Sofía Cifuentes Contador: The Trauma Mantras is a non-conventional ethnography that draws on different writing styles, such as autoethnography, poetry, essay-like pieces. What pushed you to write this book and how would you describe its main argument?
Adrie Kusserow: I wanted to write this book because I have always felt creative poetic prose and poetry were the best tools to use for describing human experience and there was so much, I wanted to share about my life and my work with refugees. Writing for me has always been both exploratory and cathartic, leading me to new insights and also a sense of sharing my perceptions and experiences with other readers, which I deeply crave. I don’t think it has a main argument. It intentionally goes back and forth in space and time. If there is any main argument it is that the American way of viewing body/self/mind are only one among many possible ways of conceptualizing and this was taught to me through my work with refugees, especially in the field of mental health and refugee resettlement.
Sofía Cifuentes Contador: Why did you choose to write the book in short passages and what effect did you expect that this writing style could have on the reader? The passages could also be read as poems or photographs of different moments of your life where you share your personal and professional journey/tribulations as a medical anthropologist, Western woman, mother, activist, caregiver and academic, among other roles that you have as a person.
Adrie Kusserow: I don’t think I chose to write the book in short passages as much as this is what came out of me. I didn’t feel the need for or was drawn to some long overarching novel like narrative, but more poetic meditations that still allowed me to bring in a sense of my ethnographic experience. I had already written an ethnography (American Individualisms) and really didn’t resonate with academic writing. I had also already written two books of poetry REFUGE and Hunting Down the Monk, with BOA Editions, Ltd, but didn’t feel like I wanted to write poetry anymore. I wanted more poetic prose that allowed me to speak ethnographically and set the context when I needed to. For some reason poems didn’t seem to be able to accommodate that.
Sofía Cifuentes Contador: Even though, through the pages of your book, there is a continuous unsettling feeling with what trauma means, conveys, and how it operates on the mind and bodies of people all over the world in seemingly very different ways, the book also signals the potential of language and writing for healing trauma. In a way, The Trauma Mantras signals the way in which writing can be therapeutic, as it seems this book was a way for you to work with your personal and collective trauma. This strategy for healing-writing about trauma is also described in “Trauma, Inc”, where African refugees are encouraged to share and write about their traumatic experiences, in a writing workshop led by your students in Burlington, Vermont. What role can language play, and specially written language, when dealing with trauma?
Adrie Kusserow: I think written language can play a huge role in healing trauma because the tools of poetic language help the writer explore the most subtle, nuanced aspects of their experience in a way that other kinds of writing don’t. The tools of poetry allow the writer to get beneath convention, stereotypes and explore the vast subtle landscapes of affect, emotion, feeling, culture, geography. Written language is also most often written to an audience and in this way can help alleviate some of the isolation and alienation those with trauma are experience. It is a way of sharing.
Sofía Cifuentes Contador: In the passage “Between Waking and Sleeping, I Look Outside as It Snows, Think about the Blunt Tool of the English Language” you reflect about how the English language tends to focus on the “I”, reinforcing self-centeredness. You write “The way our language reinforces this [solidification of the fluid], with its subjects and predicates, supposedly solid nouns and active verbs, masculine and feminine objects. Then the sentences, further molded fictions that stick together, misrepresent. Then whole concepts, hastily padded, packed, shaped, and thrown, before the other side can pelt them down” (p.105). From your experience as an anthro-poet, how central do you think the role of grammar is in shaping the traits of a culture (for example, English and individualism in the U.S.)? Do you have other examples from fieldwork of other languages that you are fluent in, where you can see how the grammar of the language shapes the culture?
Adrie Kusserow: I think grammar has a tremendous role in solidifying a sense of a singular I in our culture. The prevalence of first-person pronouns (“I”, “me”, “my”) and second-person pronouns (“you”, “your”) in American English language reinforces the individualistic focus. These pronouns separate the actor from the audience and emphasize personal agency. When I started studying language socialization among Japanese preschool children I was also struck by how individualized our grammar is! I would highly recommend you read the book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, a former missionary turned linguistic anthropologist who studies the Piraha in the Amazon. I was also quite struck by the influence of grammar in reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s chapter on language in the book Braiding Sweetgrass.
Sofía Cifuentes Contador: In “Fontanelegy” you draw a parallelism between the fontanel, a soft spot on a baby’s head where the skull bones meet and eventually close through the development process, and the privileged spaces for the anthropologist that can delve into cultural fontanels. While you praise the liminality of fontanel-like spaces, through your experience there is a guilt or maybe a sense that as an anthropologist there is a particular responsibility regarding cultural sensitivity and capacity to navigate different contexts, for example, being flexible and open as the fontanel is. When as an anthropologist you do not achieve that capacity you write “I should have known better.” At the same time, the specific training of an anthropologist of navigating cultural liminality also can creates a sense of “uperiority when comparing the anthropologist´s experience with that of other Westerner´s in a non-Western county. For example, as an anthropologist involved in non-Western contexts that attract Westerners seeking enlightenment (such as young Westerners going to India to learn and practice Buddhism). How do you think anthropologists can navigate this delicate space of cultural fontanels while not succumbing to self-congratulation?
Adrie Kusserow: I think to always remain humble and consistently aware that your way of seeing the world is just one of many of millions of ways is absolutely essential to have at the core of your being. Cultural relativism tends to negate self-congratulation. I think by its very nature, anthropology is a humbling discipline, always expanding the world to a wider place than the little fiefdoms we like to think of as permanent truths. I think field work for an extended period of time is immensely important in achieving this balance, and fluency in the language of those you are studying, otherwise the true subtleties of their vastly different ways of conceptualizing suffering, emotions, nature cannot be fully absorbed. Perhaps the key is to question everything you hold as real, and that includes the assumptions beyond any sense of superiority that might arise. Once you see your feelings of superiority as just another affect created by a certain set of cultural and subcultural influences, it tends to make a solid sense of superiority very had to hold on to for that long.
Max Conrad: You argue that Catholicism as a religion facilitates heteroglossia and is ultimately shaped – formed and reformed – by dialogue, particularly the words and actions of laypeople. The divide in how Mainstream and Charismatic Catholics view religious authority seems to mirror other differences you outline in the book, such as hymns: catechistic, narrative, and expository versus felt, expressive, and affective. When did you first realize heteroglossia would be an important concept?
