The 99th page of my dissertation, “Publics of Value: Higher Education and Language Activism in Turkey and North Kurdistan,” falls midway in my second chapter, where I seek to situate my primary field site – Turkey’s first state-recognized Kurdish-language university program at Artuklu University in Mardin – within the sociolinguistic realities of public life in the city and wider province, as well as within larger shifts in the political discourses and language practices of the Kurdish movement, Turkish state institutions, and local actors. This forms part of a larger discussion, developed over the first two chapters, that considers how differently positioned actors in Mardin and beyond have come to deploy Mesopotamia as a label designating a post-national, multicultural space that differentiates itself from conventional nationalist geographic imaginaries (such as Turkey or Kurdistan) and how this category is used to confer new value on multilingualism and Mardin’s local polyglot speech communities.
The first half of page 99 concludes a longer discussion of the analytical categories of language and speech communities and the dynamic interaction between the two (Gal 1988; Silverstein 1998). The second half begins to consider how this interaction has reshaped local language regimes in Mardin in recent decades, describing how:
“In Mardin, importantly, the values of Mesopotamia have been realized in relation to a dynamic language regime that is itself a product of a specific, if shifting sociohistorical spacetime – one in which Mesopotamia has come to represent both a validation of the values of Mardin’s speech community in relation to the nationalist projects of both the Turkey and Kurdistan and, conversely, the imposition of new linguistic projects by competing institutional forces (i.e. the Kurdish movement, the Turkish state, and the predominantly English- language domains of ‘global’ higher education and transnational tourism)” (pp. 99).
Considering the page in the context of the larger dissertation, I’m quite fortunate – within the terms of the ‘page 99 test’ – that it contains an important inflection point in my analysis with clear relevance for the larger work. Looking back a year after my defense, I can’t avoid detecting what now appear to me as moments of underdeveloped tangents, misplaced emphasis, and missed opportunities for greater clarification or precision – not to mention an ever-growing number of typos (page 99 being no exception). On the other hand, page 99 contains the seeds of two interrelated insights that I consider to be, in their fully developed form, among the work’s more important contributions: The first, inspired in part by the work by Woolard (2016) and others, is that Kurdish-language activism is not reducible to a paradigm of Kurdish nationalist politics, but embraces a range of political and social meanings that require further contextualization and explanation; and the second is that my Kurdish-language activist interlocutors, rather than proponents of predefined political or linguistic projects, are agentive actors working to remake the values of the Kurdish language in public life in ways that are generative of new identities, political subjectivities, and horizons of belonging.
References:
Gal, Susan. “The Political Economy of Code Choice.” Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives 48 (1988): 245-64.
Silverstein, Michael. “Contemporary Transformations of Local Linguistic Communities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 27, no. 1 (1998): 401-426
Woolard, Kathryn. Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia. Oxford University Press, 2016.
The “quality of the whole” is uncannily revealed by the concluding paragraph on page 99 of my dissertation. It reads:
The institution I call The Migrant Center, then, is a key node of Genevan social life, expressive of an ethical horizon of hospitality. The Center’s activities bridge governmental, charitable, and civic domains, and its educational sectors offer, on the very same grounds, training in labour law for trade union delegates and elected labour court judges as well as afterschool math classes for job-seeking high schoolers. The Center’s French language learning program is thus part of a broader pedagogy of mobilization; the Migrant Center is a key translational site at which state categories and concepts of both “French” and “integration” are made commensurate with an ethics of solidarity.
I began my research in 2013 with an interest in the everyday pedagogical conditions, practices and discourses by which an official language of the state (here, French) is taught to immigrant and migrant learners. This, in a context where a then-emergent global discourse on migrant integration had constructed official, standardized language competences as the sign of successful integration into one’s host country, and where completing language tests and attending language classes were key discretionary bordering tools in the migration regimes of various European states.
Fieldwork at the institution I call The Migrant Center revealed the ways language pedagogy can become a site of mobility mediation and ethical-moral commensuration. The keywords I had come to associate with the state’s regimentation of language and cross-border movement—words like “French” and “integration”—were, at the Center, framed in the terms of solidarity. To be sure, at times, talk about French evoked historical discourses on the equalizing powers of the French language. At yet other times, however, the form and content of classroom discussions explicitly questioned the Genevan state’s monolingual logics of cross-border and social mobility. And among instructors, French held a contested status, not least because many teachers were first- and second-generation immigrants in Switzerland with their own multilingual trajectories. Their teaching, further, was unremunerated, reflective of local frameworks of volunteerism (bénévolat) which created ethical-moral substance for the Genevan polity in complex ways. As a volunteer at the school, navigating the blurry line between social critique and social reproduction became the condition of doing fieldwork.
Returning to Page 99 reminds me that perhaps teaching is a form of hospitality—one as complex as any other attempt to enact inclusion under conditions of closure. In my dissertation, I call this labour welcome work. Naming it this way has helped me to understand, somewhat long after writing, how to analytically sustain the contradictions of working at such sites of egalitarian aspiration—to situate, contextualize, and question any linguistically-premised equality, while also creating space to understand the political possibilities of hospitable relations, relationships, and practice.
Shirley Yeung. 2020. “Welcome Work: Hospitality and the Mediation of Migrant Mobility in Swiss Integration Policy.” University of Michigan Phd.
At the bottom of page 99 in my dissertation “The ‘Nobody’ Movement: Digital Activism and the Uprising of Civic Hackers in Taiwan” is a quote from the g0v (pronounced gov-zero) manifesto: Built on the spirit of the open-source community, g0v stands for freedom of speech and information transparency. We aim to use technology in the interest of the public good, allowing citizens easy access to vital information. Opening up and making data public allows the people of Taiwan to take a closer look at politics and important issues. This gives them the tools needed to evaluate their government and exert their democratic right to influence government actions.
g0v, the focus of this dissertation, is a Taiwan-based civic tech community that intervenes and subverts bureaucratic government through the technological translation of openness. Replacing the letter “o” in “government” with the number “0” to indicate the computer binary zero and one, the name “g0v” signifies both their hacker identity and the grassroots, bottom-up approach of activism. This quote on page 99 vividly encapsulates the multiplicity and equivocation of openness. Here we see openness is translated into open source technologies, freedom, transparency, public, and democracy. Openness is both the means (open source technology and open data) and the ends (civic participation and democracy). Its rich meaning provides the room for these hackers to improvise their political actions amid the changing political environment.
Later in the dissertation, I also reveal that the equivocation of openness can lead to tension and conflicts in this decentralized community especially when some participants started to connect and collaborate with hierarchical organizations such as companies, NGOs, and the government. The most renowned case is Audrey Tang, one of the most active g0v participants who was later appointed as Taiwan’s first digital minister in 2016. While Tang’s government appointment allows her to push open data and public-private collaboration further from within the government, this also leads to the institutionalization of openness and devours g0v’s political space. To tackle this community crisis, g0v participants maneuver within translations of openness in order not to be depoliticized. It is in the process of contesting openness that g0v takes a parasitic position between inside and outside, continuity and disruption, collaboration and resistance in order to keep on making politics.
