduction of facts. But you also mention that the book’s final form was much more than “just the grin.” So, the question: how to strike that balance between a proliferation of facts, many of them unruly or cacophonous, and the through-line (for me, the book has a very clear through-line). In other words: how does the book enact the kind of promiscuous knowledge that is also its subject? How to perform promiscuous knowledge without losing the plot?

John Durham Peters: Such great questions. I’ll give a variety of responses. Ken’s vision of the kind of Cheshire catlike quality of his writing was kind of an absurdist, utopian horizon. Never trust artistic manifestos!  This was a manifesto of the sheer minimalism that he dreamed for the book—one he knew was impossible and would never happen. And you’re totally right that the book enacts this tension, perhaps most clearly in Chapters Two and Three. Chapter Two argues that the 19th century was an era of copious culture, of the thick overflow of fact. And it was a period in which otherwise very diverse spirits—Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Graham Sumner—all reveled in the encyclopedic overflow of detail. Ken gives the example of Horace Greeley going to the London Crystal Palace exposition and coming back with pages and pages describing plows at a level of detail that for us seems utterly tedious. Chapter Three argues that modernism is less a question of fragmentation than of streamlining. This is one of Ken’s most interesting arguments.  Often when you think about modernist music, literature, and painting, you think of fragmentation. But there’s also Wittgenstein’s supremely austere early philosophy that famously ends in silence. Ken assembled all kinds of really interesting examples in the twenties and thirties—from taxidermy to Reader’s Digest to Georgia O’Keefe—where the interest is in synthesis, integration, cutting out all the overabundance. As a matter of cultural history, there is a big shift from 19th century abundance to early 20th century streamlining, but that’s also the tension of the book itself. 

Any act of history writing has to make really agonizing decisions about how much evidence is necessary versus what kind of storyline needs to come out. I often tell my students that a scholarly project is like going on a hot air balloon ride. You need enough hot air to take off, but you need enough ballast to make sure you don’t go into the ozone layer. This book was a constant struggle with how to keep the hot air balloon from crashing to the ground with the weight of the facts and to keep it from floating off with the hot air. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: It reminded me somewhat of DeLillo’s Underworld. It’s also about interweaving without simplifying, suggesting a connecting pattern without reducing it to one thing. That novel is often described as maximalist. I wouldn’t say that Promiscuous Knowledge is fully maximalist, but the sidebars definitely feel like an offer of more, one more container to caress or exceed . . .

John Durham Peters: Very good. The historical period is perhaps the ultimate container for historians, but Ken wanted the coverage to be spotty, jumping from the 1870s to the 1880s, the 1920s to the 1930s, and then 1975 to 2000. He left readers to infer what was missed. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Here’s a predictable anthropologist question. I was especially intrigued by the discussion of Bateson and Mead and role that the National Cultures Project played in relation to what you describe as a broader embrace of “happy summary.” As you point out, the synecdochic understanding of “national culture” underwent many assaults and was heavily critiqued in the later 20th century, both from within anthropology and more broadly. But it also feels like, at the same time that the culture concept was critiqued, it migrated into all sorts of other domains. Would be fair to say that, in some sense, the culture concept (and maybe many other concepts) underwent a simultaneous denigration and overvaluation or proliferation, as was the case with the image? I’m thinking about how culture and cultural difference are now being mobilized in very different ways—ways that feel like a bizarro resurrection of the national culture concept. 

John Durham Peters: I defer to you as an anthropologist to comment on culture, but in Promiscuous Knowledge we blithely declare that the idea of national culture is as dead as a doornail. We were mostly right within the academy, but totally wrong elsewhere if you think of culture wars or resurgent nationalisms of various kinds. Back to Benedict and Bateson (first time as theory, second time as farce). 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: I certainly don’t want to speak for all anthropologists, but my sense is that other analytics have come to the fore. (Although Marshall Sahlins, for one, argues for the continued significance of culture.) As anthropologists have moved to other analytics, I wonder if there’s been a relinquishing of ground that’s left space for much cruder understandings of culture, or where “cultural difference” becomes a proxy for race or ethnicity.  I’m thinking of what’s happening in the UK right now, but also in Germany, in the US…

John Durham Peters: Hungary, Israel, China, India, everywhere.

Robyn Taylor-Neu: So, I don’t know whether some of the important critiques of monolithic, homogenous national culture have left a space for other kinds of resurgent nationalisms or simplifications—a return of synecdoche with a vengeance?

John Durham Peters: Beautifully put. Do we like synecdoche or not? That’s the real question.  Ken did have a kind of fondness for mid-century synecdoche such as classical Hollywood cinema. He worried about the collapse of the national center, about people not being willing to pay taxes for the welfare of their fellow citizens. He thought we needed the synecdoche of national belonging to have an operative welfare state. You don’t want to break apart the abstraction of the nation state so thoroughly that people are just happy to say “I’m gonna keep mine,” which is very much what you see with Trumpism.