Eric Hoenes del Pinal: There are two answers to that. The first time I realized it was important was in a linguistic anthropology graduate seminar with Kit Woolard (my dissertation chair), who showed us how linguistic anthropologists had taken up Mikail Bakhtin’s ideas about heteroglossia as a way to think through the social dimensions of linguistic variation. Bakhtin, for the uninitiated, was writing about how Russian novels work. He proposed that in a good novel each character’s voice is distinct, reflecting their unique personal biographies; and the novel as a whole comes from the dialogues that emerge between them. The concept of heteroglossia thus allows us to think with both unity and diversity of language at the same time.
That idea stuck with me, but it wasn’t necessarily something I had thought to extend past my analysis of strictly linguistic phenomena like codeswitching; and it didn’t really occur to me that I could extend the model to all the communicative behaviors that index social differentiation until much later. That happened when I was wandering the labyrinthine halls of the Washington DC Marriott at a AAA meeting (and feeling kind of bad about my various scholarly failures). It suddenly struck me that heteroglossia could serve as the lynchpin for explaining the complex social relations that I had observed in the Catholic parish I call San Felipe in the book. I had been struggling for several years to figure out how to write a book that was, if not exactly groundbreaking, at least different enough from my dissertation to be worth the effort. So, I went back to Bakhtin and set myself the task of seeing if I could adapt his ideas about novels to thinking about Catholicism in Guatemala. Once I figured out how to do that, I felt it left me with a good way to talk about Catholicism in a non-reductionistic, non-normative way that highlighted the creative potential that the parishioners I got to know in Guatemala feel their religion offers them.
Max Conrad: At first glance, the dichotomy appears to be that Q’eqchi’ indexes Maya identity, Mainstream Catholicism and the local, while Spanish is associated with Charismatic Catholicism and a global sense of universality. Yet, you describe this fascinating moment of juxtaposition in Chapter 4 where the Charismatics enthusiastically request the Mass in Q’eqchi’. Trends in the anthropology of Christianity seem to oscillate between localized and globalized conceptions of Christianity. Bakhtin is a major theoretical influence via the concept of heteroglossia, though you also talk about how chronotopes inform your writing. I’m curious how you see chronotopes organizing the spatiotemporal conditions for Q’eqchi’- Maya Catholics in San Felipe or Guatemala as a whole – what kind of stories are made possible under these conditions? How do Q’eqchi’ and Spanish complicate or expand the local and the global?
Eric Hoenes del Pinal: That episode you mention obviously made a great impression on me because it seemed so unexpected at first. But really, who hasn’t changed their behavior to try to meet someone else’s expectations? And who hasn’t had that sort of thing go awry at least once? Father Augustine had his expectations of what the Charismatics wanted, and the Charismatics had their expectations of what Father Augustine wanted, and both their expectations were tied to various discourses about how linguistic codes index certain kinds of identities. But things went sideways because their expectations didn’t quite line up like they thought they would. Nevertheless, the mass happened and served its immediate purpose, and I think people were generally satisfied with it even if it also led to some grumbling after the fact. It wanted to include that episode in the book, because as the situation unfolds you start to realize that the meanings attached to the codes are much more flexible than you might at first expect and subject to multiple interpretation. I think of the Bakhtinian terms I used in my analysis — voicing is the most useful one here, because the conflict in the parish seemed to largely come from how members of each camp use language and music to give voice to their identities as Catholics and how members of the other camp perceived and interpreted those voicings. You could say that what went awry here, though, was that each party adopted a voice other than the one that their dialogic partner expected to hear. What meanings the various parties brought to that encounter (and the fact it happened at all) were contingent on the specific time and place that all of us were inhabiting at the time, which is really what the idea of the chronotope alerts us to.
An African Catholic priest and Guatemalan-born, US-based anthropologist walk into a chapel in the highlands where a couple of hundred Q’eqchi’-Mayas are singing … It’s a heck of set-up and there are myriad stories that could have come from it, each of them informed by the multiple overlapping histories that somehow got us all there. Those histories are both global and local, and I think everyone present there that day understood that, even if they might have also taken different stances toward the meaning of those terms.
Christianity, but maybe Catholicism especially, contributed to that whole story by the various ways that it posits its simultaneous imaginaries of the global and local that people could tap into.
Max Conrad: In your conclusion you mention that, upon returning a decade later, glossolalia – exceedingly rare in your initial fieldwork – had become more manifest among the Charismatics of Sa’xreb’e. Similarly, you mention that the parish as a whole had undergone a kind of pentecostalization. How do you interpret what appears to be a drift towards one side of the divide?
Eric Hoenes del Pinal: We ethnographers typically experience their field sites for just a year or two, and what we observe thus necessarily bound to a specific time and place. So, all ethnographies are chronotopic by definition, even if that is sometimes elided in our writing. I think it’s important that we acknowledge that our observations are neither timeless nor universal, but rather contingent and contextual. We should also always be cognizant that life goes on after we’ve left the field. Things change and what we observe is neither how things have always been, nor how they shall henceforth always be.
There was like a seven-year gap there where I didn’t go to Cobán and wasn’t really in touch with anyone from San Felipe. Back in the mid-2000s the people I knew didn’t have email addresses (most still don’t) and social media wasn’t really a thing yet (and people have certainly taken that up much more readily). So, I really had no sense of what was going on in the parish. When I finally went back, which was to attend my cousins’ quinceañera and not for research purposes, I expected Cobán to be at once familiar and different, because that’s how like life works, but I wasn’t sure exactly how it would be so.
When I left after my main period of fieldwork, it looked like the Charismatics were on the verge of separating themselves from the parish, but, as it turned out, they didn’t. That was in part because of a Diocesan project that was built on certain aesthetic choices and practical commitments that were appealing to the Charismatics allowed for a rapprochement between them and the majority (but by no means all) of the Mainstream Catholics. But again, it also led to some new division and debates, just as every new turn in Catholicism seems to have. My conclusion then wasn’t necessarily that a kind of pentecostalization was happening, but rather that whatever was happening was a further opportunity for people to create and express new senses of self in relation to it. I think that had I not seen that change over time, I might not have gone back to see if I could use the Bakhtinian ideas could be used to theorize Catholicism.
Max Conrad: You also mention in the conclusion that the vigorous internal debates around communicative practices and markers of difference had been supplanted by questions of how to be an “engaged” Catholic within a broader non-Catholic public. How did these debates lay the groundwork for these new concerns about engagement and interaction with non-Catholics? Is the language debate still relevant with these new emphases?
