Ilana Gershon: What insights into coding and Silicon Valley emerge when you begin with hackers in Mexico?
Héctor Beltrán: Starting from Mexico reveals how Silicon Valley’s celebrated flexibility is actually quite rigid about who gets to be flexible and where. During my fieldwork, the mainstream narrative was that tech is open, meritocratic, and borderless. But when Mexican hacker-entrepreneurs register their startups as Delaware C Corporations or name their apps in English instead of Spanish just to be taken seriously, they’re not simply “entering the global tech economy.” They’re exposing how that economy is structured around very specific forms of presence and legitimacy. One research participant told me his team realized “if they think we’re a Mexican startup, nobody will pay attention to us.” This isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.
What I found most striking was how hackers used coding concepts to analyze these dynamics. They’d talk about their relationships with investors using the language of “loose coupling”—a software design principle where components interact without needing to know each other’s internal workings. For them, loose coupling became a way to maintain autonomy while navigating institutions that simultaneously fetishized and devalued their labor. They were loosely coupled to tech companies, to government programs, to the promises of the Aztec Tiger economy—the promise that Mexico would become a tech powerhouse (like the Asian Tigers of South Korea, Taiwan, and so on).
But here’s where it gets interesting: loose coupling is celebrated in code design precisely because it creates modularity and replaceability. Mexican hackers recognized they were being positioned as replaceable talent, present when needed, disposable when not. So they turned the metaphor back on the system, using it to think critically about the political economy they were embedded in. This is what I call “code work”: the labor of using coding logics not just to build software, but to analyze and navigate social and political relations.
Ilana Gershon: I am quite struck by your argument that coding strongly shapes the ways in which hackers understand how to create social change. Could you talk a little bit about how coding practices around loose coupling and looping shape how Mexican hackers try to create larger political changes?
Héctor Beltrán: The hacker school in Mexico City offers a perfect example. The founders loved hackathons so much they wanted to “live the hackathon every day”: to extend what’s typically a weekend event into an ongoing way of life. But instead of creating a permanent space, they made their bootcamp nomadic, moving through different locations in twelve-week cycles. Each cycle was a batch of students, and when a batch finished training, they’d work within tech companies or government offices where they were being recruited for their coding skills. If there was no good match—if the organization might compromise the hacker ethic they’d carefully cultivated—the hacker would return to the next batch and try again. They called this “catching an exception.”
These aren’t just cute metaphors. In programming, exception handling is how you plan for things going wrong. A defensive programmer anticipates failures and writes special cases to handle them. The hacker school was doing exactly this with employment relationships. Instead of responding desperately to job postings, they systematically analyzed workplace dynamics, interviewed workers about retention and nepotism, and treated each placement as an iteration: a loop with a conditional. If conditions weren’t met, loop again.
This iterative, looping approach to social change differs fundamentally from both revolutionary rupture and liberal incrementalism. It’s more like what performance artist David Morison Portillo does with “border looping” in his collaboration with anthropologist Rihan Yeh, Border Vueltas / Looping Fronterizo—crossing the San Ysidro port of entry repeatedly to expose the system’s rituals and constraints. The repetition isn’t failure; it’s methodology. Each iteration reveals more about how power operates.
But I want to be clear: this isn’t some techno-utopian fantasy where coding logic solves political problems. Many of my research participants got caught reproducing the same flexibility that exploited them. The code work can be a tool for critique, but it can also reinforce the neoliberal logics that ask young people to endlessly optimize themselves. The question I kept returning to was: when does thinking with the code help you see the system differently, and when does it just make you better at surviving within it?
Ilana Gershon: Your interlocutors encounter quite a few stigmatizing stereotypes in the course of being entrepreneurs/hackers. What aspects of coding logic do they use when responding to contexts rift with stereotypes?
Héctor Beltrán: The concept that came up most was “pivoting,” that Silicon Valley buzzword about rapidly adapting your product to align with the market. But my research participants also pivoted their identities, their language practices, their entire presentation of self. Javo, whose story anchors the final chapter, pivoted his startup from an anti-corruption voting fraud app to a pizza delivery system when that’s what investors wanted to hear. But more revealingly, he pivoted between being recognizably Mexican in some spaces and invisible as Mexican in others.
At a tech festival in Mexico, he wore the sombrero, waved the flag, performed enthusiastic Mexicanness for the live feedback to Silicon Valley headquarters. But when pitching to US investors, he emphasized his US presence—his San Francisco address, his “perfect English” inherited from his El Paso-born grandmother. He learned exactly when to leverage being “a hungry Mexican who knows the market” and when to render that identity invisible.
What’s fascinating is that Javo explicitly theorized this. He told me investors had asked whether his entire team was Mexican, implying they’d run things the Mexican way. So he learned to code-switch not just linguistically but ontologically: to pivot his presence across what I call the techno-Borderlands. The term pivot gave him a framework to understand and strategically navigate the racialized politics of tech work.
But this individual maneuvering has limits. The stereotypes Javo encountered (that Mexicans lack entrepreneurial culture, that they’re backward, that they need their “chip” changed—literally a government slogan: “todos con el mismo chip”) aren’t bugs in the system. They’re features. They justify paying Mexican programmers two to five times less than their US counterparts while celebrating Mexico as a source of raw talent.
Ilana Gershon: You studied a Latina hackathon, what did you discover about the gendered divisions of labor in computing?
Héctor Beltrán: The women’s hackathon was advertised as “the first for women by women in Latin America,” focused on designing “intelligent homes.” On the surface, this looks like classic gendered segregation: women designing domestic technologies, reinforcing their association with home and family. And yes, those dynamics were present. But something more interesting happened.
The organizers strategically used Arduino kits to place participants at a higher level of the computing stack; they could manipulate sensors and data without needing to master lower-level programming. This allowed women with different technical backgrounds to participate as peers. More importantly, it created space for a surprise intervention that’s become readers’ favorite ethnographic moment: the arrival of the abuelitas.
At the end of the hackathon, grandmothers showed up to cheer for their granddaughters. Their presence completely shifted the event’s meaning. In computing cultures, “grandmother” is typically deployed as the figure of technological incompetence—”make it simple enough for your grandmother to use/understand.” But here, the abuelitas weren’t passive recipients of explanation. Their presence asserted something fundamental: they were the infrastructure that made the hackathon possible. The domestic labor, the childcare, the intergenerational support; this was the actual “bottom layer of the stack” that enabled everything else.
One participant told me her abuelita “es la que ayuda en todo del día a día. Ella es la que se encarga de todo” (she’s the one that helps with everything in the day to day. She is the one that is in charge of everything). The abuelitas displaced the male tech mentors standing along the walls in their Google shirts—mentors who functioned as both reminders of the gendered hierarchy of expertise and a form of male surveillance over the women’s work. The abuelitas effectively reminded everyone that before you can code, someone has to make it possible for you to sit down and code.
Ilana Gershon: At the end of your book, you talk about how some of your interlocutors gradually transformed their initial ideas into an imminently fundable startup that could assist activists and NGOs in the global South. What lessons do you draw from this example?
Héctor Beltrán: Javo’s trajectory—from politics to pizzas and back to politics—is one of the book’s answers to whether code work can enable meaningful social change. His team’s app, “Pingafy,” used mesh networking to let phones communicate without internet or cellular service. They initially developed it thinking about earthquake response in Mexico City. But the app escaped their control in productive ways. Protesters in Hong Kong, Myanmar, and Ukraine started using it to organize away from government surveillance.
The surprise was that Javo accomplished this by doing what Silicon Valley ideology claims to value: focusing on the product, staying apolitical, working on the technology itself. He explicitly would say “we don’t support or not support anyone; we are just a tool.” This seemingly depoliticized stance actually enabled a deeply political outcome because he focused on the root layers of the computing stack: the underlying protocols that enable communication, not just the surface-level features.
There’s an important lesson here about where to aim your intervention. A lot of hackathons produce apps that are really just technological fixes, solutions that avoid addressing systemic issues. Javo’s original anti-corruption app, designed to report voting fraud in Mexico, fell into this trap. But by working on fundamental communication infrastructure, his team created something protesters could appropriate for their own purposes.
That said, I don’t want to romanticize this as a simple success story. Javo’s team received millions in venture capital because investors saw what they understood as disruptive technology, not because they cared about protesters. The app works for social movements, but it also works within capitalist logics of value extraction. And Javo’s path required forms of privilege (mobility, linguistic capital, elite university connections) that most Mexican hacker-entrepreneurs don’t have.
The real lesson is about connecting what I call code work to border work. Javo’s transnational experience—shuttling between Mexico and Silicon Valley, navigating shifting markers of race and nation, learning when to perform Mexicanness and when to render it invisible—gave him the analytical tools to understand how different systems operate. He learned to think with the code not just about software architecture, but about political economy, about how structures of innovation repeatedly reassemble into structures of inequality, iteration after iteration.
That’s what I mean by border-code-workers: people who can connect technical logics with critical consciousness about power. It’s one of the final keywords I offer readers in the book’s glossary, structured like the documentation or manuals programmers would appreciate, another bridge I’m trying to build with this work. The book ends with this provocation: if we want technology to serve liberatory ends, we can’t just teach more people to code. We need to cultivate hackers who understand that the code work can never stand alone. It has to be tightly coupled with the harder work of dismantling the borders (geographic, racial, gendered, economic) that determine whose hacking gets celebrated and whose gets criminalized.
Tony Webster: I want to say how much I enjoyed reading your book Language and Political Subjectivity: Stancemaking, Power and Politics in Chile and Venezuela. It’s really a wonderful and thoughtful book. I appreciated, especially, the chapter on Mata-U’iroa Atan’s poetry, and given I’d just read Janet McIntosh’s Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics, which also includes a chapter on poetry, it seems, to borrow a title from John Berger, which I think rather appropriate, that “the hour of poetry” has come round at last. But, I’m not going to ask about poetry, not directly anyway.
Juan, I know how much Jonathan Hill meant to you as a scholar and a mentor, and I see his influence in this book, so I’d like to ask you to say a bit about Jonathan and his influence on you and your work. Miki, not to exclude you, I’d open it up more broadly to you, to ask about intellectual ancestors and their influence on your work as well.