The quote on page 99 is where I took an initial clue before delving into the translations of openness. As the manifesto and the idea of openness continue to appeal to young generations in Taiwan, we must continue examining how openness is conceived, discussed, practiced, and envisioned towards a techno-political future.
Mei-Chun Lee. 2020. The ‘Nobody’ Movement: Digital Activism and the Uprising of Civic Hackers in Taiwan. University of California, Davis Phd.
Hannah Carlan interviews E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, and Constantine V. Nakassis
Hannah Carlan: Bernard Bate’s posthumous book Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern is a major contribution to the study of political agency and nation-building, which has, through Habermas, Anderson, Taylor, Warner, and others, long privileged “the press” over “the platform” in the formation of the democratic public sphere (pp. 3–4). Bate demonstrates that this emphasis on print capitalism is both due to the difficulty of studying the unrecorded, as well as Western semiotic ideologies that privilege the denotational functions of language over its poetic ones, leading to an elision of the sensuous, affective, and embodied aspects of speech as social activity. Bate invites us to consider how communicative genres like homiletic oratory, devotional songs (bhajans), poems, and mass meetings together constituted a novel “interpellative infrastructure” of politics (p. 66). Through these practices, previously disparate groups were called into being as a singular political public at the turn of the 20th century in Tamil Nadu. Rather than reproduce the dichotomization of speech and materiality, Bate emphasizes their mutual imbrication. In the Indic context, vernacular political oratory gained semiotic value not merely from its denotational accessibility—an influence of Protestant ideologies of textuality—but from what Bate calls “poesy”: the corporeal, sonorous, musical qualities of speech that are prized in Tamil textual traditions. How might this intervention contribute to broader efforts in anthropology to theorize language and/as materiality, and how might such an approach allow us to decenter Western theories of politics and democracy?
Constantine V. Nakassis: Your brilliant first book, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern deals with the simultaneous classicization and modernization of the Karnatic music of South India through both historical and ethnographic methods, showing how a gendered and casted form of modern subjectivity came to be articulated through a politics of voice. Your most recent book, Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India – equally brilliant – deals with so-called playback singing in the Tamil film industry. To start us off, I wonder if you could speak a bit about the relationship, and movement, between these two projects?
Amanda Weidman: Thank you for giving me an opportunity to reflect on this. I would say, in a general way, that in this second book I’ve gotten to do the project I paid lip service to (no pun intended!) in the first book: to explore voice as simultaneously an object of musical/sonic attention and of ideological investment, and to really grapple with the way these two scales—the bodily/sonic/material and the ideological/discursive—interplay with and inform each other. In my first book, the concern with voice remained mostly at the ideological, political level. I used the concepts ideologies of voice and politics of voice to get at the ways that voice, cultivated, framed, and staged in a particular way, became—to the exclusion and marginalization of other things—a potent signifier of Karnatic music’s classical status. The burden in that book was to try to understand how a high cultural status had been claimed and consolidated. Identifying voice as an object of ideology and politics was a way to challenge what has been reified and naturalized as South Indian classical music.
In Brought to Life by the Voice, I decided that the twin focus on voice as object of aesthetic and ideological investment was better captured by the idea of regimes of aurality and the voice, which I think gets at the way that ideologies and politics are actually produced and sustained—voice as a site where macro-level constructs are scaled down to a bodily/sensory level. I think about regimes of aurality and voice in several ways: through modes of discipline in vocal production—how singers learn to produce the supposedly right kind of sound in any context; through recurring contexts of listening and consumption, including performance contexts, as well as technological media through which voices are disseminated (and in the case of playback, the visual images/bodies with which voices are paired or associated onscreen); and through the articulated, verbalized categories that arise to describe and attribute meaning to particular voices and voice qualities. Inherent in the idea of regimes of aurality and voice is the process of regimentation, the shaping of vocal practices and vocal sound to particular culturally and historically specific ideals.
There are some obvious continuities between the two books. The city of Chennai is the center (the authorizing center of semiosis, you might say) for both Karnatic classical music and the Tamil film industry. But in moving from one to the other I shifted from looking at something that, framed as a high-cultural object, has all sorts of authorized knowledge emanating from established institutions, pedagogies, and forms of transmission, to a popular-cultural realm where meaning-making is taking place at many different sites: on screen, in the recording studios, in the postproduction process, on stage, on the street, in music reality shows, in forms of historical and current media publicity, and so on. This presented a different kind of ethnographic challenge, especially because I was exploring the cultural significance of voices that, though people have deep affective attachment to them, have been considered beyond description, anti-intellectualized both by singers themselves and by fans, and mostly ignored in scholarship on Indian cinema.
The movement between these two books also reflects the slow melding of different strains of my graduate training. In the 1990s, I was steeped in then-current thinking about the colonial production of knowledge, postcolonial theory, and the idea of modernity as a culture in itself—all reflected amply in my first book. But I was also trained in ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology, which at that time were relatively distant from each other and focused on their respective objects: music and language. The point of connection between them was through the music-and-language strand of linguistic anthropology, which constituted the other part of my graduate training. I learned about Peircean semiotics, indexicality, iconicity, performativity, poetics and sound symbolism, and Bakhtin’s concept of voicing, but I didn’t know what to do with it all for a while. The blossoming of voice and sound as analytics and fields of study in the last two decades has really broken down these disciplinary boundaries and created many more points of connection—and has allowed us to hear so much more of what’s going on in music and language beyond what these frameworks have conditioned us to hear. Linguistic anthropology has broadened to become more attuned to questions of mediation, voice, and embodiment, and to the way linguistic and non-linguistic, and visual and aural, forms of semiosis interact. I think of my work as definitely benefitting from, and, I hope, also contributing to these developments.
Constantine V. Nakassis: One of the many interventions of this book is to rethink the metaphysical nexus that links voice, (the visual) body, and subjectivity as a natural, unified package—by pointing to a different “performative dispensation” (Mazzarella)—that of playback singing, where voice (of the singer), body (of the actress), words (of the lyricist), melody (of the music director) are all differently distributed. How has this particular case helped you think about the study of voice?
Amanda Weidman: The striking thing about playback in the Indian context is that it starts with completely different premises and ideals. Most Euro-Western theorizing about voice, as well as cultural production ranging from Hollywood cinema to popular music, starts from the assumed ideal unity of voice, body, and self—underpinning the ideology of the unified speaking subject (a construct which has come in for a lot of critique in critical theory and anthropology), as well as that of the expressive singing/musical subject (an equally powerful construct, but one that has not been interrogated nearly as much). Within this formation, the voice de-linked from a visual representation or embodiment of its source is the disorienting exception, associated with power and mastery, or with danger, excess, and deception.