Eric Hoenes del Pinal: Those new pentecostalized aesthetics that the Diocese introduced as part of its campaign to be more publicly engaged shifted what the terms of debate were in the parish. By adopting that program (Las santas misiónes populares) the Diocese was trying to address the wider issue of the Catholic Church’s diminishing foothold in the Guatemalan public sphere. I’m not sure how cognizant the people in the Diocesan office were of what was happening at the parish level between the Mainstream and Charismatic Catholics, but they did know that if Las santas misiones was going to work, it was going to need Q’eqchi’-Mayas to be a big part of it. Several people from the parish’s lay leadership threw themselves into the project wholeheartedly, and they found real purpose in it and a strong motivation to work towards its goals. Those lay leaders did a great job of promoting Las santas misiones in the parish, and a lot more people found they really liked the idea that they were lay missionaries for the Church. Others, though, didn’t, and resisted the projecton the grounds that they felt it didn’t adequately reflect the values of their distinctly Q’eqchi’-Maya spirituality. Part of the problem for them was linguistic, but because much of Las santas misiones was done in Q’eqchi’ as a practical matter, other communicative practices like norms of bodily comportment, expected dress codes, and the forms that public rituals took became the discursive focus of what people liked and disliked about this turn within the Church.
Last year when I was in Cobán, the Diocese was celebrating the tenth anniversary of Las santas msisiones, and I saw that it has faded into the background of the day-to-day practice of Catholicism. There was certainly a lot less fervor about its activities and a lot less discourse about it than what I had seen when I first reconnected with people in San Felipe parish. Of course, that just means that other questions and concerns have become prominent in how people negotiate the meaning of being Catholic and Q’eqchi’.
Max Conrad: Guarded by Two Jaguars combines much-needed inquiries into language, Christianity, and indigeneity with important takeaways for each. How has this research shaped you as a scholar, and what is the next direction for you?
Eric Hoenes del Pinal: By the time I went to grad school, I knew that I wanted to do my research in Cobán, which is where my father’s side of the family was from and a place that I had visited often. I knew that my grandfather had spoken Q’eqchi’, and thought it was a shame that none of his children or grandchildren had learned the language. In grad school I developed a greater interest in the politics of language (which was also no doubt shaped by my own experiences as a native Spanish speaking migrant to the USA), and I more or less ended up picking a church as a field site because it was a space where some of the issues those issues were happening but hadn’t really been written about in the Guatemalan context. I was very fortunate to be at a university with some very smart people who were thinking about Christianity from an anthropological perspective, so it made sense to bring all these strands together. But ultimately, if my scholarship in this book is focused on how discourses about language, Christianity and indigeneity intersect it’s because those interconnections were and continue to be important to the people I got to know in Cobán.
In terms of what’s next, I just wrapped up some fieldwork last year for my current book project about how Q’eqchi’-Maya people are thinking about and experiencing climate change. This new project is a lot less about language, but in a lot of ways it is still focused on communication. The main thing I’m looking at is how Q’eqchi’-Maya people relate to what we Occidentals call the natural environment, and much of that happens through the medium of ritual, so to some extent the project is about how human and other-than-human beings communicate with each other. Writing about that material is giving me a chance to think about some new things in what I think are novel ways. Hopefully, it’ll turn into something cool.
Rachel Apone:Thank you for this creative, rich, and thought-provoking book! The book offers a fascinating argument about the history of Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and speaks to foundational issues in linguistic anthropology such as language ideologies and their relationship to power. But it also weaves together so many other themes and issues, making the book of interest to anyone studying infrastructure, bureaucracies, decolonization, temporality, or imagination. Can you first tell us a little bit about how this project developed? What were your motivating questions? How did those questions develop or shift as you did the archival research? What did the archival research process look like?
Courtney Handman: Thank you for these questions! Yes, a couple of times I hint at the fact that the final form of this book ended up being a bit of a surprise based on where I started with it. Initially, I was thinking this was going to be a book about why Tok Pisin has become the dominant language in Papua New Guinea over the 20th and early 21st centuries while being so intensely disliked by speakers and non-speakers alike. At the same time, I was working on questions of religious infrastructure among the colonial Lutheran missions, and how their intense focus on creating so many supposedly secular transportation networks was related to their more self-consciously religious goals. Initially, I was thinking of these as somewhat disconnected projects, but at a certain point it became clear that the way that people in colonial Papua New Guinea were talking about “the language problem” (the fact that there are many hundreds of languages spoken) overlapped with the way that they were talking about problems of moving around an incredibly mountainous place and unifying people into some larger social form (a synod, a colony, eventually a nation).
As you were hinting at in your question, the archives organized the final shape of the research too. When I went to the Australian national archives to look at the way that the colonial administration handled Tok Pisin, I started to see how many of those files were in response to the demands of the United Nations Trusteeship Council, which had oversight powers of Australia’s administration of the Territory of New Guinea, including their 1953 demand that Australia eradicate Tok Pisin. I had been hearing about this demand since the moment I first became interested in Tok Pisin’s history back when I was in college, and I was excited to finally dig into this part of Papua New Guinea’s history. The Trusteeship Council is not well-known now, but in the years after World War II it played an important role in decolonization. As I talk about in the second half of the book, its more anti-colonial delegates helped to create a kind of top-down project of bureaucratic decolonization that contrasts sharply with the more common imagination of decolonization as a bottom-up process of national struggle by colonized peoples. As I was working through these files, I started to see that even the most vocally anti-colonial delegations on the Trusteeship Council who wanted to hurry the Territory of New Guinea towards independence were thinking about Papua New Guinea in ways that mirrored the colonial and missionary discourses I had already seen: there were too many mountains and too many languages for Papua New Guinea to really be modern, and something needed to be done — to Tok Pisin, to English, to the aviation networks, to the road networks, and so on — to fix this circulatory problem.
So the book eventually took shape around the issue of what was allowing for all of these repetitions of the same problems: under what conditions do languages seem to be just like roads? Under what conditions do both colonizers and those demanding decolonization see this equivalence? In that sense, this became a book that wasn’t about languages on their own or infrastructures on their own, but about the imaginaries and material forms of circulation that organized these different channels.
Rachel Apone:As I already hinted at, one exciting aspect of this book was that it brings together a range of phenomena into the same frame. In addition to Tok Pisin, the book considers Lutheran radio and aviation networks, plantation labor and ‘telepathy tales’ and bureaucratic information flows during decolonization, just to name a few issues. In the introduction, you tell readers you are focusing on “channels,” which you define as “the institutionally and culturally codified means of enabling communication” (3). Can you tell us a little bit about how channels relate to or depart from other concepts such as “infrastructure” or “media” or “code”? If more (linguistic) anthropologists attend to the cultural formation of channels, do you have a sense of what other questions, insights, and conversations this might open up?