Juan Luis Rodríguez: Jonathan’s influence is all over this book, most obviously in our theorization of truth. His work on myth in Amazonia has been hugely influential in South American ethnography, and it has shown me personally the way to tackle the relation between discourse and social reality. Myth for Jonathan was history in the words of Amazonian speakers, not just a surface manifestation of their mental structure. For him, attending to myth was attending to the political and power relationship between Amazonian communities and the colonial forces of nation-states settling around them. There is then a direct relationship between that work on myth in Amazonia and my preoccupations with truth and the settling of national truth both in Venezuela and the contexts in which Venezuelans have been forced to move as diasporic subjects. These are things I learned from Jonathan while hearing him hammer away on the importance of discourse, power and history while walking two steps behind him as we walked around campus not knowing if he was still talking directly to me or to himself.
Miki Makihara: For me, that attention to truth is essential because it is what connects an individual speaker’s self and beliefs to history. How do people use linguistic forms to move history forward or capture collective attention? This question is central to Joe Errington’s work on Indonesia. Combining that focus on history and common attention is the basis for our emphasis on stancemaking in the book. Micaela di Leonardo sparked my interest in political economy which helped me to ground our semiotic and linguistic theorization of power.
Both: We should also add that ultimately, what brought us together on this specific project was a deep appreciation for concrete, everyday discourse. This came from our shared engagement with scholars like Joel Sherzer, Bambi Schieffelin, and Elinor Ochs. For Miki, it was also directly shaped by her early study with and work as a research assistant for Niko Besnier on Nukulaelae, Tuvalu. For Juan, it grew out of the countless times Juan interrupted you, Tony, in your office in Carbondale, Illinois. These experiences taught us to ground our biggest theoretical questions in the fine-grained details of how people actually talk.
Tony Webster: I think one of the more striking and distinctive things about the book is its collaborative nature, so I’d like to ask you to say a bit about that collaborative process. It seems, not just a shared writing project, but a shared research project.
Juan Luis Rodríguez: That collaborative spirit is something we both learned from our mentors. For me, as a relatively early career linguistic anthropologist, one of the most fortunate things was landing in a department where I found true mentorship. As I’ve learned over time, that isn’t always common. But in my case I found a colleague that took me under her guidance and from whom I truly learned this style of collaborative work.
Miki Makihara: While I learned fieldwork and solo writing from Niko, it was Bambi Schieffelin who introduced me to the modalities and rewards of deep collaborative writing soon after I arrived in New York. Working with her on the book Consequences of Contact was a marvelous experience. We applied that exact model to this book, literally weaving together every single sentence of the book over the course of many long working sessions. And this collaboration was not just about writing but about truly doing research together and creating a synergetic interaction.
Tony Webster: There seems currently in linguistic anthropology an attempt to delimit or contain the sweep of language ideologies; you cite Gal and Irvine on this point, and one could add Paul Kroskrity’s recent work on language ideological assemblages, that language ideologies can’t mean everything, and there needs to be some rethinking of the concept. Your intervention here, is to argue for lived beliefs and corporeal consciousness, which aren’t meant to replace language ideologies, but rather to refocus some of the conversation. Have I got this right, or am I misreading your argument?
Both: That’s an excellent reading of our argument. Language ideologies have been an influential idea in linguistic anthropology in one form or another for almost half a century. We are not trying to replace or delimit the concept of language ideologies, but to zoom in on how they are actually lived and felt, clarifying its relationship to subjectivity, experience, and practice. For us, an ideology isn’t a fixed set of ideas that people download into their minds and take up as awareness. It’s something that has to be built, felt, and transformed through lived experience. We focus on corporeal consciousness because these beliefs aren’t just abstract thoughts; they are felt in the body, often in ways that aren’t fully articulated. That is the lesson we draw from Raymond Williams. It is not that people are aware of experience or not but whether and how experience becomes available to thoughtful and feelingful actors. For example, when the Navajo poet Blackhorse Mitchell told you during fieldwork that he wanted to “give the listener an imagination,” he wasn’t just trying to convey ideas; he was trying to share an experience. This is a point that Rapa Nui poets also emphasize.
That is also what our concept of stancemaking gets at. It’s the messy, ongoing process where we use language to become and reshape ourselves and the world. Ideologies are not clear sets of ideas that are already existing but something that has to be made and transformed through experience and action. Ideologies are such semiotic objects embodied in behaviors. Languages are such embodied ideologies. They do not just guide and narrow our perception of the world, nor do they just allow speakers to intentfully do things with words, but more importantly we use them to become and reshape ourselves in society. They are in a constant state of becoming in relation to our positions in the world. This, we believe, is in line with Gal and Irvine’s idea of the partiality of language ideologies, and also Kroskrity’s idea of language ideological assemblages. Ideas such as a Chilean democratic nation-state, a pure Rapa Nui language, or that “we Venezuelans come from the future” are powerful, but they are always partial and always in the making. Our project is to understand how these partial ideas are incorporated, believed, and made real in the world
We want to emphasize experience as a process for the making of the individual and subjective world. This experience is felt and becomes intimate to the individual body. It is not just learned to become an object of thinking. Think of the Rapa Nui poet Mata-U’iroa Atan. He does not just list political grievances. He grounds his truth in personal, bodily experience to create an exemplary self for future generations of Rapa Nui speakers. He wants to convey what it feels like to have ancestors.
Tony Webster: The book is–while certainly ethnographic–densely theoretical and an attempt to map out a set of theoretical terms to account for diasporic communities and Indigenous communities in their struggles for sense-making. Many of the concepts, stancemaking most obviously, are meant to be portable and usable beyond the particulars of this book. But for me, I think your rethinking of truth is particularly insightful (Chapter 4 especially). But, I’ll leave the question more open-ended, what do you see as the most portable of the concepts you introduce, and why?
Both: That’s a great question. We put a lot of care into developing concepts that could travel, and three stand out for us. First, as you mentioned, is truth. This is no coincidence as we pointed out in the answer to your first question. We’re concerned with the future of diasporic communities, both indigenous and not indigenous, who are facing larger nation-state formations that threaten their very existence. In places like Chile, the idea of truth has been central to democracy since the end of the dictatorship. The idea that it is possible to agree on truth is also driving political efforts all over the world and is challenged with almost equal intensity everywhere. We try to show how settling on a constructed national truth is a political project. Whose testimony counts? In Chile, the voices of victims of the dictatorship were collected as testimonies and platformed as powerful national symbols. But these testimonies make the individual voice controllable in the name of peaceful coexistence. On the other hand, the voices of Indigenous peoples in their own truth commission were largely substituted with so-called expert knowledge. So, for us, truth isn’t about facts alone; it’s about the political process of fixing belief and the struggles over whose voice and experience are counted as real and recognized. We hope this is a useful lens for analyzing truth claims in other places as well.
Politics and power are also two twin terms we rethink in the book. We are inspired by Bakhtin’s centripetal and centrifugal forces of language in culture, which we think of as two co-existing and opposing forms of agency. Power is a cohesive centripetal force. Things like discipline, control, modeling, conventionalization and exemplarity compel and pull people together. We suggest that power is always anticipatory to ways in which this cohesion can be challenged and disrupted. This disruption comes from transgression. Politics is the centrifugal force – the acts of transgression and disruption that challenge social boundaries and the status quo. There is no guarantee of balance between them; authoritarian rule can emerge (as we have witnessed both in Chile and Venezuela but also now here in the U.S.), but so can radical change. This framework allows ethnographers to analyze the constant tension between forces of cohesion and forces of disruption in broad social contexts.
Finally, the idea of stance-making itself was key. At the beginning, it was puzzling to us. We knew what we wanted to say but were uncertain about what to call it. Stance taking and footing were appealing concepts but the idea of subjects positioning themselves in front of a fixed object was unsatisfactory. Social actors make themselves through these positions but also create others and the objects they pay attention to. We were uncertain what to call a process in which not just the object of attention or the subject emerged, but where relationship and perspective building was also the point. We wanted to emphasize the dialogical and dialectical relationship between self and object (including other selves). This was a meaning making process not just a matter of positioning. There was also no obvious straight named concept neither in Spanish nor Japanese that we could resort to for this, but we knew of breadmaking and as a noun in English, so stancemaking captured the idea for us of a process of worldmaking. Stancemaking produces a subjectivity (understood as a point of view in the world) that has consequences for the world and for others we share it with.
Tony Webster: There are number of striking and moving bits of ethnography in this book, and for me, one of the more moving parts of the book, is the discussion about the distinction between intimacy and cherishing of Rapa Nui; first I think many of us who have worked in such situations can appreciate this distinction, but secondly, and this is a testament to Miki’s work, one also sees this distinction unfolding in time. I wonder if you could say something, first about this distinction, and then, secondly, something about the value of long-term ethnographic research.
Miki Makihara: That distinction is really at the emotional and intellectual core of the book, and it was something I only came to grasp through long-term ethnographic research. It was challenging to express and make sense of the complex nature of what we call language cherishing and its relationship to what scholars such as Sapir, and you, have theorized about feelingful attachment to language. When I first arrived in Rapa Nui, the dominant academic narrative was one of survival and imminent language death. The historical trauma was undeniable – the devastating slave raids, epidemics, European missionization, and Chilean colonization in the 19th century had left deep scars. But the language I encountered didn’t feel like it was disappearing. It felt intensely alive, repeatedly reconstructing itself. On the streets and in homes, I heard this fluid, dynamic, multilingual talk. Rapa Nui sociality was vibrant, open, and creative, spilling over any neat linguistic boundaries the school textbooks and dictionaries suggested. There was profound dissonance between the tragic story of vanishing voices and the resilient, lively community I was living with.
What I witnessed over thirty years was not a simple loss, but a profound transformation, especially in the community’s relationship with their language. On the one hand, I did see a clear sign of language shift and decline in what we call intimacy — that effortless, everyday, fluency that comes from being immersed in a language from birth. Children were growing up speaking Spanish, and a generational gap was growing. But at the same time, I witnessed the powerful rise of what we call cherishing. This is a more conscious, deliberate, and deeply political act of valuing the language as a sacred symbol of genealogical continuity. I saw this cherishing in so many forms: in the painstaking work of elders such as Nico Haoa, who formed a language restructuration committee and meticulously documented and purified the ancestral language. I saw it in the fierce, tireless advocacy of young teachers such as Viki Haoa and Hiralia Tuki, who battled the ministry of education to allow them to teach the Rapa Nui language in the school. I saw it in children who had spoken mostly Spanish at home growing into young adults, coming back from higher education on the Continent, to become fierce public advocates for Rapa Nui, demanding Rapa Nui be taught at schools. And I saw it with young parents, themselves not so fluent speakers, struggling to reclaim their language (re)learning it anew right alongside their own children.
