CaMP Anthropology

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth takes the p. 99 test

April 20th, 2020

Opening to page 99 of Finding the Singing Spruce: Craft Labor, Global Forests, and Musical Instrument Makers in Appalachia, you’ll find my reflections on choosing apprenticeship as the ethnographic method that would fit my research questions exploring how craft labor was related to connections with forest landscapes in the mountain forests of West Virginia. While the page generally focuses on how I changed research topics to focus on the materials of craft as an entrance into the meaning of work and how I found makers (often locally famous and frequently interviewed) had ready-to-articulate ideas about their craft, one sentence stands out to speak to the whole of the dissertation.

I found that verbal learning about the craft processes and the craft in general occurred more often in tandem with my kinesthetic, material, and temporal experience that inspired discussion not broached in our interviews.

Ethnographic apprenticeship is the methodological rock upon which the rest of the work unfolds, as the bulk of my argument is made through the narratives of building instruments with three makers. Learning the craft enabled me to feel the affect of the work: the compulsion to make despite adverse and anxiety-inducing economic conditions, the joy and frustration of intersubjective relationships emerging between skilled crafter and wood materials as successful instruments or dashed hopes, and living in the contradiction of the major paradoxes of musical instrument making. Working alongside makers enabled me to see how they live in the contradictory processes of bringing life to an instrument through the death of a tree and relying on the capitalist regimes of timber and factory production that elide the livelihoods and material necessities of craft makers. Working together on material objects also revealed other categories that rendered the work meaningful. Through long hours spent together in the shop, topics emerged that were not discussed in interviews guided by my research questions. Relationship building through apprenticeship revealed that religion was the main driver of meaning in work in one case and transnational connections between people and forest landscapes in another. While the presence of the forest and relationship to the materials was central in both cases, it was other relationships that foregrounded the meaning of the work.

While these methods limited the scope of the dissertation, and made it difficult to speak to the extensive scale of instrument making in Appalachia, empirical discussion of the political economic context, and contrasting takes on the position of racialization and gendering, it did allow me to once explore the intricacies of the relationships between working humans and our environments, as well as position those uniquely human forms of relationship that enable us to make sense of the political, economic, and ecological webs we inhabit.

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth. 2019. Finding the Singing Spruce: Craft Labor, Global Forests, and Musical Instrument Makers in Appalachia. University of Kentucky, Phd.
Kimberly Chong on her new book, Best Practice

April 13th, 2020

Interview by Johannes Lenhard

https://www.dukeupress.edu/best-practice

Johannes Lenhard: Your book is continuing a so far relatively short line of monographs in anthropology started by perhaps Caitlin Zaloom (Out of the Pits, 2006), Bill Maurer (Mutual Life, 2005) and Karen Ho (Liquidated, 2009) tackling the wide sector of finance. What is your specific focus and intervention in the anthropology of finance with your study of management consultants in China?

Kimberly Chong: Although there is an established anthropological literature on high finance, by which I mean the work and expertise of finance professionals such as investment bankers, traders, and fund managers, rather less has been said about how financial value, financial logics and financial ideologies get transposed into non-financial spheres. In Best Practice I look to provide a corrective of sorts, by examining the work of financialization practiced by management consultants in China.

My research can be divided into two parts. Firstly, my book provides a close range analysis of how labour and work has been transformed under the aegis of financialization. I am interested in the forms of evaluation that management consultants instantiate in their clients, as part of their endeavour to create ‘high performance organizations,’ and which link notions of performance to financial value. Moreover, I explore how this linkage is circumscribed by practices of organizing and managing, and how it leads to the devaluation of certain kinds of labour. As well as being poorly paid, such labour is rendered precarious and vulnerable to outsourcing. Secondly, my book examines the specific instantiation of financializing a hitherto non-financial entity. The global management consultancy in which I carried out fieldwork was parachuted into Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to prepare them for initial public offering on international stock exchanges. It has been hired to install IT systems which are designed to operationalize ‘value-based management’, that is management with the overarching objective of creating shareholder value. Yet, as I demonstrate in the book, the way in which the consultants, most of whom are actually Chinese nationals, understand their work is not in terms of evangelising the gospel of shareholder value, but rather as a dream of state capitalism. They see their work as making SOEs, and by extension China, into a paradise – a place of modernity and development, on a par with advanced Western nations. This does not necessarily represent a weakening of, or disruption to, processes of financialization, rather I show that local structures of meaning can be appropriated to enact financialization.

Johannes Lenhard:- You position your book squarely at the intersection of the anthropological study of ethics and the economy (closely related to Max Cam); what I would want to know more about is how you think about economic ethics (as opposed to ordinary ethics or the ethic of the ethical turn for instance)? What does ethics mean in the realm of the economy?