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Yeah. I found this argument around the welfare state and around the erosion of solidarity compelling. And this is also where it becomes a kind of tragedy, right? While recognizing that these contestations were really important, there’s a melancholy… But when I say, “a return of synecdoche,” maybe it just looks like synecdoche and is some other kind of rhetorical figure…

John Durham Peters: Bad synecdoche, your name is social media! You can sense a quorum with two or three people. One post (on Charlie Kirk or Palestine) can get you fired or deported.  Classic cases of parts substituting for wholes!  Social media platforms discourage statistical thinking (even while their code rests on it).  Readiness to take the part for the whole is really dangerous. And that’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk encourage with filter bubbles. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Definitely. I recently read an essay called “Fascistic Dream Machines” in the LRB and the author’s discussion of attitudes towards AI-generated images and videos struck me as a kind of a return to a different kind of happy summary… or unhappy summary, maybe. I was fascinated by your discussions of images across different moments. There’s the large move from the synecdochic image towards proliferation and fragmentation—what we could call a diremption of the emblematic image (following Hayden White). But there are earlier moments where you show many other ways to think about images. Could you say more about how the book recasts the relation between images and truth or putative reality? How is the book shifting or pushing against a simplified understanding of images as either having a kind of simple indexical relation to the real or no connection at all?

John Durham Peters: Gina Giotta’s sidebar on airbrushing in chapter 2 shows that intervention in the photographic process is itself coeval with photography itself.  The very first photograph has no people—it is an image of erasure, not of inscription. Daguerre’s process erased the sky and everything moving, except for one guy standing there on a sunny Paris morning getting his shoes shined. In the history of so-called realistic image making, we need to think inscription and fabrication side by side.  You can’t say that the image is the real thing.  For one thing, it’s much smaller than the streets of Paris. There’s much interest in a kind of consubstantiality, an indexical kind of tracing of the real, but photography has always involved craft and forgery. And even though Promiscuous Knowledge takes pains in chapter 4 to show a wide variety of photographic practices, we claim that you can still see a kind of family resemblance that allows you to contrast historical moments.  Today, for instance, it’s next to impossible to produce an iconic photograph.  Images just don’t resonate as they once did and it’s not just because of AI and Photoshop. It is just much harder to have a synecdochic picture that sums up everything.  Unless you’re an authoritarian declaring what it all (supposedly) adds up to—and even then, the pronouncements only hold as long as the next tweet or post. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: One of the sidebars that felt like a view onto a different understanding of images was the one about the Dutch still-life paintings. You describe the coexistence of different times in those works as a kind of montage—it’s almost cinematic, right, how the seasonally different flowers all appear in one painting?  I found that really fascinating as a departure from the usual discussions of photographic realism and indexicality. The Dutch still-life example felt to me like a really nice kind of counterpoint to that (somewhat exhausted) discourse.

John Durham Peters: Sergei Eisenstein had the great idea of vertical montage: superimposing different images within rather than between frames. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Right! And vertical montage also relates to the interleaving of sound, movement, image—all the modalities at once! Okay, last question. The project struck me as untimely in many ways, both in the sense of cutting across multiple times and seeking to “grasp the times by thinking against them” (to paraphrase Wendy Brown). There’s also the haunt of untimeliness: one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the times (and probably one shouldn’t). But as I was reading, I kept being struck by elements that resonate now, regardless their provenance—the 17th century or the early 20th century or the late 20th century.  There’s so much that feels super resonant with things I’ve been thinking about that are happening now.  How do you think about this book’s untimeliness or timeliness and where it pushes us, where it leaves us?

John Durham Peters: It’s always an exercise in constellation. Or a political and ethical question about how to build a relationship between past and present.  You’re always taking positions on grounds that are constantly shifting. Walter Benjamin’s great last essay on the philosophy of history famously contrasts two modes of history writing. One is a kind of chronicler of serial events, one thing after the other. The other he calls the historical materialist who intervenes in history and can produce simultaneities across time.  That’s really my secret goal, to produce simultaneity across time.  Simultaneity across space, of course, is one of the classic definitions of modernity: you can be in Berlin and New York and Shanghai at the same time thanks to a planetary telegraphic grid.  Benjamin calls this discovery of past relevance “Messianic time” or Jetztzeit.

Robyn Taylor-Neu: That’s where he talks about the Katzensprung (cat’s leap)—no, the Tigersprung (tiger’s leap) through time?

John Durham Peters: Yes!  Part of the strategy to end the book in 2000, rather than try to take it up to the present, was to reach for a somewhat stable moment.  Although, you know the old joke of Zhou Enlai? Someone asked him what he thought of the French Revolution and he said, “too early to tell.” History’s never done. We never know what’s coming. A packrat copious mentality banks up material against future relevance—there’s the temptation to stockpile an overflow of factual ballast again.  But the idea that we can discover history “wie es eigentlich gewesen” is clearly something that this book renounces. This book is explicitly creative and open about taking positions and looking for wormholes, looking for connections between past and present, creating them. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Maybe this was implicit in my question about form—this constant dialectical impulse in the form of the book, mirrored in the tension in photography between artifice and realism (if one can even keep those things as two poles). I do feel that so many aspects of the book felt dangerously resonant… 

John Durham Peters: Yes please!   