Playback, as a technical practice and as a performative dispensation, starts from the opposite assumption: that the dissociation of body and voice, the division of labor between appearing and sounding, is the ideal, and that the embodiment of voice is the artifice, the strategic achievement that provokes anxieties and requires careful management and/or avoidance. One of the things that captivated me about this project is the way playback literalizes/concretizes so many of the concepts at play: production format/participant roles, performative dispensations, animation, and the distribution of the sensible. Goffman’s idea of production format and participant roles, or role fractions, as Irvine would specify, gets at the division of labor that playback sets up—not just between acting onscreen and singing offscreen, but also between singing and speaking, and between animating and authoring words and melodies. The concept of a performative dispensation, so usefully articulated by Mazzarella in terms of both permissions and prohibitions, gets at the way playback, as a cultural institution, controls (or attempts to control) who is visible, who is audible, and the meaning and effects that certain performances may have. Animation allows for a consideration of vocal acts as something other than identity or expression— toward other forms of agency and subjectivity that are enabled by different acts of voicing. And Ranciere’s concept of the distribution of the sensible allowed me to see how playback has constituted a regime of aurality/imageness by thinking about very concrete processes of distribution, ranging in scale from the mass/public level (determining what is seen/heard and what isn’t, and through which media; indexically regimenting voices and flooding the public sphere with particular ones) to the individual/embodied level (where a singer distributes her voice in her own body or how she occupies the space of the stage).
Constantine V. Nakassis:Animation, Voice (voicing), (Bring to) Life, World(ing) – these are some of the very big concepts that this book articulates in its account of playback singing and that have already come up in our discussion. And it articulates them through a set of more technical analytic concepts: ideology (a la Silverstein, Gal and Irvine), semiotic economy (a la Keane), and distribution of the sensible or regime of imageness/aurality (a la Rancière). I’m interested to hear about how the philosophical and aesthetic concept of Rancière’s and the semiotic concepts of linguistic anthropology fit together in this book?
Amanda Weidman:The title of my book comes from film sound theorist Michel Chion’s description of playback, which he tosses in offhandedly at the end of his book The Voice in Cinema: “In playback, the body confesses to being a puppet brought to life by the voice.” Chion meant this as a simple reversal of the usual relationship between body and voice, visuality and aurality, in which the body controls the voice which is seen to emanate from it. But the image of the puppet introduces all sorts of fascinating and productive ambiguities around visibility and voicing, agency and control, the animate and the inanimate. The playback singer is both the puppet—the singer of words and melodies authored by others—and the puppeteer—the backstage or offscreen voice who controls the movements and meanings of what’s onscreen. Much of playback singers’ work is about managing the fundamental duality of animation as a mechanical process of transmission/relay (the puppet role) and as a life-giving process (the puppeteer role). The attention to animation within anthropology has been so helpful in the way it has shifted the focus from the creation of an illusion of life in inanimate objects or forms, to looking at the social world and social relations and actors that various animating practices imagine and bring into being.
To me, the notion of a semiotic economy is a useful way of grounding Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible. Rancière argues against both the autonomy of art and art’s submission to politics—his idea is that different “distributions of the sensible” are not automatically linked to particular political destinies. Instead, their affordances must be taken up in particular ways—there must be a process by which a distribution of the sensible becomes a basis for a politics. “A common world,” he writes, “is never simply an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the sedimentation of … intertwined acts. It is always a polemical distribution of modes of being and occupation in a space of possibilities.” Rancière is not just talking about the distribution of the sensible in terms of things experienced through the senses. The sensible is also referring to the ways that sensory things become sensible, that is, intelligible, capable of carrying meaning or making sense within particular regimes of imageness/aurality. To give one example—the idealized Tamil notion of kuralinimai—voice sweetness—attributed to the voices of certain female singers in the 1960s was not just about voice quality itself, but how certain moral attributes came to be associated with it. It also had to do with the ways a non-projected head voice was made bodiless by being detached from the body of both the onscreen actress and the body of the playback singer herself. The function of a semiotic economy is precisely this—to constitute sensory things as signs by placing them in some kind of meaningful relation to each other.
Constantine V. Nakassis: Can you say a little about how gender plays into how the sensible is distributed?
Amanda Weidman:The gendered asymmetries are quite striking. Playback began as way of managing the ways the female form would become available to be seen/heard in the public sphere through expressive and medial forms such as music, dance, and cinema, in a context where respectable femininity was defined by the careful management and often avoidance of public appearance. During its heyday, the mid 1950s through the mid 1970s, the affordances of playback’s division of labor were taken up in different gendered ways. For men, the separation of the roles of actor and singer and their symbiotic relationship was productive, generating a kind of surplus power and political potency. Star status could accrue to both the actor and the singer through the combination of one’s body and the other’s voice because they were understood to be working together, doing the same thing through two different modalities. For women, however, the separation of roles was used and interpreted differently. The assumed moral licitness of a woman singing was used to cancel out, or mitigate, the assumed immorality of a woman acting onscreen. Actress and singer were understood to be doing two fundamentally different things. Female playback singers who had risen to prominence in this period conveyed this gulf between actress and singer to me by describing themselves as “just the voice” or by stressing that their acting was “all in the throat” and they were not doing “mimicry.” I have been pondering for years how this role of being “just the voice” was constructed and inhabited, and what it meant. Rather than seeing it as a simple limiting or restriction in the service of female respectability, in the book I try to show how this role was in fact a coveted status that allowed singers to steer a path between behind the scenes anonymity and onscreen/onstage exposure.
Constantine V. Nakassis:Historically speaking, one of the stories of this book is the transition from the post-Independence period (1950s–1980s) to the post-liberalization period (1990s–2020s). How do these macro epochal moments map onto what you call the performative dispensations, or regimes, of visuality and aurality that have governed playback singing?
Amanda Weidman:In this book I’ve tried to show the historicity of playback as a cultural institution responding to and shaping the ethos of particular sociopolitical moments. Its changes and shifts reflect the different kinds of semiotic/representational economies voice has been inserted into. At its beginning in the 1940s, playback was referred to as iraval kural—borrowed or traded voice, reflecting the emphasis on the partibility of the voice and the economic/transactional understanding of the practice. As playback became set as a dispensation within India’s technocratic, developmentalist post-Independence decades and within the gender politics of the Tamil Dravidianist political context, playback singers shifted to being referred to as pinnani patakarkal—behind [the screen] singers—foregrounding the project of producing a desirable or ideal onscreen body-voice combination over the partibility of the voice as such—a change that went along with a rise in playback singers’ status. In the post-liberalization decades, neoliberal ideologies have introduced a new set of industries, desires and promises centering around the voice, and a new value placed on visibility—the laying bare of what was previously hidden, unspoken, illicit. For singers, this translates into a pressure to couple voice ever more tightly with the self, body, and intention of the singer. All those things so carefully separated and parceled out in playback’s dispensation are being recombined in different—and yet still differentially gendered—ways. Tamil cinema is caught now between contradictory trends of emulating Hollywood-style narrative film and getting rid of song sequences and other supposedly non-realistic elements, and a self-referential, semi-nostalgic, semi-parodic re-animation of older elements. This is why “afterlife” seems more apt than “death” to describe the state of playback now.
Constantine V. Nakassis: Speaking of after(-brought-to-)life (by the voice), what’s next for your research?
Amanda Weidman: One of the most interesting people I met while doing this project was the singer L. R. Eswari, who managed to flout the gendered normativities of playback, combining a professional life as the go-to playback singer for vamp roles in the 1960s with a successful career as a singer of commercial devotional music on the South Indian Hindu goddess Amman—the alternately benevolent and fierce mother goddess associated with subaltern religious practice. I’m thinking about a new project that would investigate the role of aural representations of and appeals to Amman in this commercial devotional music in relation to the politics of caste, class and gender in South India.