Kimberly Chong: I carried out fieldwork during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the 2007/8 financial crisis. During that time I was disturbed by narratives, from the media and within academia, which suggested that the financial crisis was somehow causally linked to a kind of moral deviance. People were too greedy! We need more women in finance! The problem with these kinds of arguments is that they fail to recognise that the very system in which financiers are operating legitimate and circumscribe certain forms of action. As Janet Roitman has argued robustly, perhaps the financial crisis was not a crisis at all but rather the financial system working as it was intended. If that is so, then changing the people would not be the solution. Also, it would be very difficult for management consultants to do their jobs if they really thought they were perpetually creating harm, waste, or fraud. This became even clearer to me when, in another research project, I studied the decision-making of fund managers. For both management consultants and fund managers, it is important to have a belief that their actions are the right thing to do, or at the very least, have positive efficacy of sorts. I’m not saying that what they do is always right but having the belief that it is right or commendable in some way, is very important if management consultants are to stay management consultants. The way in which they claim moral righteousness or ethical legitimacy for their actions, may, of course, vary between different actors.

In terms of approach, I analyse how ethical coordinates for action are produced through systems which involve both people and things – documents, charts, IT interfaces – through which value is ascribed and produced. I show how economic value is always produced in concert with ethical values, the latter serving to legitimate the production of the former. As exemplified by the trope ‘best practice’, management consulting is the business of creating ethical injunctions through which their interventions are judged and valued, but then naturalized as value-free (in other words, ‘the best’).

Johannes Lenhard: Similar to Stein’s closely related monograph on consultants in Germany, you also have a strong focus on the idea of work. What kind of work is it that consultants are performing (also in relation to Graeber’s notion of ‘bullshit jobs’)? What’s the significance of that work particularly in the Chinese context and how do you see that work (and its impact) changing?

Kimberly Chong: I start the book with a vignette which shows new consultants learning to face down the tricky question of what management consultants do. This is presented as almost unanswerable in part because of the rather particular nature of management consulting which I argue is highly performative in character. By performative I mean, following the likes of Judith Butler and Michel Callon, that consultants are in the business of producing – performing – economic realities in which they can substantiate their claims to expertise, and thus the legitimacy of their interventions.

So what does that mean in practice? A lot of management consulting is about selling and instantiating systems of evaluation, or ‘performance management,’ which allow them to make claims about improving efficiency, and create imperatives to restructure, outsource or downsize. These systems generate a huge amount of work to run and maintain – there are people whose job it is to set up the system, others who monitor it, others who create policies to optimise performance within it. And for people whose performance is being measured, such systems significantly impact their experience of work which then becomes subordinated to the fulfilment of performance targets and legible measures of productivity.

Although Graeber doesn’t mention management consultants specifically, it is probably not unreasonable to say that they have fundamentally changed the nature of work, especially given the scale of their influence – there are few large organizations that haven’t hired a management consultancy at some point. Certainly, consultants have helped to produce jobs whose value is so tightly hewed to the production of certain kinds of representations – such as ‘best practice’, ‘high performance’ – that the content of these jobs becomes hollowed out of meaning.

In China the emphasis on performance marks a shift away from organizations run by principles of hierarchy and political or social connections. Many of my interlocutors told me they wanted to work in a global consultancy because they deemed it to be fairer, more meritocratic, and they explicitly linked these claims to performance management. In many ways they pose an interesting counterpart to the ‘bullshit jobs’ view; although many of them did question impact of their work on their clients, the meaning of their jobs came from the broader frames of value in which they were inscribed. As well as being more meritocratic, some Chinese consultants appreciated consulting as a way of honing their professionalism and expertise. Denigrated under socialism, expertise has been rehabilitated in the post-Mao era, and the fortifying of one’s professional capacities, even if this is done in a global company rather than domestic one, is seen as a means of contributing to the nation and China’s strength.

Johannes Lenhard:- I am also curious about documents in the consultants’ jobs. They use PowerPoint slides (both electronically and in print-outs) a lot. How do people talk about expertise in relationship to these slides? Were some people considered more skilled than others with PowerPoint, and how did people assess that skill? And given that these slides were so ubiquitous, how did these documents function to shape the work day and flow of information?

Kimberly Chong: One cannot overstate the importance of PowerPoint! It was the main medium of written communication, not just with clients, but also within the consultancy. This meant that everyone developed their skill in using PowerPoint– support staff like HR, as well as consultants. Moreover, the legitimacy of one’s expertise was tightly linked to the use of PowerPoint, and this included my own expertise – in the book I mention how I had to present my own pitches for access and research collaboration through PowerPoint. So yes it was ubiquitous. At the same time, some PowerPoints are more important than others, an obvious example is the proposals for new business, which are very slick. Although within academia it’s fashionable to talk down PowerPoint, my time in consulting has meant I have seen what can be achieved with this technology. Or rather despite this technology. PowerPoint is not a graphic design software, which makes it very hard to make visually spectacular documents. It was not uncommon to have slide decks with over one hundred overlaid images – tiny arrows, shapes, lines – which would comprise intricate diagrams, flow charts, graphical representations. This is meticulous work and requires painstaking attention to detail.

One might wonder how useful it is to have highly educated employees spending so much time doing what is essentially intricate formatting work. However, these documents were crucial to performing and enacting economic realities. As I show in the book, PowerPoint diagrams such as ‘Change Tracking Map’ constitute a kind of epistemological intervention through which consultants substantiate certain claims about their expertise. Other PowerPoints play an important role in training consultants and socialising them into particular ideas of their own control and potency in conditions of uncertainty. For example, in training they are exposed to slides that contain charts and graphs which model the delicate matter of client relations in a pseudo-scientific manner.