Courtney Handman: I borrow “channels” from Jakobson’s discussion of speech events as involving speaker, addressee, context, code, message, and channel/contact. In that sense I am in conversation with folks like Chip Zuckerman and Shunsuke Nozawa, who have written about phatic (channel-based) functions of language. One of the things that I like about the term is that talking about channels can be somewhat agnostic about the nature of the channel. To talk about “codes” usually means talking about languages as grammatical systems. To talk about “infrastructures” usually means focusing more on technological or socio-technical systems. To talk about “media” usually means talking about mass media. But “channel” doesn’t necessarily have those specific connotations, and I try to use it in a way that can encompass all of them. In doing so, I also try to see the ways that different channels can get conflated or talked about together in various sorts of historical or ethnographic contexts.
Paying attention to channels in this agnostic kind of way will hopefully open up conversations about otherwise less-emphasized aspects of communicative encounters. In linguistic anthropology, we tend to start our analyses of different communicative events after the process of creating a channel is done. We can analyze an interaction because that channel has been mobilized or formed, and people have started talking, or texting, or signing. But by not looking at channel formation, it leaves a lot of the work of how communicative events happen, or how people try to create the contexts for communicative events to happen, by the wayside. Even when issues of channel formation come up, we tend to downplay them. For example, one of the most consequential concepts for linguistic anthropology for the past 20 years or so has come out of Asif Agha’s work on enregisterment. In his analysis of the creation and spread of British Received Pronunciation, he uses Saul Kripke’s concept of the speech chain to talk about the spread of knowledge of RP. Linguistic anthropologists clearly have depended a lot on Agha’s discussions of enregisterment to talk about what people are doing in different speech events. But outside of some work on publics, like Andrew Graan’s idea of ‘discursive engineering,’ there has been less attention paid to the speech chain itself — its formation, its textures, its transformations. In a certain sense, then, I am thinking about channels as a way to look comparatively at how people cultivate and envision the sorts of speech chains they are in.
As I talk about in the introduction, I think of channels as elements of what Lee and LiPuma called cultures of circulation. For them, the primary regimes of circulation are publics and nations, and they focus mostly on the mass media forms that support them. By keeping the concept of regimes of circulation so linked to mass media, though, they end up ignoring other forms of circulation, for example bureaucracy. The kinds of channels I look at in the book are often not broadcast media, but rather the narrowcast (point-to-point) media used to try to link one mission to another or one office to another. And in focusing on channel formation itself I am emphasizing the places and times in which participants feel like channels are unstable, something that has been especially but not exclusively true for colonial contexts.
In terms of broader connections across anthropology, I have always wanted to see more interaction between linguistic anthropology and science and technology studies. Bruno Latour’s early ideas in Science in Action about the recruitment and translation of scientific allies in different controversies have always seemed like one place where that could happen, although elements of Latour’s actor network theory made his idea of translation at times frustratingly minimalist. Paying attention to the semiotic forms of channels and channel construction could be one way to complicate the story of network formation that he tells.
To go back to the book more specifically, when I was first looking at some of the historical materials that I was working with, I kept thinking in terms of the classifications used in the archives: some documents were about language, some were about radios, some were about airplanes, and so on. But it became clear that people who were on the ground in Papua New Guinea during the colonial and decolonizing eras were not keeping these categories very separate. A two-paragraph item in a colonial newspaper would jump between radios, communist infiltration from Indonesia, Tok Pisin, and telepathy; or a line of questioning about a report to the UN Trusteeship Council in New York would move from aviation networks, to the language problems, to English, to the presence or absence of Papua New Guinean demands for self-government. And at some point I realized I needed to pay more attention to how those links were being made. There is always the risk of making a category so general that it loses any analytic purchase, but the openness of ”channels” has been productive for me in thinking about the kinds of overlaps and connections I saw people making in Papua New Guinea.
Rachel Apone:The book is divided into two parts. The first focuses on Lutheran missionaries and other colonial actors and the second part focuses on the UN Trusteeship Council and its role in the decolonization of PNG. This concept of “circulatory primitivity” anchors both sections—you show how both colonial and decolonial actors constructed PNG as a fragmented place where ideas/information, people, and goods do not easily circulate. At a few different points you draw our attention to what might be called erasure–constructing PNG as a place of circulatory primitivity required erasing or ignoring vast exchange networks, the movement of people through kin networks, and so on. Can you thematize or reflect a bit on the relationship between erasure and “circulatory primitivity”? I’m curious why these forms of circulation are erased? Why aren’t colonizers discussing kin and exchange networks as illicit forms of circulation?
Courtney Handman: This is a great question. The historian Tracey Banivanua Mar talks about this dynamic of the visibility and invisibility of movement for the colonial Pacific broadly, and I think it is especially true for Papua New Guinea. On the one hand, there are all these (very incorrect) colonial discourses about the immobility of Papua New Guineans: that they stay within their small worlds, that they are scared to move around because of the threat of violence from other groups, that they are hemmed in by mountains and the lack of any larger lingua franca that could allow for a larger polity to form. On the other hand, there are all these colonial regulations that restricted Papua New Guineans’ movements, which would suggest that there was some recognition that people were highly mobile and needed to be constrained.
So it is not simply that colonizers did or did not recognize the mobility and circulation of Papua New Guineans. They were thinking about circulation in terms of the modernist imaginaries that they were bringing with them, which emphasized the modernizing effects of movement itself. And that meant that, as with any kind of modernist historical imaginary, there had to be a supposedly pre-modern moment against which colonial progress could be tracked. For missionaries, they used the figure of the immobile Papua New Guinean as the before side of a before/after comparison about the effects of Christianization. They used that immobility to distinguish themselves from those they ministered to: mobile missionaries armed with sacred texts travel long distances to give them to immobile people, some of whom themselves come to take up those texts and bring them to yet more distant others.
Given the connection of circulation and modernity, Papua New Guinean modes of circulation became visible mostly when they seemed to interfere with colonial projects. In the contexts that I talk about in this book, that often meant labor contexts. Where people were moving around to avoid getting blackbirded (kidnapped for indentured labor), or were telepathically connecting to others to warn them of the approach of colonizers, then forms of mobility were recognized but seen as illicit. Another moment when Papua New Guinean mobility became visible to colonizers happened when patrol officers complained that people were not present at their registered home village to participate in being counted for a census or for tax collection. At that village level, colonizers and missionaries were clearly aware of kin-based travel and long-distance exchange networks. But this typically was read as simply an annoyance that was ultimately not important and thus erasable, or as more specifically illicit attempts to evade governance that would get registered but registered pejoratively.