Constantine V. Nakassis: I can’t wait to see where this new project goes! And thank you so much for doing this fascinating interview about this amazing book!
Andy Zhenzhou Tan: An explicit orienting question for the book is “Why teach an entire nation English?” (4) Personally or sociologically, this “why” question had seldom dawned on me, a lucky survivor of the West-bound, future-facing, and English-mediated journey many of your informants aspired to. Nonetheless, or therefore, this question struck me as a giant elephant in the room. How did it become a question for you? What are some of the answers you explore in the book?
Eric Henry: Honestly it was not a topic I went looking for. Before I started a doctorate in anthropology I was an English teacher in China, thinking I could study Mandarin and pay off some debts at the same time. One of the things that struck me was that, with adult students, very few of them were in a situation or a job where they would actually need to use the language on a regular basis. There was a certain absurdity to it: here I was, with no formal training, teaching English to railway engineers or bureaucrats. My only qualification was that I had grown up speaking the language and the students had not. This kind of realization drove many of the foreign teachers I worked with to a kind of cynicism, but for me it prompted questions I could explore ethnographically. I realized that we naturalize this desire for English on a global scale – but most of the students did not care for the language itself, only for its capacity to shape their own futures. When I really started to listen to those students, and by this time I was back doing fieldwork, I learned that the desire to speak English is always entangled with dreams of the future: with going abroad, accumulating wealth, or just being seen as someone in control of their lives rather than being left behind by China’s burgeoning social transformations. Most of the people I talked to identified the last twenty years as the most important in all of China’s long history, a time that is radically reconfiguring relations between self and society on the one hand, and China and the world on the other. Saying “I speak English,” is therefore a powerful claim to identity under new regimes of neoliberal capitalism and globalization.
Andy Zhenzhou Tan: This ethnography of contemporary speech practices and English language learning in Northeast China, on a more ambitious scale, is also an intervention in the study of modernity. What is your approach to modernity in this book? What are some of the analytic concepts central to this approach? Why is it preferable over other approaches?
Eric Henry: I am a linguistic anthropologist, so naturally I look to language and discourse as primary constituents of social phenomena. It has always struck me that modernity is often defined in terms of specific economic, political or social metrics: rational markets, democracy, the retreat of the state and so on. In contrast, the people I worked with in Shenyang understood modernity through narratives about the changes going on around them; and the languages people used to talk about those changes seemed to have the power to launch this new state of being. I had the chance to dig into some missionary archives related to language teaching in China in the 1920s, and I was able to read some of the essays Chinese students wrote for their English teachers. They were incredible – one, by a young nursing student, imagined the development of a “moral hospital” in China, where intractable young people would be sent for moral instruction. In her story, the moral hospital struggles for legitimacy until the President of China commits his own son to their care. At that point the eyes of the world turn to the hospital and recognize the value of China’s civilization, extending to the nation an opportunity for global leadership. I realized that this young student understood her own language study in much the same terms as Chinese people today, as a way of transforming Chinese society and achieving international recognition; in other words, as a way of becoming modern. This is what I call discursive modernity – it is the ways in which modernity is constituted out of talk about the material or social changes that surround people as they navigate through new landscapes, new technologies and new forms of social position or status. I think this approach frees us from trying to measure abstract qualities such as “development” or “modernization” and focus instead on how people both experience the forces of change and locate themselves as social actors in relation to them.
Andy Zhenzhou Tan: Chapter 2 analyzes the distinct cultural geography of post-socialist China based on the paradigmatic form of the wall and what you term the moral economy of “recursive enclosure”. The cover photo of the book, showing a residential apartment complex I suppose, seems to be taken from this chapter. What is the structural place of this cultural geographical analysis in a book explicitly about speech practices? What is the limit to the claim about “distinctness”? To what extent is the moral economy of “recursive enclosure” more universal?
Eric Henry: Landscapes are always suffused with symbolic values – it is part of what I would consider a universal human process of place-making. We can see evidence of this anytime we talk about urban or rural, or when we label a place as being in a “pristine” state of nature. At the same time, I think there is something unique about China and the contemporary remnants of an imperial technology of boundary-making and enclosure. Traditional architecture in China, from temples to palaces to the peasant homestead, emphasized enclosure. Structures abutted the margins of the property and were inward-focused, with a series of increasingly private and intimate spaces marked off by walls, panels, curtains, and other boundaries. Cities and, at a larger scale, the empire itself were also enclosed by walls marking off center and periphery. These spatial configurations were designed to, as I argue, signify a kind of timeless continuity for the empire and the enduring relationship between the human and cosmological worlds. People – whether they be priests, peasants or emperors – doing similar types of rituals, in similar types of spaces, and using a common language asserted the unity and universality of the imperial state. As I argue in the book, however, in today’s China the spaces and space-making practices remain, but the types or rituals, behavior and language in each are now different. Residences, schools, factories, and offices are still surrounded by walls, with imposing gates dividing interior from exterior. But the imperial universality has been shattered into a landscape that is not only divided in terms of wealth, but also in terms of time. Some people feel like they are ahead, and others like they are being left behind.
One day in Shenyang I hopped on a minibus headed out on a rural route, just to see where it would take me. When I came back, some of my Chinese friends were amazed – how on earth could you find your way when all the people out there speak in dialect? You have to understand, a lot of people in the city speak the dialect too, but there is this feeling in urban China of a separation and distinctness from rural areas, almost as if the people living there are a different kind of citizen. The countryside is luohou, which means stagnant or backwards, and they are thought to speak the regional dialect almost exclusively. So these boundaries of enclosure symbolically mark off spaces that are oriented in multiply contingent ways to the future or to the past, and the linguistic and conversational choices people make are used to identify what kinds of spaces they are in. In rural villages you hear the dialect, in modern fantasy spaces like five-star hotels and luxury shopping malls you hear English. Space, time and language are bound together.
Andy Zhenzhou Tan: Chapter 6 asserts the significance of race, represented by the type of a white, English-speaking foreigner, in speech practices and imaginaries of modernity in contemporary China. How did you, often cast in that type by your informants, navigate doing fieldwork?