Johannes Lenhard: Finishing with a methodological question, let’s talk about elites. You had issues with access which is nothing new when ‘studying up.’ Continuing an ongoing debate re-invigorated by among others Souleles, what were your specific issues with accessing your informants? What did you do about them and what were you still not able to do and study?

Kimberly Chong: There were many challenges. I networked tirelessly for six months before I obtained access to a global management consultancy and my problems didn’t end once I had my entry pass. As all ethnographers of organizations know, access has to be continually negotiated and renegotiated during fieldwork, and at all levels of the hierarchy. Second, there was the challenge of studying an extremely large organization, which at the time, had over 4000 employees in its China arm. Third, how do you get people to talk to you in an environment where confidentiality is highly prized and where people come and go all the time (as consultants ‘roll on and off’ client projects)? I felt strongly that I needed ‘legitimacy’ – a position within the organization that allowed my interlocutors to make sense of me, and thus feel comfortable talking to me about their work.

The way I managed these multiple challenges was by collaborating with the consultancy. I become a member of its Human Capital Strategy Programme which was described to me as an initiative of ‘corporate culture’, hence certain employees felt that, as an anthropologist, I’d be well suited to joining. But this did not solve all my problems. Although I was able to obtain access to their ‘client sites’ which is where consultants actually spend most of their time, I was never allowed to speak to their clients and ask them what they thought about the interventions that were being prescribed to them. This was perhaps inevitable, given I was dependent on the management consultancy, and thus would not be allowed to do anything that could potentially compromise their relationship with clients. But having restricted or partial access is, to some extent, the same for all anthropological research. We can never have as much access as I we would like, and often one’s positionality has a big effect on what we can see and participate in. I don’t see this as a problem, as long we are clear about this in our writing.

Lastly, I want to mention something that isn’t often written about and that is the pace of fieldwork when your interlocutors are very busy people working under intense pressure. Because I could almost blend in with my interlocutors – I was a similar age, ethnicity, and educational background – I did. At one point I had worked four months with not one day off, like many management consultants do, and was still writing fieldnotes in the evening. In the end I paid the price with my own health – both in terms of physical and mental health. Looking back, I realise that in some ways the ethnographic method isn’t suited to this kind of fieldsite, and this is something that we should be cognisant of, and we should modify our methods accordingly. For me, I think taking regular breaks from the field, and not feeling like I should stay as long as possible, would have been helpful.
Elizabeth Falconi and Kathryn Graber’s edited Storytelling as Narrative Practice

April 6th, 2020

https://brill.com/view/title/38668

Interview by Dilara Inam

Dilara Inam: As you say you blur many taken-for-granted distinctions between spontaneous and rehearsed or quotidian and unconventional ways of telling a story. Also, there are crucial discussions on how to understand the concept of “everyday” as a category of analysis which became even more clear in Elizabeth Falconi’s chapter on Zapotec storytelling. How was your experience with working on storytelling as narrative practices holistically? With the increased interest in the concept of storytelling, how would people benefit from this book?

Kate Graber: Thanks for your question, which strikes at the heart of what we were trying to do in this book. This project emerged from a conversation that Lizzy [Falconi] and I had several years ago, in which we realized that although we were researching different genres of language—Buryat news stories and Zapotec folktales—our research participants were treating both as stories, somehow. The same analytical problems of storytelling animated these really different contexts, in Russia and Mexico: understanding what’s at stake in a particular society in demarcating what counts as “story” (and as a “good” story), identifying how tellers break through into performance, figuring out how they’re socialized into it, learning from the story audience’s uptake, and so on. Yet what I was researching—and what a lot of the other chapter authors in the volume describe—is usually analyzed in other terms: as media discourse, for instance, or as narratives of personal experience, in the case of other chapters. So we were interested in what ethnographically unites those different genres. What might a myth have in common with a family history, or a news story with the grand master-narrative of a nation-state? The rules and the forms of the narratives differ, but the social fact of having rules and forms does not. We realized that storytelling is a more expansive concept than disciplinary and topical divisions have allowed it to be. I think if more people are interested in storytelling right now, it’s because they have that same hunch.

Elizabeth Falconi: I would say that over the course of my research I was presented with and heard many different types of stories, some were presented more formally as “Zapotec folktales” while others emerged spontaneously in conversation. The similarities in stories that were presented to me as distinct in terms of genres, tellership and so on was very interesting to me, and which I discuss on pages 174-177 in my own chapter in the book. This perhaps answers your question about how to approach storytelling holistically. My attention to different storytelling episodes of the same teller (here Isidro) was another way to approach the analysis of this practice holistically. Storytelling is an ingrained practice in a wide variety of cultural contexts, and paying attention to this analytically I can help students and scholar develop an awareness of the role such practices play in socialization, relationship building, and the inter-generational transmission of knowledge, helping us to break down barriers between cultural groups associated with “oral versus written” traditions and so on.