These forms of cherishing became somewhat at odds with the liveliness and diversity of multilingual speech as they seem to lead the development of consciousness about language boundaries and policing. This leads to a painful paradox that we saw activists grapple with constantly: people love their language so fiercely that they feel unworthy of speaking it imperfectly. This explains why they demand government support for the language in schools, yet remain puzzled as to why families don’t enforce it at home. Most children learn to respect and love the Rapa Nui language, but they find it incredibly difficult to reclaim that effortless intimacy with it. Understanding this complex emotional landscape—this mix of commitment, joy, and frustration—was only possible by accompanying the community for decades, watching children grow into activists and witnessing their tireless work of cultural reconstruction firsthand.
Both: Cherishing and intimacy occupy overlapping but distinct places in our theorization of stancemaking. Miki’s experience of Rapa Nui sociality and Juan’s experience of Warao relationship with the Venezuelan state have taught us that a sense of attachment with linguistic form can be something complicated. Intimacy is better understood as a sense of closeness with the linguistic forms that speakers feel as their own and around which a sense of identity and closeness to other speakers can be generated. This sense of closeness and attachment is a product of a process of socialization that can make speakers feel at home in their own language by closing the gap between speakers and the linguistic forms they use. But what happens if respecting and loving one’s language actually produces insecurity and a gap between the speaker and the correct, pure and beloved linguistic form? These are situations in which speakers get to appreciate and name linguistic forms with which they are affectively invested but also have a sense of distance from them. Cherishing then is a form of attachment defined by a certain distance. We feel that the work of closing the dissonance between intimacy and cherishing is central to the challenges we find in the preservation and revitalization of indigenous languages everywhere.
My dissertation, Being Both: Negotiating Identity, Surveillance, and Belonging within Queer Middle Eastern and Queer Muslim Communities in the United States, explores how queer Muslims and queer Middle Eastern people in the U.S. navigate overlapping systems of Islamophobia, racialization, and homotransphobia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and in digital spaces between 2020 and 2022, I analyze how surveillance and social scrutiny shape how people express identity and belonging across different audiences—family, friends, lovers, and online publics.
Page 99 captures the fraught intimacy of recognition online. I describe how a simple greeting—“I’m a Muslim too”—on a gay dating app can evoke both connection and fear. For queer Muslim men, such moments are charged with risk: being identified as Muslim might affirm kinship, but it can also expose them to outing, gossip, or familial shame. As one passage reads,
“Even though the risk may be small that screenshots of their Grindr profile and photos could be seen by family and friends, queer Muslim and Middle Eastern men are highly concerned about proactively managing the consequences if such a data breach were to occur. This anxiety about data insecurity shapes decisions they make about expressing ethnic and religious identity on gay dating apps and often limits their willingness to share personal information with other men who look like them until they know their interlocutor can be trusted.”
This moment distills a central theme of my project: the tension between visibility and safety. I call this dynamic observational discipline—the anticipatory awareness of being seen and the strategic effort to manage that gaze. Page 99 shows how technological infrastructures of dating and surveillance intersect with cultural and moral frameworks, producing a distinct affective terrain of cautious desire and mediated belonging.
Across the dissertation, queer Muslim and Middle Eastern participants navigate which versions of themselves can be legible and to whom. Through these micro-practices of watching and withholding, they create new possibilities for being both—queer and Muslim, Middle Eastern and American—within social worlds that often render such coexistence impossible.
Since completing the dissertation, I have been teaching business communication at Indiana University, where questions of identity, audience, and representation remain central to my work. Returning to page 99 reminds me that every act of communication, however brief, is also a negotiation of risk, recognition, and belonging.
Josh Reno: I just finished your book a week ago, and I feel like it is still happening to me. It is so good at exploring anxious, uncertain moments before there’s a sense of shared understanding. It could have been called “There was only now” (p 51), which is one of many lines that I loved. The only now has been the subject of intense phenomenological scrutiny, of course, but I feel like you found a way to recreate the “ache of [social] action” again and again with each chapter, to paraphrase Loïc Wacquant. How did you approach this problem of the only now? Would you agree that the only now is hard to capture anthropologically, or perhaps capture at all?
Danilyn Rutherford: I would absolutely agree that the only now is hard to capture anthropologically and maybe at all. That’s a really great question. I think there are three ways to answer it.
One way is through my training as an anthropologist. My dissertation chair was Jim Siegel. I read Derrida before I read any anthropologist other than Clifford Geertz. I had read The Religion of Java while I was living in Java; that was before I came to Cornell. Jim’s work is really difficult to paraphrase or turn into a soundbite. But one of the things that has struck me in Jim’s thinking, particularly in his book Naming the Witch, is the way that social relations begin with an incursion from outside. This was Jim’s way of thinking about the gift. The gift by definition is something you don’t deserve or expect. And yet it sets in motion a response that can, under certain conditions, be the precondition for creating a social relationship with another person. This view is consistent with the Derridean critique of presence. For Jim, following Derrida, the only now could only ever be a shock, a shock that has not yet been domesticated and turned into something that we think we can understand. So there’s that whole line of theoretical stuff that I’ve always found really interesting. As a little kid, I was always asking, “How do things work? Where do they come from?” I’ve always had a tendency to ask these kinds of questions.
But then there is this second factor, something I try to capture in the book, which is the difference between who I was before my husband died and who I am now. I wrote about Craig’s death as a moment when someone with clear expectations about how her life was going to unfold suddenly had those expectations blown out of the water. The story I’d been telling myself about my future was gone. On the one hand, I try to describe the horror and terror of that—and it was a terrible period of life. But other things came out of that experience that have stuck with me. One of them is the realization that you absolutely don’t know what’s going to happen from one second to the next. That realization brings with it a certain grace. You start asking yourself why you’re getting up in the morning. Why are you in this world? If you can’t be present in this current moment, what’s the point?
Craig’s death transformed the way I thought about teaching. It transformed the way I thought about my relationships with people. I’m a poodle owner. For poodles, there’s the pack, and then there’s the rest of the world. Poodles bark at the rest of the world. I was not really a barker—I’ve always been pretty well behaved. But I definitely had this sense that my Craig and the children were my pack, that they were my source of support. One of the things that happened with Craig’s death was that I embraced the relationships I had always had around me, with students, colleagues, friends, and a lot of other people who really helped me through this difficult time. The desire to be present in current moment came out of this very personal experience, and it put me in a position to be present with Millie and to recognize, and to narrate to myself, the importance of that as part of what it is to be with her in the world.
So there’s the anthropological, and there’s the life experience. And then there’s Millie. “For Millie, there’s only now.” I wrote this, but it’s not totally fair. I think what happens with Millie, as far as I can tell, has to do with how temporality unfolds for her, which involves a level of attunement and awareness that’s far beyond mine. She is very interested in patterns. She has very keen hearing. No one listens to music the way Millie does. In music, the present moment is never completely the present moment. Listening to music involves anticipating what will come next and retaining what’s just happened. Millie loves listening to my partner play the electric guitar. There are particular chord changes that she really loves. They’re a little bit surprising, but they also kind of make sense. That sort of experience is something she totally digs. And if you want to be with her, she will teach you how to dig it too. That kind of only now, for me, has been more than just an antidote to careerism. Careerism pretty much got thrashed out of me by Craig’s death. Being with Millie has helped me think in a deeper way about sensory experiences, experiences of time and space that we spend a lot of time passing over because we’re so narrative in the way we think ourselves and about our lives. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
Joshua Reno: That makes total sense! And I love that response. And you’ve reminded me to go back and dig up Naming the Witch, because I just picked up a volume on Witch Studies that came out this year. I’m enjoying it a lot, and I’d forgotten about the Siegel book. So, thank you.
Danilyn Rutherford: The Siegel book is quite bold, but I think it’s interesting. It’s connected to what in a sense this book is doing. Siegel wants to make the argument that there is something outside of what we call culture. There’s something beyond society that gives rise to society or bursts it apart. As a sociocultural anthropologist, I’m drawn to that kind of bold thinking. Without wanting to be universalizing or impose my answers on anyone, I’m drawn to those kinds of problems.
Joshua Reno: In that response, you’ve talked about knowing things about yourself and also knowing what your tendencies are, knowing what your history is with the thoughts you enjoy thinking and the problems that attract your interest going way back. There is a sense in which, even more than Millie, because you’re the narrator, we’re following you, your experience, and your voice throughout the book. Would you agree that your book has as much to say, therefore, about memory as about disability? I think it does, and that’s because you are digging through decades of your life, and that kind of complicated present of the only now is shown to be more than just what’s immediately available. It is also at work in how the past and future live uncomfortably in each of us. Perhaps most poignant, at least for me, is the dream you had. You don’t say that it was a dream about running into Craig. Actually, the way you put it is that you had a dream about running into a memory of Craig. So there’s a memory of Craig at O’Hare that you had, and you had a dream of that memory. Which is an interesting way of putting it. You get lost in some of these memories. You dwell in them like they’re happening still. The cross country one with all the things you’re imagining could have gone wrong. You’re imagining that everything is terrible, even though things turned out fine. And so then the question is, is that the beautiful mystery? Are you also a beautiful mystery to yourself in the process of writing this book and uncovering these memories? Memories that you re-remembered in the process of writing this book?
Danilyn Rutherford: That’s really a great question. I’m a mystery; not sure how beautiful that one is! But the short answer is, yes, I think that’s absolutely the case.
I’m going to veer a bit into form and the history of this particular book. When Millie was in early intervention, I had this idea that I wanted to write about Millie. I was fascinated by the whole What to ExpectWhen You’re Expecting phenomenon. I was a reluctant mother. I was not someone who grew up thinking that I wanted to be a mother; I got talked into it. So I was like, “Wow, what? Nothing is happening as I expected!” Then I moved to Santa Cruz, and on a lark I went to a workshop for parents of disabled people with a writing instructor, Laura Davis, who had us do something called “writing practice.” I loved it, and I started taking classes with her. I started generating a lot of material. In writing practice, you don’t outline or think ahead; you just write as vividly as you can about whatever is closest to your mind.