Eric Henry: Even though most people claimed that Chinese society has no racial divisions, race is an inescapable part of everyday life in China. It is implicit in the ways people endlessly discuss whose skin is dark and whose is light; darkness is associated with the countryside and agricultural labor, lightness with the city and professional employment. Ethnic minorities in China are treated as cultural relics, people who dress in distinctive costumes and manifest quaint traditions. And foreigners, in particular, are recruited into these discourses of modernization because certain racialized others (and here I fit the stereotype of the white, blue-eyed personification of modernity perfectly) represent progress and development. This did grant me a clear privilege in being able to conduct research on language schools. I could saunter in the door, walk right into the headmaster’s office and be welcomed with open arms. The Chinese scholars and linguists I know had to beg, bargain and negotiate just to get access. At the same time, however, and this is something I try to elaborate in the last chapter of my book, I had a role to play. If I’m white, I’m there to teach English, or I’m there to do business, and so many of my interviews and interactions were derailed into discussions of business opportunities or study abroad opportunities. “Let’s cooperate together and open an English school – we can get rich!” I could never be unobtrusive; if I visited a new English class, I always became the center of attention and would be dragged up to lead a pronunciation lesson or answer student questions. At the time, I thought of this fact as a hindrance to my research, but I came to realize that this is a critical element of the discourse of modernity. If crafting modern subjectivities in China is, as I’ve argued, dependent upon acquiring a new repertoire of globalized speech practices, they have to be acquired from somewhere and from someone. In effect, I was being recruited into a kind of fantasy space in which I reflected back to my interlocutors the same desire they had for the signifiers of modernity, such as wealth and mobility, in which case they could consider us co-eval or equivalent social actors. To become modern is therefore to appropriate the signifiers (racialized, linguistic, performative) of those people who already appear to be modern, and that depends upon the source of those signifiers, the foreigner, acting in the way a foreigner is expected to act. By conforming to that role I was sanctioning the activities taking place – whether it was learning a global language, or opening an academic conference or hosting a wedding – as legitimate instantiations of modernizing practice.
Maybe that is a good note to end on. In your first question you identify yourself as a “survivor of the West-bound, future-facing, and English-mediated journey” and I think that is an apt way to put it. The educational pathways we have created for students and scholars follow very constrained routes, and require a very restricted set of linguistic skills and credentials, naturally favoring certain privileged groups over others. All of this is driving a massive global language teaching industry valued at around $10 billion a year. The racialized privilege I experienced was due to an equivalence between my appearance, my language, and the presumed superiority of Western countries. We have to develop a critical reflexivity towards these naturalized assumptions and never allow them to pass unchallenged. To dismantle such regimes of inequality requires an understanding of how the desires for certain types of linguistic, social, and symbolic capital are produced and sustained on a global scale.
H. Keziah Conrad: One of the central arguments you make in the book is that there is something wrong with the “successful aging” model put forward in gerontology and popular discourses. Can you say more about what the successful aging model is, and why you see it as problematic?
Anna I. Corwin: The notion of successful aging emerged in the 1990s and was adopted in both research and popular discourses as an appealing alternative to previous models that described aging as a process of inevitable decline into decrepitude. It gained popularity quickly, and the past few decades have seen a tremendous outpouring of research on the topic of successful aging – research that seeks to understand how individuals can live longer and be healthier in older age.
While this might seem to many folks like an unequivocally positive move, anthropologists and critical gerontologists have shown that the research and the popular discourses on successful aging embed neoliberal cultural values and assumptions into what they are naming as science. Instead of simply measuring health outcomes (which anthropologists know can be culturally variable), the literature promotes a model of success in older age in which individuals are independent, productive, active, ageless adults. In other words, as Sarah Lamb and others have pointed out, the successful aging paradigm is promoting a model of aging that involves not aging at all.
This is problematic for two central reasons: First, this model of success implies that one can fail at aging, which itself is an absurd notion (and has extremely important implications for how one thinks about disability and personhood). It is particularly problematic when we remember that systematic oppression including environmental racism creates a landscape that disproportionately impacts Black and Brown individuals’ health outcomes throughout the lifecourse, compounding toward the end of life
Second, the successful aging model is simply not scientifically robust – not only are measures of independence, for example, not always measures of health and well-being, they also are not values or qualities seen in a number of communities (like the sisters in Catholic convents) where people are documented to experience positive health outcomes at the end of life. As I explore in the book, in the convent, where sisters experience longevity and increased physical and psychological well-being at the end of life, the nuns demonstrate precisely the opposite cultural values and practices by emphasizing interdependence and socialization into letting go, or, as in the title of the book, Embracing Age.
Keziah Conrad: Embracing Age contributes to the literature on linguistic relativity, and you argue that language shapes how we age. You also say that simply looking for different words to replace stigmatized words like “old” will not itself change the stigma attached to aging in the US. What is it about the nuns’ language practices that goes deeper in actually shaping experience?
Anna Corwin: There have been campaigns, both formal and informal, in recent years to rid English of words that stigmatize older adults: for instance, banning the terms “old” and “elderly” in favor of “older adults.” While I am, of course, completely supportive of policies that work to destigmatize aging, I’m quite skeptical of movements that target words alone. Avoiding specific words will do nothing unless we address the underlying cultural practice and social structures that create aging stigma in the first place.
In the convent, the sisters learned to treat old age as a normative part of the life course through linguistic practices that went far beyond word choice. One of the chapters in the book (Chapter 3) looks at the sisters’ prayer practices. As it turns out, prayer is more than just a way to engage with God. Prayer also is a way for the sisters to tell each other about the needs of others in the convent, to offer and provide social support, to communicate institutional ideals, and even to express ideals about aging. For example, instead of praying for intervention or direct healing from God, the sisters in the convent would pray that a sister who was suffering find “the grace to accept” what she was enduring. Through these public, intercessory prayers, all the sisters learned community values around aging, acceptance, and the value of letting go.
Another example of the way linguistic practices shaped the nuns’ attitudes and experiences of aging was the ways the sisters treated their peers who had experienced significant decline. Even when sisters had conditions such as aphasia and couldn’t speak, or had deteriorative neurological conditions and couldn’t move, they were included in meaningful everyday activities such as worship, prayer, and social activities like card games. I devote nearly an entire chapter to looking at the micro-interactional processes through which the sisters skillfully engaged peers who have declined in mutually enjoyable, meaningful everyday activities. Building on the literature on linguistic relativity, I suggest that language and experience dynamically shape each other through habitual interactions that occur over a lifetime.
Keziah Conrad: In Embracing Age you show that socialization processes occur throughout the life-course (not only in childhood), and that socialization practices are key to how the Catholic Sisters you worked with learn to age and die. What are some of these practices? How are the nuns socialized to embrace aging?
Anna Corwin: When I arrived at the convent and began to spend time with older sisters, one of the things I was struck by was the ways that aging, end-of-life, and death were embraced in the convent as normative parts of the life-course. This stood out as particularly striking as it contrasted with mainstream practices outside the convent in the rest of the Midwest and United States where elderly adults and disabled folks are often segregated from many everyday activities and spaces. In the convent, elderly sisters continued to be integrated in meaningful everyday activities, which also meant that younger sisters continued to engage with and learn with these sisters, for example, learning how to age themselves as they interacted with their older peers.
The sisters’ embrace of aging as a normal and natural part of the life course was also underscored theologically as they emphasized notions of kenosis, which included practices of letting go of individual control and desire. This occurred in prayer, everyday narratives or storytelling over meals, in care interactions, and in social interactions such as card games. For example, in prayer, instead of petitioning the divine for healing (as one might in some Protestant communities), the sisters learned to pray for acceptance, for grace, or for God to walk with them in their pain.