Dilara Inam: Without the expected genres to talk about narrative practices, it becomes a very broad topic which discussed in a well-organized way in your book. We see 12 different case studies surrounding the discussions on narrative practices organized under three main parts which are Boundaries of Self, Negotiating Heritage and Constructing Discursive Authority. How did you end up deciding to structure the book? (more…)
Thomas D. Zlatic and Sara Van Den Berg on Walter Ong’s Language as Hermeunetic

March 30th, 2020

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501714498/language-as-hermeneutic/

Maddy Adams: You are both professors of English, and this blog is an anthropology blog. Walter Ong’s work has traveled through so many disciplines and departments: communication, rhetoric, linguistic anthropology, English, religion, history, and media studies. Clearly, Ong’s ideas have had far-reaching influence and appeal. Why do you think his work is relevant for so many different disciplines?

Sara Van Den Berg and Thomas D. Zlatic: Ong once identified his primary academic interest to be the evolution of consciousness out of unconsciousness within the context of 13.5 billion years of cosmic evolution, particularly as related to communications technology. Such a study obviously touches upon many disciplines, and while Ong resisted classification, he did reluctantly agree that his interdisciplinary work might be understood as cultural anthropology.

It is more than coincidence that two of the most seminal founders of “media ecology”—Ong and Marshal McLuhan—both earned Ph. D.s in Renaissance literature. This gave them a broad sweep not only of eras and events in the material world but also of the “internal history” of Western culture. Ong proposed there were four stages of human communication: primary orality (in which writing is unknown), writing, print, and electronics; what we know, how we know, and how we structure society are influenced by the dominant communications media in a culture. Each communication stage promoted different psychodynamics and different orientations to space and time. For instance, in his article in American Anthropologist he explained that post-Gutenberg cultures tended to spatialize noetic processes due to visually-based analogues for knowing (“world-as-view”), whereas oral cultures’ valorization of sound promoted a mentality in which words and ideas are happenings (“world-as-event”). Such a thesis invites further investigations in several disciplines.

Maddy Adams: You describe Ong’s notion of “secondary orality” as “the transmission of speech in electronic media; this…secondary version of orality depends on the underlying resources of literacy” (3). Could you talk a little more about this foundational concept? What might a student of linguistic anthropology have to gain from becoming familiar with this term? (more…)
Tanja Ahlin takes the pg. 99 test

March 23rd, 2020

Page 99 of my thesis is so short I can quote it here in its entirety. Here it goes:

Love

My mother never told me
Love is a bottle of mango pickles
She used to put in my cotton bag
Every time I leave my home town

One day
Her season of mangoes ended
And never returned”

Hrishikesan

When I first read this, I thought well, this is certainly not representative of my thesis. After all, I didn’t spend the last several years analysing poetry to get a PhD in Indian literature. Rather, my study is about how care is ‘done’ in Indian transnational families. Specifically, I look at how nurses from Kerala, South India, who migrate abroad for work, take care of their aging parents who remain in India. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork by visiting Kerala and Oman as one of the nurses’ destination countries, and elsewhere via information and communication technologies (ICTs). I draw on material semiotics approach from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to analyse my data. According to this approach, ‘care’ is understood as something that people do within specific practices. Importantly, care includes not only people, but also non-human actors – in my case, everyday ICTs like mobile phones and webcams. However, these technologies are not only passive tools that people use for their own purposes; instead, they actively shape what care comes to mean and how it should be done to be considered good.

In my thesis, I show how adult children abroad, their parents in India, and various ICTs establish what I call transnational care collectives. The dynamic of these collectives (that is, which family members and which technologies are involved and how) depends on each family. Besides sending remittances to the parents, the main care practice within transnational care collectives is calling. But for this care to be considered good, some conditions have to be fulfilled: the calling needs to be frequent, too. Different devices shape frequent calling as a care practice differently: on the phone, people share everydayness by sharing the details of their everyday lives, while on the webcam, they can spend time together, sometimes by being silent. ICTs thus change what ‘good care’ comes to mean, but they further also influence how gender and kinship become enacted in new ways.

The care practices I describe are radically different from elder care that is normally considered good in India, such as living together and sharing food, practices which demand physical proximity. ICTs help to bridge geographic distance in some ways, but not in others; they may even bring about challenging situations and conflicting emotions. I felt my thesis didn’t quite do justice to the depth of experiences of the people I encountered in my fieldwork. By way of mitigating this, I added a poem as an introduction to each thesis chapter.

I now realize that no other page in my thesis could represent its core better than page 99.

Tanja Ahlin. 2020. Care through Digital Connections: Enacting Elder Care Through Everyday Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Indian Transnational Families. University of Amsterdam, Phd.
Erin Gould takes the page 99 test

March 16th, 2020

My dissertation entitled, “Youth Transformations in Storytelling: Transmutability, Haunting, and Fen al Hikaya in Marrakech, Morocco” discusses fen al hikaya, the famous form of oral Moroccan public allegorical storytelling, and its “revival” by youth in Marrakech, Morocco. Why do I say “revived”? Well, popular discourse in Morocco and those writing about oral storytelling in Morocco discuss this genre of performance as “disappearing,” even though young people are currently still doing storytelling performing in different areas of Marrakech. In my dissertation, I argue that this youth revitalization of storytelling practices is haunted by disappearing storytelling figures who better fit the image of a Storyteller: wise old men. At the same time, youth are contributing to storytelling performance to connect with cultural forms, while also finding storytelling to be a genre that they can transform to fit their contemporary, internationalized, and economically precarious lives.