Then I started taking a feedback class with memoir writers. Memoir writers think a lot about this problem of memory and writing and the unreliability of memory. I think Freud talks about this—just because something didn’t happen doesn’t mean it doesn’t have force. It can be not true, but real. This sense of how memory works through you is something I tried to capture in this book. At the same time, there is this idea of flashbulb memory. When dramatic things happen in your life, those moments get imprinted for you. Maybe they’re constructed; all memory is constructed. But they are recalled vividly once you make yourself write in a way that isn’t experience-distant description but actually gets into the positionality of that character, that past self. Stuff comes back.
For the whole period around Craig’s death, including that dream, I have very vivid memories, some of which made it into the book, some of which didn’t. Because that’s the other side of the question. Beautiful Mystery is very much constructed. It’s a book, right? I had these writing practice pieces, which were out of my life, but then I also had ethnographic materials. I did a really good job of recording and videotaping interviews. I had transcriptions. Word-for-word transcriptions that I would bring into a chapter. Well, word-per-word transcriptions don’t make for good reading. You know? You have to edit interviews for them to actually make sense. So there’s that play of narration, of what you can recover, and what you can’t.
Then there’s the whole question of Millie’s memory. That was at the front of my mind throughout that entire early period, and kind of still is. The mystery of memory, it’s really something. And also the patchiness of memory. There are people I will never forget, people I hung out with the first time I lived in Indonesia. There are other people, American friends who contact me, and I can’t, for the life of me, put my finger on how we know each other. But I have to believe them when they say we do. It’s always kind of embarrassing. Certain things are really vivid. Certain things are not. There’s also the way the past is present in the present, the future is present in the present, there are all those moments when we’re in other places while we’re operating in the world. That’s absolutely part of my experience, and I imagine it’s part of a lot of people’s experience. I’m glad I capture that, because it is an important aspect of human experience.
The other thing I’ll say is that I’ve been thinking a lot about aging and what happens when you get older and time really speeds up. How memory works for me now. It’s not at all even. That’s the other thing that’s mysterious about memory. Your experience of time passing is very uneven. Your experience of the length of an interval is very uneven. Any writer who tries to work from memory is going to discover all of this really quickly.
Joshua Reno: I suspect this book covers the largest time span of any book you’ve written.
A review of the exhibit Dolly Parton: Journey of a Seeker at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Nashville, TN
By Sarah D. Phillips
The exhibit Dolly Parton: Journey of a Seeker opened in May 2025 at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. It advances a straightforward argument: Nothing about the 79-year-old’s brilliant career was preordained. Parton worked for everything she got, in an upstream journey. She forged her own rhinestone-studded path, against the odds, and despite a whole lotta ankle-biters.
“This exhibit focuses on turning points in Parton’s life and career through the decades, where she overcame obstacles and ignored naysayers to become one of the most beloved and widely recognized celebrities across the world.”1
Familiar objects, rare treasures, and interactive features mingle in this special exhibit on Parton’s career and major creative and philanthropic projects. The what-Dolly-overcame narrative is a stretch at times, but overall, it’s an ingenious way to parse Parton’s legacy.
The curatorial team faced a difficult task: to compress Dolly Parton’s incredible career into a small, two-room exhibit space. Their design combines large wall texts interspersed with glass cases, a looping video, and one interactive digital station. A case with six of Dolly’s signature dresses (All Her Colors) anchors the exhibit. At least twelve other original Parton outfits are sprinkled throughout, as are shoes, boots, and a few custom musical instruments.
The exhibit’s roseate color palette lets featured wardrobe pieces pop in Dollylicious yellows, blues, and reds. Dolly’s over-the-top dresses (dripping with fringe, chiffon, and beads, some of them weigh ten pounds at least!), contrast with simpler exhibit items— historic Parton family photographs, hand-pencil-written lyrics for Jolene, and even the portable cassette recorder she used to write her greatest hits. Together, these objects encapsulate what fans love most about Dolly Parton: her bold, unapologetic style; her fierce confidence and sense of adventure; her tremendous generosity; and of course, her unparallelled talent as a songwriter and performer.
On the exhibit’s main wall, live performance clips alternate with Parton’s commentary (or dolly-tary) in a twelve-minute video loop. “I have always been a seeker, in every way. My spiritual life, my professional life, my personal life. And I’m always looking. I’m always trying to find another mountain to climb.” Parton’s words reinforce Journey of a Seeker’s narrative of overcoming, and underscore the star’s incomparable independence as an artist, performer, and businesswoman.
Here Parton highlights career challenges not otherwise explicit in the exhibit—in the late 1960s and 1970s, for example, radios refused to play her songs on taboo topics such as teen pregnancy and women’s sexuality (think The Bridge, and Bargain Store). Understated, Dolly reminds us, “It was kinda tricky for a woman, for a girl [in country music] …”
Around these two anchors (the video loop and the case of Dollytastic dresses), the exhibit unfolds chronologically. It starts with Parton’s first performance at the Grand Ole Opry—she was just thirteen years old—and her very first recording, Puppy Love, in 1959. Next comes Parton’s Dumb Blonde album and her contract with Fred Foster at Monument Records. Dolly’s pivotal Porter Wagoner era gets just one exhibit case, followed by quick attention to her early solo ventures (Jolene, I Will Always Love You, and The Seeker).
The cases devoted to Parton’s Crossing Over era—her forays into film, television, pop music, and other ventures—are the least coherent. A jumble of items competes for symbolic and literal space: Parton’s magazine covers, her 1979 Tonight Show dress, her 1989 Saturday Night Live rhinestone-encrusted cowboy boots, and others. The Screen Gem case includes perfunctory nods to her various film roles, with most attention on Rhinestone and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Parton’s Trio collaboration (with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris) inhabits the same case as her Eagle When She Flies project, a clever way to reinforce the narrative of purported overcoming. (RCM Records unceremoniously dropped Parton in 1986, but she rose up and soared to new heights.)
The last third of the exhibit centers on Parton’s philanthropic and business ventures: the Dollywood theme park and foundation, Parton’s Pre-K literacy program (The Imagination Library), and Sandollar Productions, the film production company she co-founded with LA producer Sandy Gallin.
In the rear corner, an interactive digital panel invites visitors for deep dives into Parton’s Exclusive Interviews and Live Performances. It’s a terrific idea, but the station’s placement in an already piled-up corner of the exhibit space might discourage visitors from exploring its rich features.
The final, crowded exhibit case does double duty; it highlights Parton’s Blue Mountain Return (her late-1990s/early 2000s reconnection with bluegrass and mountain music), as well as her major lifetime awards (Kennedy Center Honors, Country Music Association Honors, Country Music Hall of Fame induction, and so on). It’s a cramped finale to an otherwise well-conceived, well-paced exhibit.
Journey of a Seeker successfully maintains its narrative thrusts of overcoming and inspiration. Through poignant objects and stories, the exhibit highlights barriers that could have thwarted Parton, but didn’t. She was a poor mountain girl in a rich man’s world. Industry execs pigeon-holed her. Nashville cats doubted her cross-over potential. Prudes questioned her style. Advisers poo-pooed her Dollywood dreams. Record labels let her go. But Dolly stood tall—all sparkly and hair-teased five feet of her—and forged her own path to greatness.
Journey of a Seeker even has Parton turning obstacles into advantages. Her native and rustic backwoods—the Great Smoky Mountains—inspired her songs and signature style: butterflies, birds, flowers, and bright colors coalesced in what Dolly calls a “country girl’s idea of glam.” Critics laughed, but Parton found power in her originality—her iconic makeup, hair, nails, body shape, and clothing style. She avoided pigeonholes to cut dramatic musical marks across musical genres: country, pop, rock, and bluegrass.
The exhibit could have dwelt more on Parton’s duels with rampant sexism in the music industry, and her love-hate relationship with the domineering Porter Wagoner. After all, both challenges crystallize Journey of a Seeker’s thesis that “Dolly has demonstrated consistently that she can transform adversity and setbacks into works of stunning beauty and insight into the human condition.”2 What’s more, sex discrimination in the music business—country music in particular—is an ongoing challenge. With a narrative about what is being overcome, it is quite striking that there are some things that these days one cannot claim to have overcome—male chauvinism, a paternalistic co-worker. Is this silence part of Dolly Parton’s reluctance to engage in politics (her famous Dollitics), for fear of alienating fans or ruffling feathers?3 Is this silence the price of being non-partisan in our contemporary moment? Whatever the source of this silence, it’s a missed opportunity to educate young museum visitors about the sexism and other forms of discrimination that continue to plague the country music business.
Curiously, Parton’s husband of nearly sixty years, Carl Dean, receives no mention in the exhibit. To me, it’s a peculiar oversight, especially since Dean died just two months before the exhibit’s May 2025 opening. My husband says it was likely Carl Dean’s wish to stay out of the exhibit, reserved and publicity shy as he was. Maybe the marriage just couldn’t be wedged into the exhibit’s driving theme of Parton’s triumph over adversity.
Journey of a Seeker runs through September 2026. Road trippers might want to download the museum’s curated playlist of songs marking “turning points” in Dolly’s musical career to enjoy on the drive. Visitors should take home the gorgeous exhibit catalog ($24.95 in the museum store), and those bedazzled by Parton’s wardrobe might also check out her delicious book Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones ($50.00 in the museum store and $22.18 at online retailers).
2 Kyle Young, CEO, Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “Letter from the CEO.” Dolly Parton: Journey of a Seeker (exhibition catalog). Country Music Foundation Press (2025), p. 5.
Krakoan national co-founder Magneto explains to diplomats at the new Krakoan Embassy in Jerusalem why mutants have decided to create their own language, from House of X #1 (Hickman et al. 2019a, 32).
In 2025, wars are raging in Ukraine and Israel and too many other places, but they all come down to which peoples and lands are “real countries,” and which are merely conquered or conquerable populations and territories to be managed. As I try to make sense of it all, a person whose Slavic and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors came together in early 20th century Detroit because they all really hated the Russian empire, I can’t stop thinking about the X-Me
Stay with me.
Since folklorist Johann Herder’s work in the 18th century, language is widely understood to be a fundamental part of what makes nations distinct political and cultural entities. Language is why France is France, Spain is Spain, and Portugal is Portugal. Except, as linguists know, this isn’t how language works. Europe, like much of the world, is covered in dialect continua with neighbors in nearby towns and villages speaking recognizable varieties that form points along a gradient rather than distinct languages with clear boundaries. Provençal, Catalán, Gallego, and other local Romance varieties form exactly such a continuum from Iberia to Belgium (Chambers and Trudgill 1998, 5).