Another reason that local forms of mobility were ignored or erased was because these modernist concepts of circulation were so connected to ideas of large-scale polities and forms of mass media, too. To the extent that Papua New Guinean forms of circulation did not produce larger-scale polities like nations or markets or publics, then they could be ignored as irrelevant or castigated as illegitimate.
But your question more broadly points to the ways that as much as circulation was seen as somehow able to produce modernity or modernist forms, each part of colonial and decolonial society had to tell a story about why movement wasn’t doing the kind of work it was imagined to do. If people weren’t becoming modern in the right way, that was because some other kind of circulation would be better. And these conflicts among colonial projects produced all kinds of illegitimate forms of circulation that had to be constrained or regulated. Everyone agreed that the colony needed a lingua franca, for example, but when that turned out to be Tok Pisin rather than English, they argued that Tok Pisin wasn’t producing the right kind of circulation. This constant ability to affirm the importance of circulation while also being critical about any particular form of it is a point that I can say more about.
Rachel Apone: A couple of times in the book, you reference contemporary concerns about misinformation. But, given the historical scope of the book, we never really get a good sense of your take on that issue. Do you think contemporary concerns about misinformation could challenge the modernist imaginary that more flow and mobility is always better? Or do you think that concerns about misinformation are ultimately a recapitulation of modernist concerns about illicit forms of circulation? Do you have a sense of how concerns and discourses about misinformation are playing out in Papua New Guinea?
Courtney Handman: One of the things that I argue throughout the book is that while there was a broad consensus in the modernity of circulation, every colonial or decolonizing actor had a different idea about what the right kind of circulation would be. And these different views of particular circulatory connections and networks were often quite contradictory. Those channels always had to be reworked, remolded, or sometimes removed, always with the assumption that getting the channels right could create the desired social forms. And this dynamic seems to be at work in the way people worry about misinformation now as well.
To answer your question I would first want to emphasize that there is a panic about misinformation because of the still-present sense that more information should produce better outcomes. Even if the liberal sense of wanting to decide the issues within a marketplace of ideas feels antiquated and inadequate to the contemporary moment, fundamental ideas about choice and freedom are organized around circulation-based principles, for example that you need to be made aware of your options in order to choose (something that is enshrined in all of our IRB practices of informed consent). As with concepts of freedom of speech more generally, the assumption is that information should not be withheld.
Then, as with the cases that I was looking at in the book, there is the sense that the problem that needs to be solved has to do with the way information is circulating. In other words, insofar as people have recently attempted to fix the problems of information by trying to fix the way that information circulates — by trying to get us out of our communicative bubbles and silos — they are still participating in a project of circulatory modernity. Clearly there is more that is happening in terms of a shift away from liberal models of speech in places like the US, so even though circulation is not the only perspective for understanding the rise of illiberalism, I think it is a necessary one.
I’m not sure I have enough of a sense of the current dynamics in Papua New Guinea to make substantive claims about the way people are thinking about or handling questions of misinformation there. Fringe theories from the US circulate widely there. On one of my recent trips, I was surprised to realize that a pastor who I had known for a long time was telling me that he had recently been convinced by websites advocating the flat earth theory. In contrast to the many sources of information that are available now and that get debated as being legitimate or not, the colonial era sources of suspicion were relatively few: the fears of encroaching communism or so-called native telepathy, for example. But even if the distinction between the sanctioned as opposed to illicit sources of circulation is less clear, nevertheless my sense is that people are still trying to make that distinction. That is, they are still hoping to solve questions of social forms by reforming circulation.
I actually want to hear your answer to the question of how the problem of misinformation is playing out in contemporary Papua New Guinea, since some of your own work deals so creatively and thoughtfully with these issues. In lieu of being able to do that in this forum, I just want to end by thanking you for all of your fantastic questions and engagement with the book.
Bernard Perley: You mention how radio as a medium introduced new domains for language use, but also as an affirmation of traditional forms of language use. The value of radio is in its ability to broadcast across the region so that time (generational) and space (multi-sited) are chronotopically laminated during the course of the broadcast as an unfolding event. The linguistic forms do double-duty, highlighting difference (language variety) while anchoring solidarity (cultural practices). You close with a discussion of reweaving and remembering as aspects of reanimation and reclamation. Can you discuss how the “re” words (meaning ‘back’ or ‘again’) index “recovery” while pointing toward Kichwa language futures?
Georgia Ennis: One of my goals in the book was to use terms that were locally meaningful to describe processes of language oppression and reclamation for Kichwa speakers in Napo. For instance, language activists in Napo often discussed their work as a form of revalorization, which resonates with how Wesley Leonard has describe reclamation (2012) as a community-directed and oriented praxis.
Many of the many concepts of the book hinge around this process of turning ‘again’ to previous sites of animation, memory, thought, mediation, and value. These are also future-oriented projects. Although their indexicality is often towards the past, and the return of prior systems of knowledge, practices, and ways of interacting, they simultaneously point towards the future. For Peirce (1955, 100), sign relationships included not just the ground between sign-vehicle and object, but also the interpretant. Gal and Irvine (2019, 88) recast these as “conjectures” about the meanings of signs, which depend upon pre-existing knowledge and extend knowledge as we interact with signs. It is in the emergence of conjectures that these re-oriented projects—re-weaving, re-membering, re-animating, re-claiming, re-valorizing—have the potential to generate future meaning and action for language and culture. By bringing signs back into circulation again, they point to possibilities for future engagement with them.
Bernard Perley: You describe in detail the social relations that go into the radio programming and broadcasting of Napo Runa social relationships and cultural practices as a complex ecology of community supported media. You frame the process as remediation; remediation having two aspects (at least). You state that “people are also mediums of transmission” (14). Can you elaborate on how that framing contributes to rethinking the “technologies of remediation” model?
Georgia Ennis: My thinking around remediation brings together linguistic anthropology and media studies. From linguistic anthropology, I combine ideas of linguistic relatively and Peircean semiotics to understand how we apprehend the world. For media scholars Bolter and Grusin, a medium “it is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (1999, 66). The concept of remediation hinges on the embedding of one medium in another medium (McLuhan 1964), which has some overlaps with the focus in linguistic anthropology on decontextualization and recontextualization (Kuipers 1990; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992) .
A common language ideology among English speakers is that face-to-face communication is unmediated in contrast to channels like the radio, which introduce an obvious medium between speakers. However, language and other sign systems do not just label the world but are integral to our interpretations of the content of the world (Sapir 1949 [1933]; Hill and Mannheim 1992). Language and other forms of semiosis are a further site of mediation.