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Well, maybe all resonance is potentially dangerous! Specifically, I see a kind of return of summary, but not a happy summary. You can’t find a thing on Google that doesn’t give you the AI summary first.

John Durham Peters: I guess the perverse return of summary can be banal and annoying as well as dangerous. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: Well, thank you. I think we’re at the pumpkin mark. 

John Durham Peters: I’m curious if you have any questions about the process the untimeliness of writing with someone who died a long time ago.

Robyn Taylor-Neu: That was definitely part of the question. But I didn’t want to ask directly because I didn’t want that aspect to overshadow what the book does in itself. Your conclusion is very moving and from what you say, it felt to me like Ken was someone that anybody would be incredibly lucky to know and learn from and be in conversation with.

John Durham Peters: Yeah, very true. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: And your discussion of inheriting his library! I really enjoyed the whole book.

John Durham Peters: Thank you. It’s such a joy to talk to you, just in general, but to have a good reader of the book, because you can imagine how a book appearing in March of 2020 fell with such a thud. People had other things on their mind.  Talk about an untimely birth!  So, it just basically vanished as far as I can tell. 

Robyn Taylor-Neu: I think many things that came out in that one or two year period just sort of disappeared.  But reading it now, it feels especially resonant. So many of the threads opened up in different chapters feel like they come together in different knottings here and now. You say somewhere towards the end that if this had been just your book, it probably would’ve had more about the technological systems working behind our backs. That feels like something that is clearer now than in 2000 or even in 2020.

John Durham Peters: Totally! Thank you for the conversation. 

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/vopli-vidopliassovas-tantsi-9781501363115/

Ifigeneia Gianne: What is the central focus and argument of your book on Tantsi, and why did you select this album as an ethnographic lens for Ukraine’s late Soviet cultural history?

Maria Sonevytsky: In 2019, I was approached by the editor of the 33 1/3 Europe series, Fabian Holt, and asked whether I would pitch an idea for the series based on a Ukrainian album. That’s the conceit of the 33 1/3 series – each short book is dedicated to one album. I was excited by the invitation but then confronted a small crisis: what album should be (at least for the foreseeable future), the representativeUkrainian album represented in the series?

Honestly, my first thought, which I thought was too idiosyncratic to take seriously, was VV’s Tantsi, if only because of my longstanding fascination with the title song and accompanying music video: I simply wanted to know more about this strange artifact and to understand the late Soviet social world from which it emerged a little better. But then I listed all the amazing Ukrainian albums I love. I crowdsourced on social media and among friends. I debated with myself and some of them about the downsides of picking something as obscure as Tantsi, when I could have picked something much more mainstream and/or contemporary, like the Ukrainian rapper Alyona Alyona’s debut album Pushka (2019), or the “ethno-chaos” band DakhaBrakha’s Light (2010), or even the important Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy’s Model (2001) or Gloria (2005). And then I considered Soviet Ukrainian albums I love, like The Marenych Trio’s 1979 record (the Peter, Paul, and Mary of Ukrainian state-sanctioned folklore), or the cosmic folk trio Golden Keys (Золоті Ключі) and their Soviet-era recordings, or the amazing from-the-vault reissues put out by labels like the Kyiv-based Shukai. In short, it felt weighty to settle on one.

At the same time, I had already put out feelers to VV’s original band members and started to see that this research might be possible—while not everyone associated with the band at that time was willing to speak to me, many people, including the lead singer and original bass player, were. I was on sabbatical in Kyiv with my family that year, and was falling freshly in love with that amazing city. The Tantsi idea also became a way to focus on Kyiv as a dynamic urban space in late Soviet society. And then I had a moment of researcher’s serendipity in which a late Soviet map of the Kyiv Underground fell practically into my lap out of a random encounter on the street (I write about this in the book). That map, made by Ukraine’s foremost rock journalist at the time, superimposes the network of late Soviet rock, jazz, punk, and indie bands onto a map of the literal Kyiv Metro. I realized I needed a lot of help to decode it, just to orient myself. So that sent me down the first deep rabbit hole, but also helped me justify my choice. VV was depicted as the central node in the network of lines of musical-aesthetic influence on the map. If they were so central to this Kyiv Underground, maybe the choice wasn’t so idiosyncratic after all.

It’s funny because the individual who demystified that map for me more than anyone else, Oleksandr Rudiachenko—who had been an influential newspaper editor in the 1980s and instrumental in the Tantsi cassette’s circulation through the Kyiv Underground—told me in an early conversation that I was making the wrong choice by choosing Tantsi. He worried that I had failed to select an album that would do Ukrainian music justice. But now, having written the book, I see how Tantsi also allowed me—as a Cold War kid—to revisit the 1980s, and to make sense of a part of Ukrainian cultural history not yet explored deeply in scholarship. Tantsi is more than just the story of an odd and hastily recorded semi-illicit cassette album that traveled through networks of late Soviet nonconformists; it is a monument to a time and place that is so often misrepresented along stark or reductive Cold War imaginaries.  It was a moment inhabited by people who faced historically specific constraints, and acted in novel ways within and against them.