But we believe this to be true: a nation is an expression of the political will of a people with a shared culture, shared lands, and shared language, together with its repertoire of shared stories and songs, customs, habits, and all the things that set one ethnic group apart from another. Not only do we insist on these differences—we plan them and we create them and we police the boundaries between languages as a semiotic means for remaking territorial borders on a different scale (Irvine and Gal 2000).
The European examples are what I give students in introductory linguistics classes, but my own practical experiences with language planning and policy are mainly post-Soviet, from the years I spent working at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. The USSR fell apart when I was ten. One thing I remember from the 1990s is endless jokes about confusing new maps containing a gajillion new countries that no one had ever heard of before—which they hadn’t, and for good reason. Many former Soviet republics were carved out of contiguous territories occupied by related peoples, and didn’t exist as separate countries before the USSR. But for assorted governance reasons, Soviet ethnographers and linguists took Russian imperial lands and drew new boundary lines around peoples, languages, and territories, producing “Kazakh” (or “Qazaq,” as many Qazaqs prefer), “Kyrgyz,” “Uzbek,” and “Turkmen” out of the different Turkic varieties spoken across Central Asia. The goal was to give each language and ethnicity its own mini-nation within the federal framework of the USSR. (Waite 2020 has a good overview of this process).
Kazakhstan, just south of Siberia, has the dubious distinction of being the most ethnically diverse post-Soviet state, because it’s where all the “undesirables” were deported (Lillis 2017). And despite all that linguistic and ethnographic labor, the Soviet government changed its mind about the value of promoting national languages and cultures within its territories, and Russification proceeded apace after the 1930s. In the post-Soviet era, these nations have to contend with this legacy of Russification. At the same time, they also have to elevate and promote their national languages in order to justify their continued existence as separate nations. Far from being abstract or theoretical, Russian premier Vladimir Putin has used the argument that Ukrainians are basically Russians, and the Ukrainian language is also basically Russian, as an argument for invading Ukraine. Demonstrating the linguistic distinctiveness of Ukrainian language and culture is literally a question of life and death (Carter 2022).
I moved to Kazakhstan in August 2014, some months after Putin’s forces first annexed Crimea. “Oh shit, we’re next” was a pretty common sentiment in Kazakhstan at the time, with its Russified north, high percentage of ethnic Russians (around 20% of the population), and lengthy border with Russia. It is unofficially but widely acknowledged that the capital was moved from Almaty, far in the south, to Astana, smack dab in the middle of the country, in order to encourage ethnic Qazaqs to migrate north. Russian is the first language of many Kazakhstanis, regardless of ethnicity, and is an auxiliary official language.
Like Ukraine, the Kazakhstani government has an existential interest in promoting Qazaq language and culture. It helps that Qazaq is Turkic, not Slavic, and therefore considerably more linguistically distinct from Russian. But given its very diverse population (ethnic Qazaqs are now just over 71%), the government also has to disentagle Qazaq language from Qazaq ethnicity and link it instead to Kazakhstani citizenship. This is one of the reasons that Nazarbayev University exists. A certain level of Qazaq language proficiency is a requirement for all graduates, regardless of ethnicity, and the Qazaq language department is busy and large.
So why can’t I stop thinking about the X-Men? Because the X-Men live in an improbable fictional world, populated by people with extraordinary abilities, they get to do weird things like exemplify moral and cultural ideals about what nation-building and language planning could or even should look like in a more fantastic world. As with much speculative fiction, the story of the founding of Krakoa illuminates what real nations do, why they do it, and where we think we fall short in our real-world attempts to convince others that we deserve sovereignty, security, and political recognition. The X-Men get to do what independent post-Soviet republics want to do—what any aspiring ethnic state wants to do—and they get to do it better, faster, and frictionlessly. As Karlander (2025, 85) asserts, “the creation of a micronation implies an intensified commitment to statehood and the semiotics of statism, not least in their manifold nationalist guises. The micronational mimesis of state power thus enacts a specific critical stance, that is: critique without critical distance.” Micronations, real and fictional, engage in language planning, and sometimes language creation, precisely because a new nation is still a nation, and therefore needs all of the trappings of one, even if ad-hoc, satirically, or fictionally.
I’m going to assume that you know who the X-Men are if you’ve had any contact with English-language pop culture in the last 30 years. But unless you’re a really big fan, you probably don’t know about Doug Ramsey, aka Cypher. Doug’s mutant power is basically speed linguistics. He’s not well known or beloved, although the guy at my local comics shop did inform me that he’s going to be at the center of 2025’s big X-men crossover event. (Thanks, writer Jed McKay, I owe you one.) Doug’s a cute blond boy who looks like a normal human, and can’t do anything flashy or combat-oriented. His powers mostly camouflage themselves as seeming really smart. Doug’s mutation doesn’t help him learn languages instantaneously or psychically get past language barriers to communicate. He can just analyze language very quickly compared to real field linguistics. This is made most clear when Professor X, circa 2019, assigns Doug to make friends with a sentient island and learn his language, to see if the living land will itself consent to be transformed into a paradisiacal mutant island nation.
Professor Charles Xavier, telepathic mutant leader, introduces Doug Ramsey to Krakoa, the living island, in Powers of X #4 (Hickman et al. 2019c, 16).
Why might mutants want their own nation? The basic premise of X-Men is that the higher radiation levels of the atomic era created more people with inborn super-powered mutations, as opposed to acquiring superhuman abilities later in life after transformative encounters with cosmic rays, radioactive spiders, or toxic chemical sludge. As the comic develops its premise from the 1960s into the 1980s, these mutations are pinned by writers not just on ambient “radiation” writ broadly but on a specific “X-gene” that gives every mutant a shared genetic heritage.
Superheroes like the Fantastic Four are small teams held together by ties of kinship, friendship, and shared traumatic cosmic ray experiences. However, the hereditary quality of mutant powers and physiology makes mutants a large cohesive group, like an ethnic minority. Politically and biologically speaking, they are seen as born this way. This makes them uniquely appealing targets for eugenic discrimination and exploitation, depending on whether the people around them think mutations are good or bad, and whether they envy mutants or want to eradicate them. Pop-culture commentator, writer, and activist Jay Edidin (along with podcast partner Miles Stokes) has specifically called this “the mutant metaphor,” enabling mutants to stand in for whichever marginalized group an author might want to tell a story about: ethnic minorities, gender and sexual minorities, people living with disabilities (Ackerman 2018). Because of mutants’ textual and allegorical properties as a cohesive group who face unique discrimination, they tend to stick together.
Much like real marginalized populations, some mutants espouse the virtues of nationalism or separatism, which produces enclaves like villain Magneto’s mutant supremacist Acolytes, or microstates like Genosha in the 1990s or Utopia in the 2010s. Doug Ramsey’s assignment to make friends with the island of Krakoa is actually mutankind’s third attempt at nation-building. Krakoa is different in large part because it’s planned. Genosha and Utopia were created opportunistically and haphazardly, governed by authoritarians with minimal political structure. By contrast, Krakoa has a government, and not just a self-appointed leader. It has laws. It has a security apparatus (and the comic dedicated to it is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read). But perhaps most importantly, it has a language. The language is not the island’s own native tongue, which Doug does learn. In fact, no one else can speak to Krakoa directly, which gives Doug a special position in the government as the voice of the land itself. But the mutant national language, Krakoan, is Doug’s creation, and it’s psychically taught to every mutant who passes through the living gates that teleport them to and from and around the island.
Information page explaining Doug’s linguistic accomplishments and showing the Krakoan alphabet, from House of X #3 (Hickman et al. 2019b, 30).
A world with language superpowers and instantaneous, telepathic language learning means that mutants don’t need Krakoan to communicate with each other. The X-Men has featured many US American characters, but it also has Latin American, Québécois, Russian, Kenyan, Indigenous American and Australian, Japanese, and Afghani characters—lots of mutants whose first or preferred language might not be English. But mutant telepaths can and do teach everyone else any language they might need. Before Krakoa, being a mutant means being cosmopolitan polyglot. But, as we see so often in antisemitic rhetoric, being a cosmopolitan polyglot is the opposite of being a citizen of a shared nation with a shared cultural heritage (Barenblat 2018). Jews are never really citizens of the countries where they live—and neither, it seems, are mutants.
If mutants want to be taken seriously as a people, with the right to determine their own political destiny, then they need all the recognizable trappings of peoplehood. Magneto’s statement that mutants need a shared language to build a shared culture in order to eventually be a real nation is not true, as a matter of linguistic or anthropological fact, but it’s also an understandable impulse that reflects how nations legitimate themselves in real life.
It’s not an accident that Magneto, long-time mutant defender and separatist, shows up in Jerusalem to formally announce Krakoa’s founding to the diplomats of the world. He is famously a German Jew and Holocaust survivor. Israel is the place where he originally met his best frenemy and ex-boyfriend, Professor Charles Xavier, leader of the X-Men. The X-Men’s politics, and Magneto’s in particular, have often reflected internal Israeli and diaspora Jewish politics (Elbein 2024). It’s not an accident that part of the Zionist project to create Israel involved reviving Hebrew as an everyday language while actively rejecting the hybrid languages that Jews developed in diaspora: Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic (Schweid 1984). Likewise, I’m sure it’s not an accident that, in building Krakoa, mutants too reject multilingual, diasporic language practices. And it’s probably not an accident that Krakoa is a nation that can be built without a Nakba, founded on consenting, sentient land that offers itself up as a home for mutants (Goldsmith 2020). Krakoa is nation-building done right, or at least, an attempt at it.
Marvel Comics are not JRR Tolkein, nor HBO, nor Star Trek, and they did not hire anyone to come up with an actual Krakoan language. In the comics, it’s represented with an alternate alphabet that only loosely diverges from English Latin in its character inventory. But although it’s just a cipher, it clearly stands in for an actual different language in the comics, unintelligible to others, as when mutant characters speak in Krakoan to each other to communicate when being surveilled or in hostile circumstances.
Mutant gladiator Shatterstar says “hi” to mutant detective Polaris in Krakoan. X-Factor #3 (Williams et al. 2020).
Language is not mutants’ only cultural endeavor. On Krakoa, mutants work to cultivate mutant fashion, literature, and perhaps most notably, mutant religion. They work towards mutant-specific visions of justice and peace, of accountability, of sexual ethics and relationships. But by their own account, it is a shared mutant language that makes this possible, that makes mutants a people, a nation, and not just a motley collection of freaks. The vision of Krakoa requires a linguist to negotiate with the island, to speak for the island, and finally to design their utopian language and fashion a script for it, not unlike the literary standards and scripts created for the newly distinguished Turkic languages of the USSR. It requires a rejection of the cosmopolitan and embrace of the monolingual, the pastoral, the folkloric, as mutants elaborate their own national mythology, and comics writers deepen the lore, writing and rewriting our own modern myths. Magneto, the villain of X-Men #1, is now one of Krakoa’s greatest heroes.