In my framework, people are channels of remediation, who internalize what I think of as the content of other media—be that experience, other people, or their own thoughts. At the most basic level the content people remediate is their qualitative experiences of reality mediated through semiotic systems, which are themselves built from experience. Such qualitative experiences may also be remediated into speech or other sign systems. In our daily lives, we remediate experience through conjectures that build up interpretations of the world. We further remediate experience through multimodal and embodied citations. Like processes of decontextualization and recontextualization, remediation can also generate intertextual gaps or transformations across sites of production. This is one way that I conceive of the semiotics of intergenerational transmission and socialization. Social actors are mediums of transmission across space and time, which allow for further remediations and transformations of the social order.
Bernard Perley: In your introduction, you talk about being a good daughter. One thing you shared was, “I had even tried to learn to weave shigra. I remained clumsy, though, while Serafina and her daughters deftly wove knots they described as “daughters” upon “mother” threads to produce shigra…”. You observe the daily wayusa upina, “was a time when children learned to be Napo Runa and when Napo Runa adults and elders reaffirmed their connections with each other and to the communicative world” (23). Jumping to your chapter on affect, you discuss spicey speech or joking behavior as cultural intimacy and a form of play that often included you. Your analysis of one joking account prompted Serafina’s musings on earthquakes. I am wondering, it seems you acquired deep enough “cultural knowledge and intimacy to be ‘in on’ the joke” (191). Can you describe how you became a reciprocal thread in the Kichwa lifeways—how did the intimacy you achieved contribute to Serafina’s interpretation and musings?
Georgia Ennis: For Serafina—my elder host in the village of Chaupishungo—I was a wakcha, which shaped my research with her. This is like the concept of orphan in English but also includes those who have lost just one parent, as well as spouses who have lost their partners. Serafina and I had both lost our mothers at relatively young ages. This is one of the reasons we became so close, and she came to see me as a daughter—and I also came to see her as a mother. The mornings that I spent by the fire talking with Serafina and listening to the radio with her family were times in which I was socialized into Serafina’s knowledge about how to live a good life through the life stories she chose to share with me.
This was also intimacy that grew through time. Following my first year of fieldwork, Serafina became more intent about sharing her life history and experiences, particularly the privileged traditional and historical knowledge shared among family. Where she had once told me she did remember her elder’s narratives, she began to share them more openly. I am now analyzing some of our conversations about this transition in terms of “narrative refusal”—moments when knowledge is hidden or silenced for inappropriate audiences (see also Simpson 2007). This is also why I write less explicitly about many Kichwa narratives—I was entrusted with them because of specific relationships, relationships that my readers may not have.
My presence, and my emphasis on speaking with Serafina to learn from her, included other family members, who shaped our discussions. Her daughters often joined us and contributed to our conversations. This approach also unintentionally excluded others, who felt that Serafina was not interested in counseling them like this, and who did not awaken early with us. As a graduate student, my job was to engage with Serafina and other elders; I received financial and social support for it, in ways that were almost completely foreclosed to young people in Napo. These were significant ethnographic moments that invited me to recognize how privileged my position was. I sometimes still wonder, did Serafina give me such intimate access because I paid rent to live in her household? Was our relationship as meaningful to her as it was to me? These are questions surrounding anthropological engagement, intimacy, and the ways our positionality informs our research, which are significant to me as a feminist anthropologist (Behar and Gordon 1995). Our ethnographic intimacy emerged from the relationship we forged and the habitus I developed through our time together. Other members of her family have remained important and close interlocuters, even after her death.
Bernard Perley: In chapter 3, you delve into language ideologies and ontologies. On ontologies, you state “an ontological approach emphasizes the subjective assumptions of the nature of language for the people with whom we work and decenters the taken-for-granted assumptions about language of linguists and anthropologists trained within our own epistemic traditions” (126). You describe A New Path program that revalorizes and is responsive to “many of the ontologies and ideological assemblages of language found elsewhere in Napo” (131). Specifically speaking, what are the decentered language ontologies of Kichwa you once took for granted as an anthropologist trained in your epistemic tradition?
Georgia Ennis: I write about several in the book. One I have continued thinking with regards circulation and accessibility of language. Although my training considered ethical issues in language documentation, as well as the limitations of Boasian salvage ethnography (Boas 1889; Rice 2011; Perley 2012), I was also shaped by ontologies of language as a system available to all. Linguistic documentation is often premised on accessible archiving, making language and knowledge available to wider audiences. There is greater acceptance of community protocols in archival projects (Christen 2012), but the creation of open archives remains a goal for many linguists and funders (Ennis and Debenport 2025).
Yet, for my Kichwa interlocuters, language and narrative were significant sources of knowledge and personal power, which they closely guard. When I started my research, I was eager to record traditional stories that I had read in collections of Amazonian narratives. I was often told that people ‘did not know’ or ‘did not remember’ such stories. I also found that my interlocuters like Serafina shared more about these stories as our relationship deepened. Understanding these ontologies drew me into new relationships of responsibility relative to my data, which is actually the significant cultural knowledge of my interlocuters (Ennis et al. 2024).
Just as some activists have adopted models for revitalization based in language standardization conflicting with local ontologies, others, including ANew Path, have turned to broadcast technologies that make knowledge more accessible. This is a site of ontological transformation and debate in Napo. In my recent work, I have developed a greater attitude of refusal (Simpson 2007) out of respect for the knowledge protocols of many of my interlocuters.
Bernard Perley: Your framing of the social entanglements of the Kichwa language as shifting ecologies is a good way to describe the environmental conditions that potentiate mutually influential transformation in diverse ecologies. You also describe the porousness of those ecologies of new media, new generations, and new ideas as a lived reality of contemporary Napo communities. You state in your epilogue, “The introduction of new digital technologies involving such media suggest a more hopeful future, in which language and culture are remembered, rather than forgotten, albeit in new modalities and regimes of value.” (238). This comment struck me for the tension between an implied uncertainty about Kichwa futures and a deus ex machina hope for remediated futures. Can you discuss the tension and how it relates to language reclamation projects in general?
Georgia Ennis: Reclaiming languages is an uncertain prospect, because it often involves not only reconstituting a code but countering the forms of oppression that have reconfigured how and when language is used (Meek 2010). Uncertainty and hope shape the experience of language reclamation. But what is technology’s role in this hopeful future?