Ultimately Tantsi pulled me more strongly than anything on my list because I wanted to attempt to humanize that late Soviet period by exploring what I saw as weird and cool people and their weird and cool Kyivan scene. So the choice was also subjective: I liked the music and band’s affect. I also wanted to evaluate how those last years of the Soviet experiment in Ukraine are remembered today. Tantsi became the focal point for triangulating among the rather scattered Soviet historical accounts of this scene (the fragments that exist in official archives and the more robust informal archives created by fans), against the first-hand recollections of people who were there at the time; and to interpret how volatile memory politics complicate the picture. Of course, the Russian full-scale invasion of 2022, which occurred while I was about 75% of the way through the first full draft, surfaced difficult questions about which leg of that methodological stool to lean on: how to evaluate the scattered archives against the current testimonies, especially now that the question of Russian revanchist imperialism was on the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Ifigeneia Gianne: In paraphrasing the band’s declaration, “Ok fine, we will dance, but we will do it in our ungovernable way,” (p. 5) you foreground a tension between embodied joy and political resistance. How do you understand this unruliness, not only as a musical aesthetic, but as a cultural stance, emerging within the specific post-Soviet moment? To what extent might Tantsi be read as enacting a form of sonic sovereignty through its genre-bending performance?

Maria Sonevytsky: I often think of the line that Sashko Pipa, VV’s bass player and (in my view) chief philosopher in the 1980s, repeated to me: “We simply made the music we wanted to hear.” The Soviet 1980s were characterized by so many governmental reforms and not-always-durable constraints—rules that seemed to change weekly and often arbitrarily, as I was told by a VV superfan at the time—that these young creative punks brilliantly played against them, to great and often hilarious effect. The Soviet Party-State in the mid 1980s was a gerontocracy. It maintained a sclerotic censorship regime and had declared a War on Rock that identified neofascist themes and images in Western bands like AC/DC, 10cc, and Sparks. It had its Leninist Youth League, the Komsomol, sponsor ideologically correct dance parties at government-controlled Houses of Culture, and it expected dutiful Soviet youth to attend these discotheques where they would dance, I suppose, in an ideologically correct way.

The song “Tantsi” ludicrously skewers these expectations placed upon young people by the state – the song is an over-the-top fantasy of dancing at the House of Culture after a long hard week of work. In the music video, the band members dance in their raucous way, juxtaposing their manic movement against scenes of the band standing stock still, shoulder-to-shoulder in a line. In the video, and in live performances at the time, they would bring out familiar signage in the form of the agitprop parade banner, but instead of a Soviet political slogan, the banner read “dances” (tantsi). The effect is classic stiob, a form of late Soviet satire written about perhaps most influentially by Alexei Yurchak in Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, his study of the last (mostly Russian) Soviet generation. Stiob, a form of extreme satire that works by overidentifying with its target, is meant to blur the lines between complicity and protest. “Tantsi” the song, and many of the songs on Tantsi the album—“There Were Days,” “Politrok,” “Polonyna,” etc.—do this expertly, perfecting the art of total stiob.

VV and their allies did not think, at the time, that they were enacting any deliberate kind of politics. Even in interviews done in 2020, and 2022, people laughed if I asked this too pointedly: “was this the music of resistance?” It is of course a romantic idea—rock as resistance is a Cold War trope—but I was struck by how everyone I interviewed sought to nuance that idea, or rejected it out of hand. Some people reflected that their awareness of the political effect of the music came later, as new frames emerged in the post-Soviet 1990s that allowed them to reinterpret what they had been doing back then—whether within what we could call decolonizing frameworks (for many, this was the rather personal confrontation with internalized inferiority instilled through Soviet Russo-supremacy), within emergent civic nationalist frameworks, or in the new political economic frames afforded through the explosion of wild capitalism and commercial music industries. In the conclusion, I refer to their politics across these temporal frames as “accidental anti-imperialism.”

The band members of VV, and the allies and fans that surrounded them, were not particularly fearful of the state. This was not the Stalinist 1940s. Yes, one of Ukraine’s brightest poetic lights, Vasyl Stus, died in a labor camp in 1985 at the age of 47, but most Ukrainians at the time did not know that because the state suppressed such information. Yes, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor had irradiated much of Ukraine and Belarus and displaced some of its population in April 1986, but to the punks, this confirmed the state officials’ incompetence and hypocrisy; these were not the people leading contemporary so-called eco-nationalist movements in Ukraine. The members of VV and the Kyiv Underground tusovska went to the Balka black market to trade in illicit records expecting, almost ritualistically,that it would be broken up by the police every week. They went anyway and spotted their young hip professors there; they saw their friends from the shows and the cafes; they found the music they wanted to hear there. Yes, they thought the state was irredeemably corrupt, but they also thought it was feckless.