They also embraced the oldest members of their community in very practical ways. In the convent infirmary, instead of caring-for and other uni-directional care interactions we often see in institutional care settings, the sisters mutually engaged with and valued elderly peers in on-going, dynamic arrangements. For example, one day when I was shadowing a sister (S. Irma — all names are pseudonyms) in the infirmary, the sister provided blessings for her elderly peers. In one of the rooms, we met Sister Helen who had aphasia and whose mobility was significantly limited. Sister Irma asked Sister Helen to bless me – and to my surprise, she proceeded to place Sister Helen’s hand on my forehead and Sister Helen blessed me using words I could not decipher. Ultimately, the form of prayer, in which God is the recipient of the request for a blessing, the fact that we could not make out her words did not matter. The blessing was seen as meaningful as she was interceding on my behalf to request the blessing. In this way, Sister Helen and her peers with significant chronic conditions such as aphasia and neurological conditions that limited communication and movement were included as meaningful interlocutors in everyday practices. By engaging elderly peers with physically and/or communicatively limiting conditions in meaningful everyday activities, the sisters demonstrated that they actively valued and included all members of the community, even those who were infirm and/or disabled. All of these practices and many more served to teach the sisters how to embrace aging as they themselves grew older.
Keziah Conrad: What kind of experiences have you had sharing this work with older adults who are seeking models of how to age gracefully or successfully?
Anna Corwin: I have presented my work to public audiences and have offered 8-week workshops in my community where I introduce my research findings and invite older adults to engage with the work. In these spaces, I have seen how pervasive and appealing the mainstream model of successful aging is in the United States and I have been struck by the power and prevalence of the dual desires to avoid aging and, if one must age, to do so while maintaining independence and control over the body. The notion of embracing aging doesn’t always sound appealing to mainstream Americans and people have sometimes voiced disappointment and resentment to me that I do not offer tips to avoid aging. However, I have seen some remarkable transformations as individuals begin to notice the popular discourses of aging that surround them. Most often, the pushback I receive develops into an articulation and rejection of the stigmatizing and troublesome discourses that individuals begin to note in their everyday lives. I have witnessed many people replace old internalized practices with new, hopeful, more loving practices.
One of my hopes for this book is that it allows more people to become aware that the popular discourses of aging which stigmatize, segregate and otherwise demean older adults are not the only way to approach aging. There is tremendous diversity in how aging is understood and experienced across cultural contexts. Doing this research has filled me with a lot of hope as I have witnessed the processes through which the nuns value and integrate their aging peers and learn to embrace interdependence and the end of life as they grow older themselves.
While page 99 of my dissertation (see below) seems far from its focus on sex apps and digital media among queer men in Beirut, the connection is palpably beneath silence as an analytic of queer freedom and possibility within dense social constraints put upon queer intimacies. Silence, as the strategic offspring of constraint, suggests a struggle between violent social homophobias and the everydayness of gay sex and intimacy in Beirut. In the digital age, this queer silence is never perfectly achieved because of all the personal and sexual information queer men circulate within dense networks of sex app users who could be anyone behind the screen. Perhaps silence has never been perfectly achievable, but just a tool within liberalism for striving toward the idyllic antonym of constraint: freedom. While silence may structure queer men’s interactions within heteronormative time and space, this dissertation examines how men use sex apps and social media to bombastically announce their queer desires and arrange gay sex within the everydayness of Lebanese cultural politics and social constraints.
This research examines how, over three decades of telecommunications’ infrastructure development in Lebanon, gay sex has become more integrated into men’s everyday lives. I argue that gay sex in Beirut is not extraordinary simply because it exists against a set of marginalizing forces, but rather that it is ordinary because of its imbrication in everyday life, habits, and routines via the functions and structures of digital media, and all manners of communicating in the digital age. Via ethnography, I map the media practices, logics, meanings, categories, and debates queer men in Beirut have developed to live with one another sexually and relationally. I show how men’s engagements with sexy information – those pieces of information men circulate to describe themselves and their desires to others – has shifted the social and political conditions of queer male intimate life in Beirut. Information encompasses a set of political questions about queerness in Middle East: the degree to which men’s information ought to reproduce Lebanese cultural politics within their intimate lives or enable novel and unexpected formations to fuel new kinds of everyday intimate possibilities.
My page 99:
Through Rasa, Haddad connects queer secrecy and discretion to the Arabic word ‘eib, which roughly translates as shame, but is more: it encompasses a broad moral order that structures everyday social relations. He writes, “the implication of ‘eib is kalam el-nas, what will people say, and so the word carries an element of conscientiousness, a politeness brought about by a perceived sense of communal obligation… I’ve come to realize that if worn correctly, the cloak of ‘eib is large and malleable enough to allow you to conceal many secrets and to repel intrusive questions” (Haddad 2016: 26). In Lebanon, family members and family friends know a lot about one’s life, and ask detailed, prying questions. And men have to devise plausible stories for how strangers enter their lives. To Haddad, ‘eib speaks to a queer freedom based on silence. If one does not talk about one’s queerness, families and social networks do not inquire, thereby not stirring speculation and gossip as a form of policing within a moral order. I recall one man, Khadim, in his late 30s who thought that because of his Arabness, people would not accept him if he came out, and he would lose his job as an educator. So, he, like many other men, was selective with who he told. He cultivated a feeling of security before he disclosed his sexuality by carefully raising the topic and testing reactions. He particularly chose people he trusted not to disclose his sexuality to others. He also did not want to disappoint and possibly cause physical trauma to his ailing mother, for whom he was in Lebanon to care (he received Canadian residency a few years before but never emigrated). There is a strong social obligation to remain tied to the family and to be there to support the family, through material, financial and emotional means. Khadim empties Lebanese homophobia (as Merabet [2014a] calls it) from its cultural and historical meaning, reducing it to a quality of being Arab. Discretion is not always out of fear of risk, but also sometimes an act of love and care.
Özge Korkmaz: I want to start with a general question. How would you describe this book to an anthropological audience, and do you see it as belonging to any particular theoretical genealogy or subfield?
Lauren Zentz: I must say that I have always seen myself as a theoretical nomad of sorts. That being said, I find that linguistic anthropology and especially sociolinguistics are good homes for such a type of scholar. I believe that I can say that my work is inspired by work that comes from various fields but that tends toward the ethnographic. Thus in this book, as I relay in the preface, I draw on diverse work ranging from the feminist qualitative studies of Lather and Smithies, to Mendoza-Denton’s and Heller’s crucial work that I tend to consider more typical for the field of linguistic anthropology; I draw on ethnographic work that is not really described as such from foremost political scientists like Theda Skocpol; ethnographic work that draws more on cultural anthropological writing paradigms in Graeber’s work; to work that blends genres, like Perry Gilmore’s ethnography-slash-memoir that also taps into long-held conversations across sociolinguistics as well as cognitive and theoretical linguistics. I read in media studies and general discourse analysis theory and methods, in addition to the above. In the end, then, I would say that my work is quite interdisciplinary, but this includes a heavy lean towards deeply qualitative and ethnographic work. And, as many who know me and my work would tell you without a moment’s hesitation, my work is of course deeply inspired by Jan Blommaert’s, whose work I also consider to be deeply political, deeply interdisciplinary, and both deeply sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological.