Communication technologies can provide a source of emergent vitalities in language reclamation projects. However, I am no techno-optimist, who imagines that technology will “save” a language. As you (2012) have pointed out, archives can create “zombie languages,” disembodied from their speakers and inaccessible to communities. Perhaps we will soon interact with disembodied AI “zombie speakers” of Indigenous languages. Such a future may not be far off, when marketing firms are already using AI to generate “Indigenous” influencers. Gerald Roche has also written that enthusiasm for AI should be tempered, as “underlying economic, social, and political, relationships” shape the possibilities of many communities to interact with such tools (Roche 2024). Simply creating an AI model that can translate between one code and another does not guarantee that tool will be useful to a language community, and it raises larger questions about the transparent commensurability of translation (Mannheim 2015) or community protocols for data sovereignty (Carroll, Duarte, and Max Liboiron 2024). I am skeptical in many ways about remediated futures.
What is significant about media technologies is that they mediate between people (Askew 2002). Media can become focal points for interaction in and around a language, both in production and reception. Such technologies generate new questions and concerns in language reclamation, which should be clarified on a case-by-case basis. Rather than a deus ex machina hope that remediation into new contexts and communicative modalities will “save” languages, media technologies can provide hopeful, potential avenues for further mediation between people.
References:
Askew, Kelly. 2002. “Introduction.” In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, edited by Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk, 1–13. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
Bauman, R, and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. “Poetics And Performance As Critical Perspectives On Language And Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1): 59–88.
Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon. 1995. Women Writing Culture. xiii, 457 p. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bolter, J. David, and Richard. Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Briggs, Charles L., and Richard Bauman. 1992. “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2 (2): 131–72.
Carroll, Stephanie Russo, Marisa Elena Duarte, and Max Liboiron. 2024. “Indigenous Data Sovereignty.” In Keywords of the Datafied State, edited by Jenna Burrell, Ranjit Singh, and Patrick Davison, 207–23. Data & Society Research Institute. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4734250.
Christen, Kimberly. 2012. “Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness.” International Journal of Communication (19328036) 6 (January):2870–93.
Ennis, Georgia, and Erin Debenport. 2025. “Introduction: Language Lives in Unexpected Places.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 48 (1). https://doi.org/10.17953/A3.4831.
Ennis, Georgia, Gissela Yumbo, María Antonia Shiguango, Ofelia Salazar, and Olga Chongo. 2024. “Relating to the Forest: Possibilities and Limitations of Collaborative Community Media.” In Countering Modernity, edited by Carolyn Smith-Morris and César Abadía, 59–84. New York: Routledge.
Hill, Jane H., and Bruce Mannheim. 1992. “Language and World View.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (January):381–406.
Kuipers, Joel. 1990. Power in Performance: The Creation of Textual Authority in Weyewa Ritual Speech. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Leonard, Wesley. 2012. “Framing Language Reclamation Programmes for Everybody’s Empowerment.” Gender and Language 6 (2): 339–67. https://doi.org/doi: 10.1558/genl.v6i2.339.
Mannheim, Bruce. 2015. “All Translation Is Radical Translation.” In Translating Worlds: The Epistemological Space of Translation, edited by Carlo Severi and William F. Hanks, 199–219. Chicago, IL: HAU.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Signet.
Meek, Barbra. 2010. We Are Our Language. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Peirce, Charles S. 1955. “Logic as Semiotic.” In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler, 98–115. Philosophy of Peirce. New York: Dover Publications.
Perley, Bernard. 2012. “Zombie Linguistics: Experts, Endangered Languages and the Curse of Undead Voices.” Anthropological Forum 22:133–49.
Rice, Keren. 2011. “Documentary Linguistics and Community Relations.” Language Documentation & Conservation 5:187–207.
Sapir, Edward. 1949 [1933]. “Language.” In Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, edited by David Goodman Mandelbaum, 7–32. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, no. 9 (January), 67.
How to Tell: Gender Performance and Viral “Identity Tests”
“Supposedly, only women can do this,” a typical video begins. The woman bends at the waist and lifts a chair, steps over a broom, kneels and puts her hands behind her back, the man strains, struggles comically, falls on his face. These “challenges”pre-date the internet—many commentators remember learning them decades ago in gym or physics classes—but have been given fresh relevance and urgency by public anxieties over transgender visibility and civil rights. On “X,” user “TTExulansic” writes, “this test, the chair test, and the knowledge we have about male and female skeletons’ body wide proportion differences, all lead to being able to distinguish sex based not simply on how they look as a still frame, but on the lines their bodies trace across time as they move.”
As with more overt strains of gender essentialist discourse online (here I’m thinking of Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s infamous embrace of trans-exclusive radical feminism), these tests/challenges are propelled by an empowering, feminist(ish) framing: “only women can do this.” The most popular videos emphasize the physical comedy of men confidently fumbling and flailing at something their wives or girlfriends perform easily.
Sometimes influencers juxtapose highly visible gendered physical differences (his bodybuilder physique) with invisible female strength or agility. (This particular influencer, Jarell Carter, makes a lot of these challenge/collab videos with other fitness influencers, typically showing himself attempting to replicate the workout routine of a slender, leanly-muscled woman, fielding interruptions from his sweet, clueless pitbull Dootie, and gamely failing spectacularly; I’ve never seen him succeed. He has essentially built a brand out of deflating stereotypes of toxic masculinity or Black male violence, with an assist from his pitbull, a dog breed with their own undeserved bad reputation to subvert.) He ends the video saying, “I’m sorry fellas,” like he has let down his entire gender, as if this performance is not largely aimed at and consumed by women. He has captioned this video, “I’m starting to realize there is so much women can do that men can’t.” (You can also see it’s sponcon; it’s actually an ad for these energy drinks in the background.) In another example of this genre, the chair test , this content creator has captioned this “constantly proving that women are the elite species.” This gymnast posts a lot of workout routines, but this particular post is by far his most successful post, 173 million views. The algorithm rewards men willing to humiliate themselves in order to affirm their masculinity and reify a gender binary—he is hitting himself in the balls, yes, but that proves that he has them!
Because these videos circulate as challenges or tests, the outcome is binary: either you can do it, or you can’t. At a time when transphobic politicians try to catch their opponents with the gotcha question, “What is a woman?” the gender essentialist frame of the meme offers concrete terms for quantifying womanhood, that thing all women share that makes it possible for them to do this: it has to do with height, or shoe size, with hip to waist ratio or center of gravity, or it’s not determined by gender but by age, fitness, core strength, flexibility. The playful, experimental format of memes opens up space, in comment sections and stitched video responses, to debate the the supposed science of gender, while simultaneously defusing the political stakes of the conversation in the way that vernacular culture does best: a humorous and plausibly denial focus on personal experience. “Should someone tell her” — ie, that her husband is not a real man—one comment reads on a husband-wife influencer account who have “debunked” the challenge. The original poster replies, unoffended, “lmfaooo.” As we know from folklore scholarship on legends, belief isn’t binary but social and relational, and legends are circulated most aggressively not by those who believe, but by those who doubt. This is to say that, just because there is no consensus in the comment sections on what these tests prove about gender does not mean these negotiations are meaningless—the virality of the genre is proof of their believability.