The 99th page of dissertation is part of my fourth chapter: “Narratives of the Storyteller: The Historical Figure and His Decline in Jemaa el Fna Square,” which considers the “image” of the storyteller and how the narratives of the “historical storyteller” and the “disappearing storyteller” leave out the narratives of young storytellers in the city. In this chapter, I not only discuss the figure of the storyteller, but I contextualize the most famous center of performance in Marrakech: Jemaa el Fna Square. This square is considered the heart of Marrakech, and it is around this place that many myths concerning performance genres have arisen, including a myth that says the storytellers in the Square, through their storytelling, gave birth to the other figures in the Square, including the snake charmers, the henna artists, the musicians, the tea sellers, and the food sellers. Page 99 introduces my analysis of the “disappearing storyteller” narratives, complete with a short excerpt from an interview with a young woman storyteller, Fatima Ezzahra, in Marrakech. While this passage does not represent the whole of my argument, it is undoubtably the beginning of a larger conversation that contextualizes my research in Marrakech. Hope you enjoy.

Page 99:

The Storyteller’s Decline in the Square

______________________________________________________

“10 years ago, there were storytellers—Morocco was no exception. They told religious stories and fairy tales about Kings, heroes, and princesses. However, now there is a lot of noise in the Square, so storytellers are unable to be there…”

—Fatima Ezzahra (From fieldnotes; 3/23/2017)

______________________________________________________

Jemaa el Fna Square has been extensively documented and written about by scholars and writers, especially since the times of the French Protectorate period from 1912 to 1956 (Canetti 1978; Deverdun 1959; Peets 1988; Warnock Fernea 1980). During colonization, General Lyautey wanted to promote Moroccan design and keep traditional places intact (Rabinow 1995; Wright 1991). However in the 1950s, the government had made plans to make Jemaa el Fna Square into a car park outside of the maze of souks because it was no longer seen as popular or useful. One of the most famous stories associated with the need for a revival of the Square and surrounding souks is associated with Eleanor Roosevelt, the former first-lady of the United States. There is rumor that Eleanor Roosevelt visited Marrakech in the 1950s, and she was disappointed to see that Jemaa el Fna Square was changed so much from the times she had visited in her youth. She noted that the public square was not as lively as she remembered, but she would love to see the Square have its sprawling and lively atmosphere when she visited the next time.

Because of this conversation, King Mohammed V “saved” the Square from destruction and vowed to bring it back to its previous fairy-tale glory by the time Roosevelt returned (Minca 2006; Wagner 2015; Warnock Fernea 1980). This is one of the most famous myths outlining the potential destruction but eventual saving of the Square and performances there. However, while many Moroccans abandoned their living spaces in the medina, or old town, immediately after gaining independence in 1956, more recently foreigners have played a large role in changing the medina, just as tourism has transformed the city and its economy.

Erin Gould defended her dissertation in December 2019 at the University of California, Riverside, after conducting research in Morocco from 2016 to 2018. Her research on storytelling is ongoing, and until she can return for more ethnographic work, she is lecturing part-time at Chapman University in Orange, CA. She can be reached at erin.gould@email.ucr.edu or followed on Twitter @erin_gould4.

References Cited:

Canetti, Elias. 1978. The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit. J.A. Underwood, transl. New York: The Seabury Press.

Deverdun, Gaston. 1959. Marrakech: Des Origines à 1912. Rabat: Éditions Techniques Nord-Africaines.

Minca, Claudio. 2006. Re-inventing the “Square”: Postcolonial Geographies and Tourist Narratives in Jamaa el Fna, Marrakech. In Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism. C. Minca and T. Oakes, eds. Pp. 155-184. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Peets, Leonora. 1988. Women of Marrakech: Record of a Secret Sharer 1930-1970. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rabinow, Paul. 1995. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wagner, Lauren B. 2015. ‘Tourist Price’ and Diasporic Visitors: Negotiating the Value of Descent. Valuation Studies 3(2):119-148.

Warnock Fernea, Elizabeth. 1980. A Street in Marrakech: A Personal Encounter with the Lives of Moroccan Women. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Wright, Gwendolyn. 1991. The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Patricia G. Lange on her new book, Thanks for Watching

March 9th, 2020

https://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/3737-thanks-for-watching

Interview by Jan English-Lueck

Jan English-Lueck: You have been writing about YouTubers, on and off screen, for over a decade. How is this book continuing themes you have been developing for a long time and what is a departure from your previous work?

Patricia G. Lange: My work has oriented around empathetically exploring nuances of mediated interaction to understand the allure of interacting in digital spaces. Throughout my career, criticism of mediated interaction has persistently been very harsh—from scholars and the public. Yet, mediation is part of the human experience. My current book similarly tries to understand why vlogging (video blogging) and sharing the self through media was so important to YouTubers interested in sociality. My past and current research challenges the notion that mediated interaction is simply parasitic to and less meaningful than in person interaction. The sociality YouTubers experienced was emotional and real—both online and off. Even going back to my dissertation, I have been concerned with problematic talk and issues of online access. Back then troublesome participants were called “flamers” and today YouTubers complain about “haters”—groups that exhibit differences but also similarly produce chilling effects to participation. I have explored how digital spaces facilitate or challenge democratized participation. This book continues this passion by analyzing experiences of YouTubers who originally saw the site as a place of tremendous possibility for offering a potentially democratized space for self-expression and interaction. Thanks for Watching traces the initial excitement and eventual ensuing complications that an interconnected group of people experienced. It explores difficulties such as haters, competition brought on by monetization, and changes in content. It also analyzes technical complications such as algorithmic rankings that privilege certain types of content over quiet, social videos. The book concludes by providing advice and recommendations when conducting ethnography in digital spaces. It also provides information about what might be changed to renew a corner of YouTube for sociality, or perhaps to more ambitiously create new video sharing sites that fundamentally support interaction.