With all of this said, large comics franchises never really end, and no matter how much their characters go through, they are only gently, ever so slowly, allowed to age and learn and grow. At the same time, what drives stories is conflict, which means that a tropical island paradise that all mutants can safely call home cannot be allowed to last. Internal discord and external attacks destroy the nation. The First Krakoan Age is over. But it seems like memories of Krakoa will live on. Most mutants still know Krakoan, and as they scatter into diaspora once more, I can’t help wondering whether the language will still be allegorically and narratively useful for bringing mutants together. Now we get to find out what comes after nationalism.
Mutant scholar David Alleyne (aka Prodigy) teaches a class on Krakoan diaspora at fictional Empire State University (Lanzing et al. 2024, 10).
Irvine, Judith T, and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, edited by Paul V Kroskrity, 35–83. School of American Research.
Schweid, Eliezer. 1984. “The Rejection of the Diaspora in Zionist Thought: Two Approaches.” Studies in Zionism 5 (1): 43–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/13531048408575854.
Last month, American Eagle released an ad campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney, modeled after a 1980s Calvin Klein denim ad. The campaign plays with the homophone jeans/genes. In one version, Sweeney crosses out “genes” on a poster reading “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” replacing it with “jeans.” Another ad features her saying, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” The camera pans to her face as she says, “My jeans/genes are blue,” with no jeans in the frame.
This ad set off a fierce debate around its indeterminate meanings. As one commentator asked, “Are we supposed to want pants or Aryan features?” (Cunningham 2025). A vocal minority argued it was a dogwhistle for eugenics and white supremacy, while others insisted it was simply about Sweeney being hot. Beyond the jean/gene pun, there is also indeterminacy about which “genes” are being invoked, ostensibly her conventional attractiveness: her pouty lips, blue eyes, blonde hair, and “buxom” chest (“Hey, eyes up here!” she rebukes the camera in another ad).
The debate is animated partly by the politicized contradictions of Sweeney’s image, which is “semiotically potent and yet ideologically unfixed” (Jones 2025). Alongside acclaimed roles, Sweeney has lent her brand to numerous ad campaigns. Many of her roles hypersexualized her image, which she has alternately lamented and embraced, making her a right-wing darling as conservatives embrace “raunch” and celebrate her as an ideal female form that will end “wokeness.”
“Eugenics vibes”
For many, this ad was “fashy coded.” Some online commentators, like @Dewwwdropzz and @midtwesterngothic, called the ad Nazi propaganda, while others noted its “eugenics” or “master race” “vibes.” Right-wing commentators dismissed these interpretations as hysterical, treating accusations of Nazism as preposterous, characterizing it as “everything is Hitler” (a common right-wing refrain).
But eugenics and white supremacy was not just Hitler’s project. Trump has described immigrants as having “bad genes” and expressed preference for immigrants from blue-eyed countries; his time in office has seen expanded civil commitment for those deemed mentally ill, a massive expansion of ICE, and expanded habitual offender statutes(Cunningham 2025; Norwood 2025; Miller 2025). Trump recently federalized the California National Guard to suppress protests against deportations and took over the capital’s police to respond to “crime,” a racial dogwhistle.
These moves resonate with the rise of Christian nationalism and “great replacement” rhetoric (Ali 2025), both of which promote demographic engineering. Just weeks before the ad aired, the Department of Homeland Security amplified this vision, tweeting paintings that valorize Manifest Destiny. They were captioned: “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage” and “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Commentators suggested the capitalization itself was a dogwhistle (Ali 2025).
The MAGA-led government has also energized RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement, described as social Darwinist “soft eugenics” for withdrawing care from targeted populations and stigmatizing neurodivergence and mental illness (Beres 2025; Sexauer 2025; Giroux 2025). Coupled with the hard eugenics of the genocide of Palestinians and callous indifference to disposable lives here and elsewhere (Miller 2025; Giroux 2025), these developments mark the normalization of dehumanizing ideologies.
At the same time, other groups are encouraged to reproduce. Pronatalist movements promoted by tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, with support from the Heritage Foundation, valorize “good genes” and fuel demand for gene-edited “designer babies” (Stein 2025; Elinson 2025). Within this pronatalist, anti-choice framework, some conservatives even point to pro-choice policies and liberal institutions such as Planned Parenthood as the real eugenics.
“It’s not that deep”
This slide to fascism is perceptible, yet for many “all of this reality is stripped away” (Warzel 2025). To them, it is just an ad, just about Sweeney being hot, or just about jeans.
This dismissal is bipartisan. PragerU pundit Amala Ekpunobi ridiculed “chronically online” Leftists who should “touch grass,” insisting the ad “didn’t mean anything.” Liberal commentators likewise treated it as a distraction unworthy of “incredible complexity” and analysis (Jones 2025; Ali 2025). Some argued that engaging with the controversy benefits the right, since “the right-wing-media apparatus has every incentive to go at the Sweeneystuff, as the MAGA coalition struggles to distract its base from Donald Trump’s Epstein-files debacle” (Warzel 2025).
“Woke is dead”
If liberals were hysterical, conservatives were triumphant. While mocking liberals as snowflakes and crybabies (McIntosh 2020) and insisting “it’s not that deep,” right-wing media reanimated a MAGA battle cry (Mendoza-Denton 2020): “Woke is dead!”
When asked whether Sweeney or Beyonce won the denim war, one pundit called the ad “normal” and declared it the “final nail in the coffin” of “woke.” Fox defines woke as “progressive, politically correct stances on race, gender ideology, and other hot-button topics,” but the political correctness framing is misleading (Beliso-De Jesús 2020). Its indexical range is much broader. While White House communications director Cheung decried “Cancel culture run amok,” Cruz and Vance talked about the attack on “beautiful women.” On the Ruthlesspodcast, Vance quipped, “everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi,” adding “she’s a normal all-American beautiful girl doing like a normal jeans ad, right?”
Trump characteristically said the quiet part out loud, praising the ad and contrasting it with ads by Jaguar and Bud Lite. MAGA media was feeling the vibe. A Fox News pundit said, “We’re over this woke agenda. We’re over the Lizzos, we’re over the Dylan Mulvaneys. If this was a 300-pound non-binary person, they would be applauding her.” On one podcast, hosts said they were sick of “DI stuff with big girls,” wanted more “ideal images” of “perfection,” and joked there should be “legislation against plus sized models.”
Other pundits also mirrored Trump’s rhetoric with fidelity. Tomi Lahren contrasted Sweeney with Dylan Mulvaney, saying conservatives want “hot people.” Matt Walsh called the ad “a move back to normalcy” and away from “freakish nonsense.” Other pundits added: “Woke ads are out and beautiful ads are in. Yes, welcome to 2025 where Dylan Mulvaney has been replaced by Sydney Sweeney” and said:
“This seems to be simply a return to normal…they changed and they started to use hideous people…people don’t want to look like Lizzo…they want to look like Sydney Sweeney….they’ve had ugly platformed for so long…we actually aren’t all created equal…we all look different.”
A Fox commentator called the ad “consequential,” representing the demise of “fat pride and gender androgyny and DEI.” Megyn Kelly praised Sweeney as “all woman,” “natural,” and “normal,” saying she hadn’t “Kardashianized herself,” and declaring, “we are fucking done with the Lauren Sanchezes of the world” and with “enormous lips,” and rejoicing at the return to “classic American beauty.”
The blonde bombshell’s others
MAGA commentators had been celebrating Sweeney as a return to classical ideals long before the ad. When she hosted Saturday Night Live in a low-cut dress, she had already “killed woke” (Grady 2025). Commentators lamented that body positivity had brought “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack … to the brink of extinction” (Furlano 2025) and that white people had been “banished from advertising.”
In this discourse, “woke” and “DEI” index what Sweeney is not: black, big, non-binary, non-feminine, non-traditional, working as shibboleths for dispreferred social types. “DEI” itself has become a “strategically deployable shifter” (Urciuoli 2025), “relayed” into a new domain (Gal 2018) and resignified as a slur that “clasps” (Gal 2018) Sydney Sweeney to ideal images of womanhood and clasps all her opposites together as undesirable social types.
The “blonde bombshell” recalls midcentury Americana, when the white feminine figure was unrivaled. Nostalgia for this time situates the campaign within a revival of regressive, white-washed femininity, from pinup girls to tradwives (Furlano 2025). Fascist movements have historically weaponized this ideal.
Sweeney’s image, combined with the ad’s images and language, draws on this charge: the paradox of white femininity as both sexualized and innocent. It enables a right-coded idealization of white, fertile, feminine beauty (Grady 2025; Cunningham 2025), set against the racial and gender diversity that unsettles a pronatalist white supremacist vision of a homogenous America.
Dogwhistles and semiotic containment
American Eagle’s campaign was a success, if only for the attention it generated. Its strategy: “Flirt with the public’s fear (or excitement) about fascism—with the help of Sydney Sweeney” (Cunningham 2025).
This flirtation plays with dual addressivity and multiple layered semiotic indeterminacies to send a dogwhistle. Dogwhistles are messages with an innocent meaning for most addressees and a coded one for some (Haney-López 2014; Slotta 2020). They are political uses of semiotic indeterminacy (Gershon 2025), and such indeterminacy is not always symmetrical (Dénigot and Burnett 2020).
Moreover, the participation framework and production format is complex (Goffman 1981). Dogwhistles are uttered by a “duplicitous speaker” who differentiates among “savvy” and non-savvy listeners (Dénigot and Burnett 2020), and this corporate ad, voiced by an actress speaking as herself but through a script, amplifies this duplicity. Even savvy listeners are multiplied: the target audience aligned with a racialized message and its liberal opponents who identify and repudiate it. Moreover, the indeterminacy here has a binary logic, with competing polarized meanings.
Racialized dogwhistles are central to conservative self-conceptions, exemplified by Lee Atwater, a pro-segregationist who directed campaigns for Reagan and Bush senior and later chaired the RNC (Haney-Lopez 2014). Atwater avoided the semiotic determinacy and rigid performativity of taboo language like the n-word (Fleming 2011; 2018; Miller 2022) by using “abstract” terms like forced busing or tax cuts, explaining that these economic policies would “hurt blacks worse than whites” while avoiding explicit slurs.