If we read Tantsi as enacting some kind of incipient “sonic sovereignty” in the 1980s, we can appreciate the range of ways in which this music was received in its time and place: while many cultural elites dismissed or decried it as punk grotesque, or as demeaning to Ukrainian culture, others recognized it as exorcising the demons of a colonized subjectivity, of the inferiority complex instilled by centuries of Russocentric messaging that overtly or obliquely demeaned the Ukrainian language and questioned the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and culture —as the future culture minister of post-Soviet Ukraine, Ivan Dzyuba, reportedly did. Dzyuba perceived the punk satire of the Tantsi music video to be a valuable step in Ukrainian culture’s emergence from centuries of structurally unfavorable comparison to culture produced in the Russian imperial metropoles. It is easy now to assume that this was a dominant position at the time, but I try in the book to take seriously what people who were there then told me: this was about revealing hypocrisy and reveling in the creative possibilities that the contradictoriness of daily life afforded much more than it was about attempting to bring about a change in political conditions. This was something more elemental for many young punks. As Eugene Hütz—then a teenaged VV superfan, now the frontman of Gogol Bordello, poignantly explained to me over a series of conversations—VV allowed for a kind of shared recognition: this irreverent punk display, with its hybrid language and its murky Ukrainian themes and its obscure messaging and its sense of humor, is ours.

Ifigeneia Gianne: You reflect on growing up in the Ukrainian diaspora and describe the affective dissonance between a romanticized Ukraine and the country you came to know through fieldwork. How did that personal and diasporic vantage point shape your approach to the album and your interpretation of its cultural significance?

Maria Sonevytsky: In graduate school, I first read Sherry Ortner’s famous essay that asserts that ethnography attempts to apprehend social worlds “using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing.” That formulation remains an anchor point for me, it confronts a core instability in our scholarly accounts that simultaneously contributes to the truthfulness of what we do as anthropologists. So yes, my position vis-à-vis the object of study is always something I want to foreground, so that the reader has some sense of who the self is that mediates the knowing in any given project.

In this book, I write in the opening pages about how astonished I was when I first heard the song “Tantsi,” and later again when I saw the video, because it fundamentally shook up the gray-scale imaginary I had of late Soviet Kyiv—it infused the scene with vivid color (even though the music video is in black and white!). I was born in 1981 into a family of political refugees from Soviet power, who appreciated Reagan’s tough stance against the “evil empire.” From early childhood, I was inculcated with a strong sense of my Ukrainian heritage, of my duty to this imaginary elsewhere. I possessed a dual sense of this Ukrainian elsewhere: on one hand, it was a place of radiant beauty, endless sunflower fields, folk songs, a halcyon and mythical homeland, round dances, freedom-loving anti-imperial fighters, potato dumplings that we called varenyki instead of pierogies, a place proud of its 19^th century poet-hero who rose from serfdom to articulate an ideal of democratic statehood. Second, it was a place sucked bone-dry through cycles of repression, Russian domination, mass violence, and Soviet hypocrisy. This vision of Soviet Ukraine was of a captive society; it was thuggish, corrupted, gray.

When I started to travel to Ukraine—first, as a child with my family; then independently, as a teenager; and eventually as a researcher—I was always negotiating between these two incommensurate visions. How to square my beloved aunt’s warm recollections of being a competitive cyclist in the Soviet 1960s if everything was always so sad and hopeless? How to make sense of the conviviality of people I encountered in all regions of the country if social life had really been so stunted, so shot through with fear? The “Tantsi” song and video was a kind of evidence that, even as I was growing up on the other side of the Cold War superpower line, there were people familiar to me who had been making noise in Soviet Ukraine. I wanted to know more.

Ifigeneia Gianne: Given the current context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the fact that Tantsi was reissued in 2023, how did the experience of writing and publishing this book during wartime affect how you understood the stakes of the project? Did your interpretations, methods, or sense of what was at stake shift in light of these events?

Maria Sonevytsky: As I mentioned earlier, this presented a real methodological challenge. I did not want current events and the understandable emotion associated with them to overtake my analysis. I began the research in 2019, and by late February of 2022, I had completed practically all of the research. But I did reopen conversations to take stock of whether, how, and to what degree, the full-scale invasion might prompt new interpretations of the moment in history that Tantsi represents. Personally speaking, the full-scale invasion knocked all the wind out of the project for me initially. It felt pointless to write a book like this when Ukraine’s survival as an entity distinct from Russia was in question. I turned my attention elsewhere for a while. But after a few months, some of my interviewees—one of whom, I remember, was by then living as a refugee in Germany—started checking in on the project, wanting to know when it would be done. This motivated me to pick it back up; if it mattered to them, it should matter to me.