In the past, my work has centrally revolved around issues of analyzing technical identities, and how “geeks” socialize to learn and project an aura of being an expert. Thanks for Watching departs from this research program. Identity work has been important for many online studies, but other interesting rubrics exist. Inspired by Lefebvre, my book uses the lens of “rhythm analysis” to explore how temporalities, rhythms, and interactions over time shape video-mediated sociality. For example, an arrhythmia is an irregular rhythm, one which often indicates a problem. YouTubers at times experienced arrhythmias between honoring their creative pace of production and satisfying the relentless demands of audiences and algorithms. At times creators could not keep up with such requests and took a break. Disruptions in posting video content might be observed by viewers who became concerned when video making output became irregular. It could feel as if a collective was in tune with a video maker and was watching out for them. Focusing attention on such patterns leads to significant analytical insight, especially in terms of seeing such deep and widespread connections as illustrative of our increasingly “posthuman” condition. I remain circumspect about usage of this term, which has the unfortunate connotation of asserting we are no longer human. Yet, we are far from being robots or files containing a downloaded consciousness. Nevertheless, I chose to explore this rubric given that some of its characteristics can quite clearly be observed on YouTube. Collectives of interconnected people, artifacts, commercial interests, and technical operations are deeply influencing how people express the “self” in both communal and troublesome ways.

Jan English-Lueck: You observed an actual drum circle at a YouTube meet-up in Toronto. You then observed it is an appropriate metaphor for video sharing. Could you tell us more about how that metaphor illuminates participatory cultures?

(more…)
Michelle Williams takes the page 99 test

March 2nd, 2020

One half of page 99 of my doctoral thesis is a photo, taken at eye level of a group of Tongan students sitting cross-legged on the ground of their school courtyard in Auckland, New Zealand. They are rehearsing for an upcoming cultural festival that is the central topic of my research. I am sitting, unseen, with the students as we learn the performance item together. The movement of our bodies and voices has become synchronous over several weeks of practice and in this moment, the production of culturally-specific movement and sound is a uniting factor among myself and the student participants. However, the image also represents a key problem central to my fieldwork methodology: although membership in a music-community transcends difference in some ways, how would I bridge the spaces created by authority, power, ethnicity and age? How could I represent young people’s experiences effectively and help to bring their voices to the fore within a discipline that often excluded them? These questions were significant components in constructing my research model.

My research approach was informed by both Pacific research frameworks and recommendations from ethnomusicology, many of which overlapped in their emphases on relationships, collaboration, and reciprocity. Educational research helped me to problematize how I would represent myself to students, and was essential guidance to the shifting roles I undertook as a learner, music-community supporter and friendly teacher (the latter during the focus groups we co-created). Throughout my fieldwork I attempted to daily to bridge the spaces created by my adult authority and my privileges as a white American researcher, through shared love of popular music, my immigrant status, my Christian upbringing and the common goal of representing “our” school at the cultural festival. Although I had to concede a number of limitations, I was pleased that ultimately the experiences and viewpoints of the students were a major component of my findings, and included several “firsts” in research with Pacific youth in New Zealand.

Michelle Ladwig Williams. 2019. The ASB Polyfest: Constructing Transnational Pacific Communities of Practice in Auckland, New Zealand. University of Auckland, Phd.
Monica Heller’s Reflections upon Retirement

February 24th, 2020

Photo courtesy of EGSS Conference 2015

How did you discover linguistic anthropology? Why did it attract you?

I kind of sidled into it. The initial interest came from growing up in Montréal in the 60s, when everything in everyday life was about language choice, as part of navigating struggles over social difference and social inequality. Somehow it seemed obvious that all this pain and anger and fear couldn’t actually be about language itself; also, I wanted to understand how it made sense to people to take the very different positions they took, without having to assume anyone was inherently evil or insane. I discovered there was a thing called linguistics because my father, who liked hanging around bookstores, came home one day with a magazine for me that featured a cover story about Chomsky. It took me a while to figure out that generative grammar was not going to give me the tools I needed, but it was really helpful to have to figure out why. By this time, I was in college, and saw that an anthropology professor had put a course on Sociolinguistics on the books.

Back in Montréal, “sociolinguistique” was becoming a thing: it was used by academic researchers to investigate the question of the variability of French (a highly charged question in the context of linguistic minority political mobilization) and government ones to develop and implement language policy as part of the construction of Québec as a francophone quasi- or proto-nation-state (as is common in Canada, the relationship between the two spaces of production of la sociolinguistique was close). Also, my mother had gone back to university to study sociology around then, and sent me off to meet two key people she had met there: Gillian Sankoff, at the Université de Montréal, and Pierre Laporte, at the Office de la langue française.