Dogwhistle tactics also use indeterminacy to differentiate within a single listener, bifurcating conscious commitments to equality from unconscious racism, so dogwhistles are hidden partly from the target audience itself (Smith 2016; Haney-Lopez 2014; Mendelberg 2001). This complicates the notion of the identity-based dogwhistle (Dénigot and Burnett 2020).
Indeed, identity here is unstable. “Woke” functions as a shifter designating not only an ideology one can adopt but also refers to groups of people who are like Lizzo, Dylan Mulvaney, or Oprah–even those who don’t adopt “woke” beliefs. Many “woke” critics of the ad were feminine white women, and many of its defenders were people of color or liberals. These “woke” identity positions don’t intersect neatly with “woke” listener positions.
In this way, a dogwhistle can hail white supremacist listeners while avowing a colorblind position (Dick and Wirtz 2011). If Sweeney’s “good genes” are about being hot rather than white or feminine, then hotness is universal, equal opportunity even. Listeners who hear racialized meanings are paranoid racebaiters, bearing the liability of racialization. Cultural value accrues to those who cannot hear it, who are figured as rational, and colorblindness enables racist discourses to proliferate under a guise of neutrality (Dick and Wirtz 2011; Williams 2020). As Haney-Lopez predicted, dogwhistle politics has evolved to recruit nonwhite support (2014). Racial identity is therefore a poor predictor of reception.
TikTok user @heyitstwig25 remarked, “So, the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad isn’t racist, but the only people I see supporting it and defending it are openly racist…got it.” This suggests the issue is less about identity than about participation in chains of discourse through which themes and cultural stories become intelligible (Slotta 2020). Names and labels work as condensed abbreviations for these stories (Ibid), and allusions or “vibes” similarly direct attention toward particular contexts–but only if those contexts are already available. Dogwhistles are one form of “strategically restricted communication,” relying on differentiated awareness of context, such as white supremacist discourse in right-wing media, without which the message is inaudible (Mendoza-Denton 2020). Further differentiation also depends on awareness of the cultural history of white supremacy, its motifs, values, and unspoken commitments. Heterogeneous audiences thus bring heterogeneous indexical associations (Agha as cited in Gershon 2025), enhancing and multiplying semiotic indeterminacy. Even defenders of the ad are heterogeneous.
This heterogeneity and indeterminacy is key to the plausible deniability that sustains racializing discourses (Dick and Wirtz 2011). By suppressing or manipulating context, speakers avoid responsibility for racist discourse and strategically differentiate their messages (Hodges 2020). This relies on ideologies of communication that privilege semantics and grammar over interactional context, common in the MAGA base and central to Trump-era tactics (Hodges 2020). Trump’s “dark innovation” has been to extend plausible deniability even further than his predecessors (Smith 2016).
The American Eagle ad exploits this affordance, building on the MAGA movement’s use of entertainment and humor as a “containment strategy,” a way to speak taboos while denying violating norms (Hall et al. 2016). The strategy also works on liberals and leftists who dismiss the ad as trivial, epiphenomenal froth atop a sea of material conditions. One LA Times critic asked why anyone cared about a silly ad when DHS was increasingly militarizing (Ali 2025). This dismissal shows how dangerous rhetoric slips by not only through semiotic indeterminacy but also because some genres render signs unserious and “not that deep.” Even the ad’s brevity functions this way. One critic wrote, “a 15-second denim commercial is not a rich enough text to sustain this level of analysis” (Jones 2025), reinforcing the idea that the micro doesn’t matter (Lempert 2024).
Does the ad even need indeterminacy? When Elon Musk can evade responsibility for a Nazi salute, with the ADL calling it “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm” (Connolly 2025), plausible deniability is already abundant. Nazi salute-like gestures now circulate widely on social media. Even determinate taboo signs are rendered indeterminate through selective disavowal (Resnick 2024; 2025). A rigid designator like the swastika can be framed as “just about” something else (Resnick 2025). This “determined indeterminacy,” like colorblind discourse, naturalizes white supremacy by denying its existence (Resnick 2024). As with political dogwhistles, it enables speakers to espouse repugnant views while appearing to conform to liberal norms (Resnick 2024).
This is why American Eagle did not need to apologize. One need not be accountable for vibes. It could dismiss criticisms by insisting the ad was just “about the jeans.” Though some videos were removed, Sweeney said nothing, and the company posted only one non-apology:
This message narrowed the contextual aperture. Regardless of uptake—which both critics and supporters saw as extending beyond jeans—they affirmed meaning only in what was explicitly spoken: Sweeney’s personal “jeans” and “story.” The inclusive gesture to “everyone” nodded to the criticism while deflecting it with a universalizing message. Anyone who saw race, it implied, was seeing things that weren’t there.
This affirms a restricted meaning based only on explicit referentiality, instructing readers and viewers to ignore co-textual signs and context (Hodges 2020; Gershon 2025). Only speaker intention counts, and any further inference is cast as illusion (Gershon 2025). This form of gaslighting (Ibid) reflects a semiotic ideology of containment, empowering bad-faith speakers and listeners to dictate what something is “just” about.
Dogwhistles as canaries in coal mines
Liberal outlets such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Cut, and Vulture ran op-eds framing the controversy as misunderstanding or trivial (Andrew, Scottie et al. 2025). In this architecture of false equivalences, the dogwhistle is reduced to a failure to communicate across party lines or “read the room” (Battle 2025). Writers urged readers to “not be weird” and stop making Sweeney a proxy for broader debates, arguing that too much context is problematic and “Sometimes a pun is just a pun” (Jones 2025). Others lamented that “the discourse is broken,” with both sides only discharging outrage (Warzel 2025). Many blamed the Internet or social media for polarization.
The “discourse” is indeed shaped by algorithmic media that mines attention through ragebait and infinite scrolls. But the Internet did not break the discourse. Racist dogwhistles long predate it; there has never been a good faith bipartisan conversation (Slotta 2020). Reasoned dialogue with white supremacists is neither desirable nor possible. The metadiscourse is broken too: if bad-faith speakers mobilize semiotic ideologies of containment, then talking past one another is not a failure but an achievement. And semiotic containment will only increasingly normalize dangerous rhetoric and admit it into respectable discourse.
This dynamic extends beyond the American Eagle ad, which condenses broader cultural movements. A “leftist meltdown” is overstated; most leftists didn’t care. MAGA media amplified faint signals (Warzel 2025) to occasion the celebration of the death of “woke” and rebirth of “normal.” The same pattern followed Dylan Mulvaney (Holmes 2025).
A select few spoke of dogwhistles, others of canaries in coal mines. On Breaking Points, the host read the ad as carrying white supremacist and eugenicist overtones; the guest scoffed, calling it “just an ad, not a canary in the coal mine for the rise of fascism.” Others insisted it was exactly that: for critical savvy listeners,it was an early warning of danger.
A “canary in a coal mine” once referred to bringing canaries underground to warn of toxic gases. As a metaphor, it’s a signal of imminent threat. Yet the canary is not a signal but a sensitive receiver, like a savvy listener who can reconstruct the discursive milieu and anticipate construals.
Listening is political work. The pragmatics of reception, who listens, to whom, how, and why (Slotta 2023), are further complicated by algorithmic mediation which creates micro-publics. As linguistic anthropologists, we cultivate sensitive listening within and beyond field sites and across publics. So when we hear the cry “woke is dead!” as the military-industrial complex ramps up domestically and abroad, we should continue to ask what that cry presupposes and entails. Such listening may provide early warnings or perhaps reminders of dangers long present.
Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M. 2020. “The Jungle Academy: Molding White Supremacy in American Police Recruits.” American Anthropologist 122 (1): 143–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13357.
Dénigot, Quentin, and Heather Burnett. 2020. “Dogwhistles as Identity-Based Interpretative Variation.” Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference.
Dick, Hilary Parsons, and Kristina Wirtz. 2011. “Racializing Discourses.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21 (s1): E2–10.
Hall, Kira, Donna M. Goldstein, and Matthew Bruce Ingram. 2016. “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 71–100.
Haney-López, Ian. 2014. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hodges, Adam. 2020. “Plausible Deniability.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.009.
Lempert, Michael. 2024. From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McIntosh, Janet. 2020. “Crybabies and Snowflakes.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.005.
Mendelberg, Tali. 2001. The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2020. “Part I Introduction: ‘Ask the Gays’: How to Use Language to Fragment and Redefine the Public Sphere.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.002.
Resnick, Elana. 2024. “The Determined Indeterminacy of White Supremacy.” American Ethnologist 51 (3): 433–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13311.
———. 2025. “Absurdities of Indeterminacy: Swastikas and Playing with the Token-Type Relationship.” Signs and Society 13 (1): 60–77. https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2024.8.
Slotta, James. 2020. “The Significance of Trump’s Incoherence.” In Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108887410.003.
———. 2023. Anarchy and the Art of Listening: The Politics and Pragmatics of Reception in Papua New Guinea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501770029.
Urciuoli, Bonnie. 2025. “Revisiting the Strategically Deployable Shifter: Manipulating Indeterminacy for Semiotic Power and Profit.” Signs and Society 13 (1): 9–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/sas.2024.3.
The CaMP anthropology blog has been running for 10 years — our very first post was on September 4th, 2015. During this decade, we have celebrated 122 dissertations, and 302 new books.
The blog started because when Indiana University dissolved the innovative and beloved department of Communication and Culture, five ethnographers moved to IU’s anthropology department. We joined six other people interested in linguistic anthropology, media anthropology, and the anthropology of music and art. Eleven people, all in the same department, and yet it was a concentration that seemed likely to fly under everyone’s radar. We wondered how to let anthropologists know about the department’s new strength, and hit upon the idea of creating a blog devoted to communication, media, and performance. We were making lemonade out of bureaucratic lemons (ah, the institutional melodrama I am omitting here in this bland account of how a blog came to be). Susan Seizer was the editor for the first year, and Sarah Mitchell designed the blog, getting the ball rolling.