The plan to reissue—or really issue, for the first time, formally—the Tantsi album had been in the works since 2020, when Sashko Pipa alerted me to the existence of the master tape from the 1989 session, and I located a label (the wonderful Org Music, based in the US) interested in putting it out. Oleg Skrypka, the lead singer of the band back then and now, gave permission for the remastering to happen, even though he had doubts about the value of the record, since it was made before the band had access to a proper recording studio or high-quality equipment.

It was in the winter and spring of 2022 that we were actively translating the lyrics. I worked on that most intensively with Sashko Pipa as I was in the Hudson Valley, he was in Kyiv. After late February, Pipa generously gave his time (in between air raid alerts, electricity outages, and his volunteer work in territorial defense and drone-building operations) to debate how to best capture the nuances of 1980s jargon—I remember we cracked up trying to render some of the playful obscenities—in translation. I worried that I was asking too much, but Pipa reassured me that this collaboration was giving him a sense of normalcy during a time of intense violence in the city and acute uncertainty for Ukrainians facing Russian aggression.

For me, it has been gratifying to see the instances where Tantsi has been accepted as a small but significant contribution to fleshing out the late Soviet Ukrainian social world. Because the album is so emblematic of its time, I think it resists being easily co-opted into present-day wartime narratives that dehumanize both victims and perpetrators, even as I sympathize especially with Ukrainian rage at the present circumstances. Tantsi is proudly, almost freakishly, Ukrainian, but it is also enmeshed in global popular music histories that traverse the West-East divide, Soviet imperial relationships, changes in the political economic order, and the apparently perennial will of young people to make culture anew.

https://bookshop.org/a/100347/9798988684404

Sherine Hamdy: Roxanne, I can’t believe the sequel to Death in a Nutshell is already here! As you know, I was a huge fan, but I think I loved this one even more. 

Roxanne Varzi: Thanks, Sherine!!

Sherine Hamdy: This time our intrepid anthropology graduate student Alex is starting a new field project in Oslo, Norway, with a lot of funny nods – winks? – to Nordic noir. So my first question – why Norway? 

Oslo, Bjørvika, Photo: Roxanne Varzi

Roxanne: The beauty, the light! (It’s a photographer’s dreamscape) The serenity and Scandi culture – I taught in Sweden almost twenty years ago in the UC Education Abroad program in Lund and traveled to Copenhagen. I loved Scandinavia and wanted to return. I was going to England to meet with folks researching dyslexia and found a flight through Oslo. So I asked my friend Paige West who had spent some time in Norway to introduce me to cool anthropologists there and she introduced me to Thorgeir Kolshus, one of the coolest anthropologists in Norway and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo. 

He invited me to stop by and do a multimodal workshop at the University of Oslo. I loved it and decided to go back for my sabbatical. I was both scouting a new fieldsite and doing a sound project on climate change. Soon my real project became my protagonist’s fictional project and Alex, my protagonist, took over my project in Oslo! I was actually in the middle of writing Armchair Anthropology Book Two which takes place in California (and will now be Book Three).

Sherine: Thorgeir? Any chance he inspired your character of Thorvald, the anthropologist who knows about burial practices in Melanesia?

Roxanne: Thorvald is a fictional character! Your first guess was an American retiree from our department! Which goes to show he’s a composite character! Every reader will have their guess! 

Sherine: Okay, that’s fair! The first scene begins with your characters bobbing up and down to silence …at a church in Oslo. How did you come up with the idea of a silent disco night? 

Roxanne: I was at dinner with friends in Oslo and their son was headed out to a silent disco. I’d never heard of it before and he was kind enough to fill me in. A month later there was a silent disco at a large sauna near where I was staying. It was past my bedtime, but, you know: “anything for research!” I literally got back out of bed, dressed and trudged along the Fjord to the disco spot to “research” it. 

Sherine: Edward Munch, famous for his painting The Scream; the playwright Henrik Ibsen, and children’s book author Roald Dahl all make appearances in your book, as important Norwegian creators (I’d never known Roald Dahl was originally Norwegian!). Why is it important for your character Alex to reflect on the lives and works of Munch, Dahl, and Ibsen? 

Roxanne: I’m a big believer in using theories and philosophies from the field. I don’t like importing theorists to explain another culture. With Iran I used Hegel, because he’s considered the Rumi of the West by Iranians, but I also used Ibn Arabi, Attar. Theory and philosophy is part of doing fieldwork. I lived across the street from the Munch Museum in Oslo so Munch was omnipresent for me, part of my Oslo landscape. And Dahl was my Dyslexia example from the field so it worked out really well! There’s an element of serendipity to writing these mysteries that I love–like Jack Horner [in the first book] was a character, and also as a person with dyslexia. Aside from that I’ve always loved Munch. He was a writer as much as a painter and when I saw his notebooks at the Munch museum in Oslo I knew he was someone whose life I wanted to delve into deeper. 