Özge Korkmaz: Since this is an internet-based ethnography, I am curious as to how you define your field-site, and whether you struggled at times with working outside of the traditional domains of research? I ask this question recognizing that every ethnography comes with its problems about where the field-site begins and ends, so I wonder what those problems would be for students of social media.
Lauren Zentz: This was indeed a challenging question, and something that there is not a robust literature on to my knowledge, especially when it comes to incorporating online and social media communities/communications, so I did find myself really improvising and having to define things for myself. Ultimately for any ethnography, of course, this is what we want anyway – the field site needs to be defined from the ground up because life and community organization generally don’t line up with our preconceived notions of them. But I did find myself on perpetually shifting ground, I would say, for at least the first year (of two) that I was conducting data collection. In this study, I started out thinking that I would conduct a study of the leadership of the state organization of Pantsuit Republic Texas. This was a group that lived throughout the state but mostly in Austin, Dallas, and Houston. Given that we only met online on Slack, Facebook, and a group phone call website called FreeConferenceCall.com, I was of course unable to gain the trust of the people who I’d imagined would become my research participants – the eight or so members of the state board (although I was given permission to start this study from two of the leaders of the state board, who I already knew and who lived in Houston). Because I could not gain people’s trust, I simply could not do the study in the way that I had first dreamt it up. And so my field site had to shift dramatically. I stepped back, continued my secretarial duties for the state board, and then reflected on how I had gotten involved in the organization in the first place, and only then did I realize that I needed to go to the people who I already knew. These were, again, the two people from the state board who had initially authorized the study, and then people with whom I had worked in the leadership of PSR’s local counterpart, Pantsuit Republic Houston. So I went back to these folks and changed my strategy to collecting data from their Facebook posts both in and outside of both PSR and PSRH’s secret Facebook groups, as well as research interviews and field notes. I asked sixteen or so people in total to participate, and ultimately ended up with a total of eight. Of these eight, some were more available than others for various work, home, and activism related reasons, and so I collected more and less information from each depending on their individual circumstances and my relationships with them each individually.
After all of this strategy shifting, my primary source of data became Facebook. So this was primarily an online ethnography, but let’s not forget that there is not a separation between online and offline life, contrary to some early (and continuing) beliefs that online life is supposedly fake and offline life is putatively real. As with every technology, from the telegraph to the phone and the television and so on, these have all been integrated into our lives. We don’t have a TV-watching life and a non-TV watching life; we just have a life, in which we watch TV and then refer to what we’ve watched after the fact. Similarly, we have a life in which we engage on various online social media platforms via our smartphones, our tablets, our desktop and laptop computers, and so on. On these sites we engage in individual chats, group chats, secret group pages, public pages, our personal walls on which we post publicly and/or privately, and so on, and then we met with several of the people we were just talking to online and we continue the conversation or move on to different topics. I engaged with my research participants online, but I also met up with them in person, at state board meetings, local PSRH public meetings, protests and other events. So while I emphasize online data in this book, it is informed by a more holistic experience while I was acting as a member (albeit peripheral) of the leadership groups of these organizations.
Özge Korkmaz: As ethnographers, we already know that whatever it is that gives political identities their unity of meaning is not static but processual. Yet we are also pretty good at documenting the ways people strive to create a somewhat stable one that is consistent with its own facts. What does this identity-work look like in the internet? What resources and techniques are available to people?
Lauren Zentz: I actually just met with a couple of my research participants the other day – now that they had contributed to the construction of a monograph through their own words via social media posts and interviews, they wanted to a have a sort of mini book club about it. It was really fun. But the reason I bring it up is just to say that we talked about how much data I ended up collecting in this study. Over 13,000 screenshots from over 6,000 original posts. Plus interviews, plus field notes, and so on. It was so, so overwhelming. But I found that something similar to what has happened in my previous studies happened as I sorted through all the data – and even as I simply watched my participants’ posts go by on my news feed on a daily basis. What happened is that the themes started to repeat themselves. This is sort of a standard, nonformal cue for how we know we’ve finally collected enough data – the themes that we’ve seen arise through our grounded, inductive experience start to repeat themselves. So as I watched these participants “write themselves into being” (boyd 2010) – particularly as political and activist beings – over the two-ish years of posts and interactions I had with them, I started to see the themes of the narratives they were constructing, over time and across interactions, about themselves, their activist group(s), and the geopolitical formations in which they found themselves, and this is how I saw those stable and unified stories emerge over time.
Özge Korkmaz: Lastly, increasingly our lives become suffused with contradictions that emerge out of a perceived gap between ethical commitments, on one hand, and the real situation, on the other. What does the world of internet activism have to offer us in terms of contemporary configurations of morality and politics? Do you think this desire to get involved in things, especially against the background of the rise of social movements across the globe, teach us something new about politics and political systems?
Lauren Zentz: I’m really not sure that it teaches us anything new about people’s desire to get involved because I’m not sure we actually do get more involved. I don’t want this prior statement, however, to come across as contradictory with the critiques that I posit (building on others’ work) in the book regarding notions such as “slacktivism”. I do think that there is value to, as Dennis (2019) reframes the former term, “microactivism”. Let’s take, for instance, a conversation that was held in the secret PSRH group in late 2018 – so two years after the formation of these groups/after Trump’s election. Lucy, a leader in both PSRH and PSR who was very active both on and offline in these and ally organizations, wrote a post describing her metamorphosis, basically from a rather soft-spoken person with opinions she didn’t bother voicing much into a very outspoken person who was not at all shy about her beliefs and opinions, political or otherwise. After she authored this post, numerous people who participated online in the PSRH group responded that they, too, had undergone such a change. They had shifted their relationships, gotten rid of people who did not support their more outspoken selves, spoken up more to family members with whom they disagreed, and so on. And those responding to Lucy’s posts were certainly not as active offline as she was; however, their membership in this support community that had come together around a shared set of political beliefs/ideologies after the 2016 election had provided them at least one important source of social support that enabled them to stand firm in how they felt about the US’s political circumstances at the time. So in this case we see that online activities that might be derided by some as slacktivism were actually quite the contrary – they were in many senses life changing. So perhaps the growth of online activism at best has taught me that lots of people do want to get involved, and they really do care, but the burdens of regular life prevent them from doing anything more than talking online about what they care about. Face to face activism, as I witnessed it through my engagements with my research participants as well as the other leaders of these groups, is immensely time consuming, and, as I write in the book, people with families, full time jobs, and so on, quite frankly might be relieved to have a social media outlet where they can feel connected to people who feel the same as them because they certainly don’t have the time, energy, bandwidth, and so on to meet up in face to face activities and “do the work”. They instead provide and participate in a sort of critical mass of moral and ideological support that helps keep the movement moving.
In this light, I suppose it is appropriate to end where I began, mentioning Jan Blommaert, who referred to online activities as expansions of our communicative repertoires. As he and Ondřej Prochazka wrote specifically in reference to online activism, this “knowledge activism” in online spaces must be “serious business” (Prochazka and Blommaert 2019), and as such worthy of serious consideration as an integral part of how people communicate throughout the myriad contexts of their daily lives. In this book, I hope to have given insight into how such serious business played itself out in a quite momentous shift in national, state-level, and local politics in the US.