It wasn’t until I went to grad school that I learned there was a thing called linguistic anthropology; to this day, I’ll use whatever label works. I really only use linguistic anthropology for moving around the United States. But the main lesson I retained from all of this is that there often are tools in unexpected places for addressing questions that are bugging you, so it’s a good idea to keep your eyes open. Also, people are really helpful, so you shouldn’t be afraid to knock on someone’s door, even if you’re some 18 year old whose mother took a lecture course with this person ten years earlier.

Why did you decide to study in the United States? What was that like?

Ah, yes. So that wasn’t necessarily the plan. University was definitely the plan; we’re talking immigrant/refugee Jews, do I need to say more? The expectation was that I would follow the footsteps of my parents, aunts and uncles and go to McGill. Then my father found out someone was developing a sideline in advising high school students regarding U.S. schools; in Montréal, going to university in the US, France or England was definitely upward mobility (yes, the relics of colonialism). England required A-levels; France seemed way too unstructured. So – the US, especially its liberal arts programs: there was nothing like that in Canada. Long story short, although I think we all figured I wouldn’t get in and would end up at McGill anyway, I got into Swarthmore, attractive not only because of its liberal arts program and history as a coeducational institution, but also because of its Quaker and pacifist orientation. I went, curious about this powerful country close by, familiar and yet… so strange.

Then, I decided I wanted to go to grad school. It was clear that the two places where I could actually study exactly what I wanted were Berkeley and Stanford. California felt even farther from any world I was familiar with, but I applied anyway; figuring, again, I won’t get in, so I’ll also apply to work with Gillian Sankoff at the Université de Montréal, because she said that although she couldn’t train me in the ethnographic methods I wanted to use, she would let me do what I wanted. I got into Berkeley, as it happens, though during my frequent and lengthy research stays in Montréal I was fortunate to be welcomed both in Sankoff’s seminars and in Pierre Laporte’s Service de recherche sociolinguistique at the OLF, profiting hugely from their intellectual and human generosity. So, the best of both worlds.

Although perhaps not a perfect fit in either (but not quite fitting available categories is the story of my life, and I have learned to make good use of it). In Québec, I had these odd, if interesting, ideas about ethnography and the politics of everyday life, quite different from the approaches dominant in Québec at the time: the social psychology of language, technical-yet-engaged language policy, quantitative census-based measures of ethnolinguistic inequality (“démolinguistique”), variationist and lexicographic studies of French.

At Berkeley, strictly speaking, I was an international student; as such, I was expected to eventually go home in order to use the knowledge I acquired in the US to participate in my country’s development. My work in Québec made total sense in that frame (to my fellow students and to my teachers). But at the same time, I was white and my English was way too good; its occasional oddities (oh come on, say “about” for us again) tended to take people aback. No one ever explained the US to me; I was expected to know it. Which in fact sometimes I did (years of watching WCTV Plattsburgh New York helped), until, oops, I didn’t. I was also expected to naturally desire to stay and be American – it would be so easy for me. And I might have, except I didn’t actually want to.

How did you end up an academic in Canada? Was that a career plan you had?

Again, no, not really, I certainly had no particular fixation on being an academic. I thought about writing the exam for the diplomatic corps (both Québec and Canada), or the civil service. I figured I’d end up in language policy somehow; there were lots of models (Pierre Laporte was one of them). But the machine of US grad schools includes applying for university jobs, so I did. I was offered one at LSU in Baton Rouge; I turned it down, partly because opportunities for my partner (an American archaeologist) were limited, but really, I think, because I didn’t want to be there, despite the real interest working in Louisiana presented. The Canadian partner of a grad school buddy of my partner gave me his old copies of a publication which included job ads for academics; there was an out-of-date ad for a post doc in Toronto which offered the possibility of working in the Franco-Ontarian community. The deadline was long past, but I called. They hadn’t been able to fill the position, bizarrely. Anyway, the post-doc turned into a research position, which turned into directing a research centre, which turned into a tenure rack job. Toronto was also outside the known universe, and still is for many Québécois – while I had lived in England, France, the former Yugoslavia and the US, it was only when I got to Toronto that that my family asked whether it is possible to eat okay in this new place. Which, when you think about it, made it a perfect fit for me.

How have you navigated anglophone and francophone worlds?

I love being able to not be stuck in one linguistic market, and to be forced to think about the same thing differently, or about different things altogether (I am not being all Whorfian here, it’s not the languages, it’s the discursive spaces). I am privileged, obviously, to be even able to participate in two such powerful ones. And even so, it gets complicated. For one thing, there’s the eternal problem of the fact that it is the English-language journals that count more (not to mention that it is the ones based in the US or the UK, not Canada). So I have done some strategizing around which language to publish in, for which audiences. Obviously, its easier to make these choices once you have tenure. But yes, it has been really important to me to develop spaces of knowledge production that are not only in English and not only in the big centres. The centre-periphery thing remains an issue; if you write about the US or France you can be seen as doing theory, or broad issues of general interest. If you write about Canada, you’re writing about Canada. And then there is the language issue. First, you have to turn in a monolingual performance; none of this mixing languages stuff. You can write about it, just don’t actually do it. I do sometimes get some comments on my English, but I was trained in the US, and Canada is understood as having some kind of good neutral English, so that part is easy. I did have to be taught to do academic writing in French; I have Denise Daoust at the OLF who helped me write my first grant application in 1978, and my colleagues in Toronto in the 1980s with whom we did text-exchanges, to thank for that. But the conditions of the market are different; there is more attention to “la qualité de la langue” more policing of language in general. The hierarchy, as it affects me, is France-Québec-rest of Canada. No one believes there are francophones in Toronto; I really believe that when both Québécois and French see my affiliation, they think “oh oh, her French is going to be awful” (plus my name – what is that anyway? Maybe her married name?). Anyway, I am especially proud of having made an editor of the French journal Langage et Société back down, decades ago; I felt they were being all judge-y about la qualité de ma langue. For a sociolinguistics journal, I argued, it seemed odd to not be able to handle discursive variability. They had to agree I had a point. But again – write about it, just don’t do it.