Munch Museum, Oslo, photo: Roxanne Varzi

Munch’s tea kettle, photo Roxanne Varzi

Sherine: Themes of neurodiversity continue in this book – one of the most heart wrenching parts of the book for me to read wasn’t about the slain victim, but when Alex overhears other graduate students in her cohort talking about her learning disability, and questioning her right to even be in a PhD program if she has dyslexia. While Alex was drawn to creating miniature sites as a form of visual ethnography in the first book, in this one she takes up sound ethnography. What do you think is the relationship between experimentation in the academy, multi-modality, and neurodiversity?

Roxanne: Great question!!! First, there is the fact of non-linear thinking and finding alternative ways of doing things. And Dyslexia comes with enormous gifts and strengths, what Brock and Fernette Eide call MIND strengths: M for material reasoning or 3d and spatial reasoning, I for interconnected reasoning or big picture thinking, N for narrative reasoning (my favourite, and what makes Alex a great detective. She has the ability to construct a connected series of mental scenes from past personal experiences, to recall the past, understand the present, or create imaginary scenes. And the D is for dynamic reasoning – connecting elements of the past to predict the future, which, again, fits perfectly with detective work. That’s also where paleontologists [like Jack Horner, Book 1] with dyslexia have a major advantage!  Multimodality allows practitioners to work in their areas of strength. So, if someone is better at 3d spatial reasoning, then a diorama makes sense. If someone excels in narrative reasoning – why not write a murder mystery? Not only does this allow us to make data and research more accessible for people with learning disabilities, but these works are also more accessible to the general public, who didn’t go through the training that we did to read theory and research – or in other words, academese. This is why I loved coming across Robert Frost’s words about professorial writing.  

Sherine: I know you are referring to a quote in the book, but I think it is worth citing in full here. Can you tell us the whole quote you are talking about?

Roxanne: Sure, I was going down a proverbial rabbit hole on the sound of language. I had read Frost’s correspondences before, and when I went back to them, there he was promoting poetic writing.

Frost says: 

Just so many sentence sounds belong to man as just so many vocal runs belong to one kind of bird. We come into the world with them and create none of them. What we feel as creation is only selection and grouping. We summon them from Heaven knows where under excitement with the audile [audial] imagination. And unless we are in an imaginative mood it is no use trying to make them, they will not rise. We can only write the dreary kind of grammatical prose known as professorial.

And Alex replies, “God save us from professorial…”

Since graduate school I have been trying to avoid academese. It’s a form of gate-keeping and my mission was not to preach to the choir from the Ivory/Ivy tower. My mission has always been education and advocacy. 

Sherine: You’ve definitely accomplished that here! You also continue with the format you established in the series’ first book, of including Alex’s fieldnotes as a way to communicate anthropological ideas and theory. How did you approach the fieldnotes sections differently this time around?

Roxanne: This time, I experimented more with form. In addition to the field notes, I used  conversations on text messaging, Facetime, and good old-fashioned letter writing. Part of the difference was driven by the fact that two of the characters from the first book were not with Alex in Norway and I wanted them to be there.

Sherine: You mean Will and Kit?

Roxanne: Yes, and as so much of the lives of students with disabilities, including Alex’s life,  revolve around assistive technology, I wanted to expose the struggle of writing, (she has dysgraphia which is common for folks with dyslexia) and the extensive use of notes, dictations and texts. I wanted Kit to continue to advise her and be there as a bestie. Their relationship is a wonderful melding of neurotypical and neurodiverse people complementing each other. 

Also, with Jack Horner, in the first book, I began writing him in as a paleontologist before I learned that he has dyslexia. This book also had a fun moment with another public figure whom I met by accident and later found out has Dyslexia. I showed a random portrait of a man to someone in the anthropology department who misidentified the person as Terje Nicolaisen. I looked Terje up hoping to share my portrait and found myself fascinated by his work. I asked if I could visit his studio and our meeting there pretty much is exactly what Alex experienced when she went to meet him – which involved a long discussion about handwriting, dysgraphia and dyslexia. I told him about Alex and my Oslo mystery and he brought out all of his notebooks!! 

Terje Nicolaisen  Photo: Roxanne Varzi

Sherine: Well, if Terje showed his notes – I wonder if you could show us yours? What do fieldnotes for a sound ethnography within a murder mystery look like?

Roxanne: Here’s a note from my own research –you can see my own dysgraphia on full display along with coffee stains (Norway has amazing coffee!) These are what my field notes look like!!! 

Sherine: To go back to the multimodality theme – your first book was like a (fun!) primer on visual anthropology, and this time we are learning about sound ethnography, and the concept of time. Why did you choose to do sound for this book?

Roxanne: I was standing in this amazing cultural space, Kulturkirken Jacob with its longtime director, Erik Hillestad and I was telling him about my adaptation of the Shakespeare play Twelfth Night. I was thinking it would be the perfect place to put on the play. I always have 1 million projects going on at the same time and somehow the idea of sound and music in that space got lodged into my head – the next thing I knew, I was placing Alex at a silent disco there.