Narges Bajoghli: What made you write this book and want to focus on the media in Afghanistan, particularly?
Wazhmah Osman: In western discourse, from Rudyard Kipling to Winston Churchill, the prevailing image of Afghans has been a stereotypical, racist, and dehumanizing one. Afghans are portrayed as savages, militant, and barbaric. These colonial tropes took on new currency after the tragic events of 9/11. There was so much misinformation about Afghan people and Afghanistan in the news, documentaries, books, and by political pundits, which resulted in acts of violence and discrimmination against people from the Muslim world including my communities. I knew I wanted to redress and challenge these problematic dominant narratives by directing the global dialogue about Afghanistan to Afghans themselves. During my pre-research trips to Afghanistan, I noticed the rapid expansion of the Afghan media sector, largely thanks to the post 9/11 international donor community’s funding and training. I also noticed how the media is at the heart of the most important national debates about women’s rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam. For countries in the global south and east, like Afghanistan, who are described as stuck in time and incapable of modernizing, showing the dynamism of cultural contestations and social movements that occur in and around media is one of the best ways to dispel the immutability and failure discourses.
Narges Bajoghli: Your research for the book is very ethnographic and embedded and impressive in its scope and access. How did you go about the research of this book, especially given how fraught your fieldsites were/are, with active war, occupation, and violence?
Wazhmah Osman: Thank you. To be honest, initially I did not want to go back to Afghanistan for my dissertation research, which this book is based on. I needed a break from Afghanistan. Post 9/11 I had been going back and forth for journalistic assignments and documentary film work. Pre 9/11 I was also going back and forth to visit my father and other family and to maintain my cultural ties and connections. Afghanistan, just like its people, is a lively and beautiful place but it has been marked by over four decades of death and destruction and lawlessness, which makes everyday life there extremely difficult and dangerous. I partially grew up in Af-Pak during the height of the Cold War. So I’m no stranger to the chaos and violence of war but the extent and extremity of it never ceases to surprise me. Sadly for Afghans in Afghanistan, it has become mundane.
But I also knew that in-depth on the ground research with local Afghans was the best way to challenge elitist and problematic views from the top and disrupt their simplistic and imperialist narratives that drum up hate, violence, and war. Also in dialogue with Faye Ginsburh, our advisor, she encouraged me to work with Afghans in Afghanistan as opposed to the diaspora in Queens NY. Going back there for my book research and fieldwork was my longest and hardest trip back. As you know, long term fieldwork and research is such a privilege but also arduous. It took a big personal toll on me. There’s the emotional challenges of returning as an expatriate to a former home that is a war-torn shell of what it used to be, being apart from loved ones, and the loss of that. More seriously and devastatingly though, I lost research subjects and interlocutors I had befriended to the violence of war. Brave media makers, human rights activists, reformers, and aid workers risk their lives on a daily basis to create a progressive and democratic society. They are regularly targeted by local and international warlords and conservative groups. I survived and have the privilege to leave and tell their stories. Many people don’t.
Narges Bajoghli: In the book, you argue that television is at the center of violence in Afghanistan–“generating it and also being targeted by it.” Yet, you argue, television is also providing a semblance of justice, debate and healing. Can you expand more on this central argument in your book and how television becomes such a site of contention?
Wazhmah Osman: Due to high illiteracy rates and limited access to computers and the internet, the dystopic state of the country, television (and radio to a lesser extent) have become a popular and powerful medium in Afghanistan. A lot of hopes, fears, and funding are funneled into it. I set out to study the impact and cultural contestations that the media is enabling. I mainly used two methodologies, content analysis of the most popular genres on Afghan television and my ethnographic research into their production and reception. While space won’t permit me to get into the details, I can say that Afghan media producers, at great risk to themselves, are providing a platform for local reform, activism, and indigenous modernities to challenge both local conservative groups and the international community that has Afghanistan in its sights. The media has opened up space crucial for private and public discussion around important national and cultural issues. I also discovered that Afghan peoples’ need for justice via more serious programming and entertainment via more fun and distracting programs are not mutually exclusive. We cannot underestimate the value of entertainment in war-torn countries like Afghanistan. The antidote to war and its atrocities is equal parts reflection and distraction. I mean look at how streaming services and media consumption have skyrocketed during the pandemic. This is not just because we were captive audiences at home. It’s because the media provides a semblance of calm and understanding of our chaotic, violent, and confusing world.
Narges Bajoghli: Although I think most American/American-based scholars and anthropologists should have an interest in this book given the decades-long American war and occupation of Afghanistan, we unfortunately know that not to be the case. We’ve talked a lot about this before, but it seems like the two places you and I study, Iran and Afghanistan, respectively, are always in the news, and have been for decades, yet all that ink spilled has not led to deeper knowledge in the Euro-American sphere, including, unfortunately in many corners of academia. How does this book speak to anthropological debates about media in general, and about media and democracy under occupation? What can this book teach us and our students who may not focus on Afghanistan as a main area of study?
Wazhmah Osman: Like you said Afghanistan, like Iran, your site of research, has occupied the public and popular imagination of Americans for decades through the news and Hollywood films. Most of that has been in relation to wars and conflict like the Soviet Invasion and Occupation of Afghanistan, the events of 9/11, War on Terror, and the US Forever War in Afghanistan. The US government and therefore the American people have been entangled in over forty years of wars and military operations in the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia). I think many Americans are confused about what their taxpayer money has been funding for so long. I wrote this book with that in mind, to cross-over into the public sphere. While of course I engage with anthropological debates about media and academic theories of media and democracy under occupation, at the same time, I tried to make it as readable and engaging as possible to general audiences as well. Thanks to whistleblowers and investigative journalists, reports of extrajudicial torture, blacksites, and rendition programs are emerging, which are forcing people to reckon with US militarism abroad. Yet at the same time, many of the proponents of media independence and human rights in Afghanistan who train and support journalists and activists are NGOs funded by the United States. In Television and the Afghan Culture Wars, I tried to provide a complete blueprint and outline for understanding the complex geopolitical situation in Afghanistan.
Narges Bajoghli: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sorts of impact do you hope it will have?
Wazhmah Osman: In addition to academics and the public, I also wrote this book for politicians and policy makers. If the US truly wants an exit strategy out of its Forever War in Afghanistan with its ensuing global refugee crisis, it is time to start supporting and centering the voices and stories for self-determination, peace, and justice. Rehashing the same dangerous stereotypes of despotism and barbarism precludes the fundamental agency, creativity and intellect of people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Far beyond the archetypal Hollywood alignment of forces of good (the US military) versus bad (Islamic extremists and terrorists), there is a wide range of people. As I describe in my book, there are many Afghan human rights activists, journalists, and media makers who risk their lives everyday working to lay the foundations for democracy and human rights. They are subjected to threats, physical attacks, and death for challenging local and international warlords. In the book I highlighted their work and organizations in an effort to expose readers to the creativity and agency of Afghan reformers as well as their pain and suffering. These activists and reformers also offer the best solutions and hope for creating a more diverse, equitable, and violence free society.
CaMP Anthropology 