But blogs are hungry beasts, and we had to figure out ways to feed it content. So in November 2015, I hit upon interviewing authors of recently published books, honoring the arduous work we pour into these texts. Honestly, it helped that I was on leave that year, and longing for a bit of legitimate distraction from writing The Book. Aneesh Aneesh was the first author we ever featured. And then I began to wonder why we weren’t also celebrating dissertations more – these too have taken years and years of challenging intellectual work. Elizabeth Kickham was the first to turn to page 99 of her dissertation, and discuss how it related to her dissertation as a whole.
Ten years later, and CaMP anthropology is still chugging along, releasing a post every Monday morning. This is thanks to all of you – so many have participated over the years, helping this amorphous intellectual community rejoice in what careful and hard-won analysis can reveal about our social worlds. May the blog celebrate many more books and dissertations in the years to come.
My dissertation, With Other Men: Love, Narrative, and Belonging Among Same-Sex Attracted Men in New Orleans, is an ethnographic study of how love narratives—structured around the phrase “I love you”—are interdiscursively linked to broader histories of racialized exclusion, public health discourse, and queer social life. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with same-sex attracted men in monogamous, polyamorous, and open relationships, the project traces how “I love you” is used at four key relational moments: its first utterance, after an argument, in times of joy, and at the end of a relationship.
Page 99 is in the second chapter, “‘I Love You’ After an Argument,” and begins midway through a paragraph in which I write:
[For the men in this study] repair is not just about resolving a linguistic misunderstanding—it is about re-establishing affective alignment, reaffirming commitment, and negotiating belonging within intimate relationships. This process of attunement is dynamic rather than linear, meaning that repair does not necessarily mean returning to a previous state, but rather constructing a new relational equilibrium. In this sense, misunderstanding is not merely a failure of communication, but a pivotal site where love, trust, and intimacy are tested and reconfigured.
For my interlocutors, especially those navigating intersectional histories of racial and sexual marginalization, repair becomes a moral and affective process through which belonging is reframed and love is sustained.
Page 99, therefore, does not capture the full scope of the dissertation, but it does highlight a central insight: that love and belonging are as fragile as they are enduring, and that it is through practices of repair, intersubjective attunement, and the ongoing efforts of choosing to remain with one’s partner(s) that new forms of intimacy, deeper connections, and new futures are made possible.
—-
Citation:
Sorapuru-Mitchell, Davine A. (2025) With Other Men: Love, Narrative, and Belonging Among Same-Sex Attracted Men in New Orleans. CUNY Academic Works.
Shannon Ward: In the Introduction, you discuss zurza as a uniquely Tibetan genre of humour. Can you say more about how you first discovered zurza as a genre? Do you remember the first Amdo Tibetan satire you heard? And, how did you as a researcher gradually come to understand continuities in how Tibetans identify zurza across artistic practices and media forms?
Tim Thurston So, I’m an inveterate language learner. I love learning languages, and trying to understand the social worlds with which they are intertwined. Being curious about language is about 95% of my research method. It’s in the process of learning language that I start to pay attention to different grammar structures, but also to the terminologies and classification systems that are part of their world. I first heard the term zurza in an interview. I was sitting in a public space on a university campus in Ziling, and talking to a young man who enjoyed the comedies. And he talked about how each one “did zurza.” About one or more “social problem(s).” Prior to this, I had been really focusing my research on the social problems angle. But hearing the word then helped to make sense of something. In the verb-final Tibetan language, it literally meant “to eat” (za) the “sides” (zur). Not so much an individual verbal practice, it was an approach to communication that privileged indirection as a way of articulating critique. I started paying attention, I realized that I was hearing it again and again in interviews. When I listened back to previous interviews, I saw that it also had been used there, but I hadn’t really caught on to it yet. Initially, I thought it was something pretty specific to the comedies I was researching for my dissertation, but then I heard a rapper use it. And another person used it to refer to forms of traditional poetry, and I realized that it was much more significant than I had initially thought.
Shannon Ward: Your book provides a remarkable account of Amdo as a distinct cultural region within Tibet, supporting efforts within Tibetan studies to show the nuances of identity amid changing social, economic, and political conditions on the plateau. Through your diachronic approach to the dynamic practices of satire, you show the adaptability of Tibetan cultural producers. At the same time, many of the satires themselves articulate essentialized views of Tibetan language and culture. Can you say more about how this tension between essentialization and adaptation plays out in identity formation through zurza?
Tim Thurston: Folklorists sometimes refer to folklore as “the stories people tell themselves about themselves.” I think of the texts in this book as the “modern stories Tibetans are telling themselves about their (ideally) modern selves.” These texts are both a funhouse mirror and a prism. They (exaggeratedly) reflect Tibetan society back on itself, but also refract it, separating different points out for audiences to examine and consider. In this way, the comedies and rap songs examined in the book are sort of prescriptive: they simultaneously say “this is who we are” and “this is who we should be.” This always involves both adaptation to emerging policies and priorities, and essentializing statements about “who we are.” There’s a degree of Herzfeld’s “cultural intimacy” in this: the sort of embarrassing and the backward parts of ourselves that unite our identity.
In the context of the People’s Republic of China, this question about the place of Amdo is an important part of it. The state identifies all of these people as Tibetan. Anthropologist Charlene Makley and historian Gray Tuttle have shown that the Tibetan word bod (བོད།) and the Chinese term zangzu (藏族) that we would translate as Tibetan refer to unique projects of identity making. The Tibetan bod traditionally only referred to people from Central Tibet, and not from Amdo or Kham, but is now used for all Tibetan. The Chinese Zangzu, meanwhile, is a state classification that includes a variety of groups, some of them quite different. At the same time, written texts and oral traditions suggest a recognition of shared identity. In versified oral traditions ‘black-haired Tibetans’ mgo nag bod མགོ་ནག་བོད། or ‘red-faced Tibetan’ (གདོhང་དམར་བོད།) were common noun-adjective formulae for performers (including in Amdo and Kham) to use in their songs and speeches. Comedians, rappers, and other artists are naturally navigating this. Many are fervent nationalists. And so, while their life experiences, humor, the stories they compose, and their language practices are very much based in local knowledges and experiences of people in Amdo, but their ultimate goals involve saying something broadly about the Tibetan nationality or ethnic group.
Shannon Ward: Your chapters demonstrate the evolution of zurza in new media forms, which are closely connected not only to the availability of new technologies, but also to political and economic goals such as urbanization and development that emanate from the Chinese state. Can you say more about how you see Amdo Tibetans navigating the availability and evolution of media technologies, amid constantly changing political agendas that may frequently shift between promoting and censoring zurza?
Tim Thurston: So zurza itself was never really promoted or censored, not least because it never really rose to something the State or its representatives really recognized as something worth governing. But I would say that the support for Tibetan language media and the space for social critique expands and contracts at different moments. Across these moments, however, it is generally accurate to say that the bigger one gets, the more important it is to adhere to the Party line. In Amdo in the 1990s and early 2000s, mass media (radio and television) were just about the biggest game in town. Comedians and other performers were keenly aware that they had to set just the right tone. They had to entertain with stories that were realistic but not quite real. They had to promote the State’s policies, but also wanted to embed their performances with important social critiques that might not always align with the State’s priorities. Zurza are the flexible set of practices and approaches to humor through which Tibetans can approach an issue obliquely rather than directly. In this way it provides artists with precisely the skills and the toolset necessary to navigate and accommodate shifts in policy, changes in media preferences, and the evolution of Tibetan concerns in these contexts. It allows comedians in the 1990s and early 2000s to promote a form of Tibetan nationalism, based largely in language purism and cultural preservation, while also fitting State demands. But it also empowers hip hop artists to critique young urban Tibetans who do not know their culture, to playfully rework folksongs into hip-hop beats, and to critique unrealized visions of their predecessors. It continues into the present, when people take to livestreaming and video sharing platforms to share any variety of entertainment.
Shannon Ward: Especially in your discussions of hip hop, you have shown how zurza serves to valorize the Tibetan language, but also how it can articulate linguistic purism. How do you see zurza potentially affecting the ways that Amdo Tibetans conceptualize and use language in their everyday lives?
Tim Thurston: The way I see it, these hip-hop artists and the comedians before them wanted to valorize and center Tibetan language in the nationalist project that has emerged in Amdo across the post-Mao period. Language has a complex place in China. The Chinese state is bound by constitution and the basic principles of Marxism to support officially recognized “minority nationalities” to “develop” and “promote” their own language. Additionally, the government has, over the last 70 years, developed extensive Tibetan language mass media apparatus as well. Cynically, we might say that Tibetan media is primarily for propaganda and spreading the news, but there is also some space for entertainment programming as well. But despite this support, language is also closely monitored. We sometimes hear that Tibetan singers have been arrested for singing or speaking about Tibetan language, or that Grassroots Tibetan literacy classes are sometimes closed by the government. Too direct an approach is not necessarily safe. What zurza does is allow people to promote language (and language purism) through example, through humor, without directly saying it.
Shannon Ward: In recent news media, much is being reported about Tibetan children’s decreasing access to their language and culture, especially given the rise of mandatory boarding schools that run almost exclusively in Mandarin. Being raised apart from family members can take away opportunities for children to experience Tibetan artistic practice in everyday practices like watching tv and streaming videos from smart phones. How do you see young people’s ability to connect with and produce zurza potentially changing in this new political context?
Tim Thurston: This is a great point. Intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge is under threat from a variety of sources. Some students now go to school in inland urban centers like Beijing or Chengdu. But to my understanding, most of the schools are still in periurban Tibetan communities with almost entirely Tibetan student bodies. Students in these schools often live in dorms during the weeks (or as many as two or three weeks at a time) and then go home on the weekends. In this way, they have at least some opportunities to engage with Tibetan language and culture. Without meaning to downplay the tremendous impact of removing teenagers from their homes, intergenerational support structures, and contexts in which cultural transmission happens, one of the bigger concerns for many young parents I have met is about modern media, and this appears to be independent of the boarding schools. Young people, they say, prefer watching Chinese cartoons, and listening to Chinese music. With all the changes to the fabric of Tibetan life, and to Tibetan language competences in the region, it shouldn’t be surprising that some older comedy performances will not resonate with students who lack the lived experience of herding livestock, of first using a telephone, or of the oral traditions sometimes parodied in comedies. Similarly, there is good reason to believe that the uniquely Tibetan aspects of zurza may indeed begin to fade with the gradual cultural and linguistic shifts. But whether loss of language can wholly supplant some of these characteristics and practices, and the concept of eating the sides entirely remains to be seen. Certainly, the skills of indirection, humor, and entertainment remain as relevant as ever.
CaMP Anthropology 