Kulturkirken Jacob  Photo: Roxanne Varzi

Sherine: What do you most want readers to take away in this introduction to sound anthropology?

Roxanne: With each book, I want to show the many sensory ways of knowing. The lack of noise during the pandemic was a profound reminder of the degrees to which sound affects us –and I wanted to look at how that plays out in different ways…without revealing a spoiler, I’ll simply say, sound or the lack thereof can be dangerous.

From roof of Oslo Opera House Photo: Roxanne Varzi

Sherine: While the first book had more of an emphasis, on dyslexia, this one has a greater focus on ADHD and attention. The theme of attention is related to time – how it is spent, who controls whose time, how perceptions of time change from one context to another. Can you tell us a little more on how you came to focus more on issues of attention in this book?

Roxanne:  I knew I wanted the next book to emphasize Alex’s ADHD and I also happened upon an interesting researcher, Drew Johnson, who was at a working research group at the university called Good Attention. He and I had some conversations around ADHD, and he introduced me to the RITMO working group – things just serendipitously came together. 

Oslo became an interesting intellectual space to think about sound and attention. I continued to tinker with my own sound project on climate change and was reading a piece in “The Conversation” about a sound project by an artist/geologist recording the last breath of a melting glacier. I looked him up, and  it turned out that he was at the University of Oslo. 

I immediately emailed him, and the next thing I knew he was emailing me back to tell me that he was doing a lunch talk in literally half an hour in the building next door to where I was. I don’t know if it’s luck when these things happen or if it’s just really about being in the right mindset with the right preparation and the right intentions. Or maybe it’s just that these were the things I happened to follow and so it all came together.  In that way, Alex’s adventures in Oslo mirrored my own adventures, as I followed my research interests, she found clues. We were often on the same trajectory and path as I explored new subjects and people. And this made the book very different from the first book, or what is shaping up to be the third book in that I was writing as I researched. The other books came years later, after the research.

Window into Costume design studio, Oslo Opera House Photo: Roxanne Varzi

Sherine: I like what you say about being in the right mindset and open to the opportunities that present themselves. That must be how you wrote this one so fast!

Roxanne: Yes, this is the fastest book I’ve ever written, because it’s the first time I’ve put down all of my other projects and concentrated on just this It will be interesting to hear what people think in relation to my other books that took years to write (usually about a decade each!). 

Sherine: It’s also shorter than the first one. Was this a conscious decision? 

Roxanne: Yes. For one thing I didn’t feel the pressure to have to introduce readers to anthropology and research methods.

Sherine: You mean because you already covered that ground in the first one?

Roxanne. Yes, exactly. Also, I promised my students that it would be shorter. We have shorter attention spans than we once did, and I think also I’ve relaxed into the idea that writing a series means I can leave some for later! And I needed more suitcase space – it’s much more manageable to travel with! But really, it comes with the confidence to not have to put everything I know about sound and attention or Norway in a single book. In any book, there is so much that gets left out – so much more research and so many other points I could have made, but I also have to pace theory and philosophy with story. I can’t throw in more than the plot can handle. 

Oslo Opera House, Sauna in foreground, photo: Roxanne Varzi

Sherine: One of my favorite things in this book is your ability to render Norwegian speech in English, with its sing-songy tones, joyful inflections,and other idiosyncrasies. How did your Norwegian colleagues react to finding their speech portrayed in your book? 

Roxanne: Thank you, I love Norwegian, it’s a beautiful language. Everyone who read their chapter gave me their blessing – no one commented on the language. One person remembered our conversation well and was excited to see so much of it in the book, which was cool as I did not record our meeting.  At the book-reading that you attended, you heard me read aloud part of the book where I slip into the cadences of the language.

Sherine: Yes, I thought it was hilarious!

Roxanne: But I don’t do that in the audio book because I don’t want to offend anyone, and it’s a fine line. 

Sherine: You mean a fine line between portrayal and parody?

Roxanne: Yes. So I read it as an American narrator, though I tried hard not to butcher the Norwegian words. A friend was kind enough to send me voice memos of words I needed to hear spoken, and then I just tried to mimic him! At one point. I really regretted having rendered in Norwegian the warning not to shoot polar bears. It was a mouthful to record for the audiobook! Listeners can enjoy hearing me muddle my way through that!

Sherine: Will there be an audio version soon?

Roxanne: Yes, it was important to me as a dyslexia advocate to have the audio book come out at the same time as the print versions. I don’t want to privilege eye reading over ear reading. 

Museum of Natural History and Botanical Gardens, University of Oslo,  Photo: Roxanne Varzi

Sherine: Well, congratulations, Roxanne, on another great work! I really love the idea of a murder mystery series exploring contemporary pursuits in anthropology and pushing the bounds of what counts as academic research and writing. I can’t wait for your next one!

Roxanne: Thank you Sherine, I always enjoy talking experimentation with you! The third one is set close to home, so who knows what role you may play next! 

Image: Roxanne Varzi (left) and Sherine Hamdy, photograph by Erica Sutton