How have you handled being a woman in academia?

I’m tempted to say “poorly”, which is to say that I could have struggled more loudly. The upside has been being non-threatening, until, well, I got too much power. I have the usual stories to tell about family not taking me seriously, and then doing their best to sabotage me when I didn’t make the right sacrifices; the awful stress of trying to get a job and tenure while having kids and raising them – I’d say I lost my first marriage largely over those issues, even though we really really tried in many ways to make it all work. And of course I beat myself up all the time over whether I did right by my kids. At work, I had one horrible experience of screaming sexism (symbolic violence, rest assured, not physical). And a bunch of everyday ones, the ones I suppose would now be called microaggressions. One huge advantage of having been trained as an interactionist is that I have the tools to unpack the sequences and use the rules to my advantage. The one I like the most is how I responded to being overlooked in favour of a male panellist on a TV show; I noticed he moved into the conversational space a microsecond before the animateur finished his turn. So I worked on beating him to it, and it worked! It’s been difficult to know where to draw the line in mentoring; I don’t really want to be everyone’s mother (I have two kids of my own, I always say), but at the same time I know how important it is to not pretend we are pure disembodied intellects. So maybe the right answer to the question is “it’s been a struggle, but welcome to the universe; I have done my best to struggle well”.
Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine on their new book

February 17th, 2020

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/signs-of-difference/E69813363E4CD9927C6C8E1BD2FC3011

Interview by Hannah McElgunn

Hannah McElgunn: Signs of Difference begins with analyses that draw from long term ethnographic engagement in two very different places: Bóly, a town in Southwest Hungary, and a rural, Wolof-speaking town in Senegal. How has working together, across such seemingly different fieldsites, influenced the approach to language and social life that you present in this book?

Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine: Our collaboration started with those unexpected parallels between our separate ethnographic projects. Reading each other’s papers and listening to each other at AAA meetings, we saw amazingly similar processes in two fieldsites that were utterly worlds apart. The happy result has been a semiotic approach to difference, an approach that is much wider than our own ethnographies but is well illustrated by them. Our book is mainly devoted to developing and explaining that approach, but it begins by showing how it applies to the two ethnographic cases.

In the German-Hungarian town in Hungary as in the Wolof-speaking town in Senegal, people were making distinctions among themselves not only through the way they spoke but also through different forms of emotional expression, clothing, houses and numerous other signs and activities. Language, social organization, geography, history, were all quite different. But in both towns, as it happened, one social category of people spoke and acted in relatively reserved, restrained ways; the other category, by contrast, seemed to be more elaborate in everything, more vivid, dramatic. These were stereotypes of difference. People oriented to these social types, often enacting them in their everyday lives. But how to understand the weird parallels between the two towns? “Restrained” vs. “elaborate” were the ways the people in our two towns characterized their own differences. But when we read fieldwork by others, we saw that although there were always overarching cultural distinctions that organized relations between contrasting sets of people and signs, those distinctions could be quite different from ours. For instance, there was: tough vs. soft in one place but in another pragmatic vs. political. To understand our own examples and others, our explanations would have to be quite abstract. And semiotic.

The book explicates step-by-step a semiotic process of differentiation, with several aspects, that encompasses all the cases. Contrast – as axis of differentiation – is the fundamental idea. Contrasts in expressive signs pointed to contrasting categories of identity; and the qualities attributed to the signs were also attributed to the people-types indexed by the signs. For those familiar with a particular cultural context, the signs of each identity seemed to cohere and to display the same qualities as the people types they point to. We turned our hand to American and historical examples: How did Yankees come to be thought different types of people than Southerners in 19^th century US? How do faculty differentiate among themselves at an American university? How did the National Rifle Association divide in the course of a crucial political battle? And how do the axes of differentiation themselves change? It was very exciting to work out how the semiotic process we propose illuminates relations between whatever culturally-specific qualities are involved.

Hannah McElgunn: As you note, C.S. Peirce hoped that “a converging, objective portrait of the world” would result from different actors continually refining the conjectures of their peers (88). This is opposed to the project you take on in this book, part of which is to detail the “construction of perspectives that are partial, conventional, and positioned” (88). Yet, despite the fact that Peirce’s larger project differs so strikingly from yours, his semiotic theory plays a foundational role in your “Ingredients” section. How have you come to understand Peirce as useful for the analysis of social life, despite your divergence? (more…)