The performative, ritualistic aspects of these identity tests play into the social and embodied nature of belief: like the familiar duet-with-me and put-a-finger-down-edition meme formats, physical imitation and collaboration helps bring online relationships and identities home, ups our investment in virtual worlds. Katherine Young reminds us that “we activate folklore by moving into it bodily… by borrowing other’s subjectivities” (2011, 82, qtd. Barker 2019, 70). Categories of identity are social, but we live increasingly isolated, disembodied lives. A wide range of viral trends aim to fill this gap, by inviting users to confirm their relative health, age, agility by holding their breath, flexing their fingers, searching their body for a significant mole. Can you see the number, count the dots, read the expression? Are you colorblind, autistic, do you have ADHD? There’s a simple, actionable, at-home test for that—no need to visit a doctor’s office, which is convenient because you don’t have health insurance. Click your heels together, the evidence was in your own body all the time.
We can think of meme formats which call on users to physically re-enact what they see as social media rituals, which Trillo and co-authors define as “typified communicative practices on social media that formalize and express shared values.” They write, “Each contribution amounts to ‘a tiny value assertion’ (Gillespie, 2018, p. 210), which is then subjected to a series of tiny evaluations in the form of likes, shares, and comments” (Trillo, Hallinan, and Shifman 2022). This is what the enactment of social identity looks like online, each post stakes a claim on perceptual reality and backs it up with their body. Unlike the Yanny/Laurel meme (which do you hear first), or the famous dress of 2015 (do you see blue and black, or white and gold?), the virality of which relied on the impossibility of confirming our unique sensory experiences, these gender tests come prepackaged with supposedly appropriate outcomes, and attached to larger political discourses about the immutability of gender.
The chair test, the broom test, the balance challenge, and other things which only women can do lend a participatory, embodied authority to arguments that gender ideology is primarily an internet phenomenon, whose claimants are terminally online and need to touch grass. But as in all online trends, what can be seen cannot be felt, and what can be felt cannot be seen. No matter how engaging or realistic the world on your phone screen is, you can’t smell it, taste it, touch it. Liking a post is no replacement for spending time with friends in person—but it has replaced it. Social media is fairy food, leaving us even hungrier for the real thing. This is the principle that drives the social media popularity of conceptual art exhibits like Koch and Ortkrass’s Rain Room, James Turrell’s lightscapes, Yoyoi Kosama’s Infinity Mirror rooms, or the many pop-up “museums” that invite guests to swim in a pool full of sprinkles, fall into a ballpit of balloons, walk through a room-sized projection of a painting. These venues encourage patrons to document and post everything, knowing that whatever they post will be a sensuously unfinished experience—anyone seeing it through a screen will want to feel it for themselves. (“swimming around absolutely consumed with joy”). The Turrell lightscapes colorshift as you look at them because of the biology of your eyes—your human body is the canvas. Unlike Walter Benjamin’s famous essay about the Mona Lisa, these works of art cannot be mechanically or even digitally reproduced.
The theorist Anna Kornbluh calls this trend “immediacy,” typical of “too late capitalism”—a rejection of the abstract and the symbolic in favor of the present moment, the personal and experiential that, she argues, informs not just art and culture but politics, economics, and even academic discourses like affect theory, actor-network-theory, and post-criticism. Kornbluh writes, “Philosophers have … identified recent history with a ‘passion for the real’ or a ‘reality hunger’… Much of immediacy’s lure rests in the momentary compensatory solidities of imagined contact with imagined real… Immediatism demands these imaginary reals, grasping encounters with what circumvents or precedes mediation—but its aesthetic and political effects propagate infinite, individualized, phenomenalized attempts that perpetually, repetitively circle, multiplying into a hall of mirrors” (Kornbluh 61).
One comment on these videos, a more traditional male-fail, reads “am I the only guy who can do this easily” – the original poster encourages them to upload their own video in response, and conveniently boost their engagement and earnings—“Let’s see it!”
It’s an endless feedback loop: there is no effective way to respond to the conversation except in kind. But that video will not prove anything to viewers—seeing isn’t believing, belief is in the embodied, social interaction, in the co-construction of shared experiences and consequently shared realities. As Brandon Barker writes about folk illusions, “bodies are only human bodies as long as they are involved in social processes, and socialized, enculturated bodies shine a light on yet another core paradox: the universal materiality of human bodies vis-à-vis the singularly unique manifestation of each human’s body. Much is at stake when we make the move from the universal to the particular.” (Barker 75). Anyone watching these videos will need to try it for themselves, and their performance will, in turn, be reincorporated into online discourse, virtual evidence of the material reality of cultural constructs like gender.
Paradoxically, the insistence that gender is concrete and observable in virtual spaces—the transphobic rhetoric of “we can always tell,” the dissection of vocal pitch, shoulder breadth, adam’s apples, thigh gaps, and other so-called evidence—can only ever reaffirm that gender is performance, because everything online is performance. Every image, every video, is framed, selected, cropped, edited, filtered, hashtagged. It is all representation, not reality. There’s no there there. All these videos do is to invite us to examine ourselves. If our only interactions with stigmatized others is online, any stories we tell about them are stories about ourselves.
References
Barker, K. Brandon, and Claiborne Rice. Folk Illusions: Children, Folklore, and Sciences ofPerception. 1st ed. New York: Indiana University Press, 2019.
Kornbluh, Anna. Immediacy. Verso, 2024.
Trillò, Tommaso, Blake Hallinan, and Limor Shifman. “A Typology of Social Media Rituals.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 27, no. 4 (2022).
Bingjing Yang: I thoroughly enjoyed reading your book and have started practicing mindfulness myself to better understand this phenomenon that is unfolding globally. Your book explores how mindfulness serves not only as a reflective tool for personal mental experiences but also impacts the broader cultivation of mental health in everyday life. You describe your analysis of mindfulness as neither a critique nor an endorsement. Initially, you delineate the influence of Buddhism and meditation on the concept and practice of mindfulness in the UK. Could you explain how your focus shifted from meditation to mindfulness? Furthermore, could you elaborate on how this book explores the transformation of mindfulness from a therapeutic intervention to an integral part of living a “good life”? How does this integration challenge or reinforce societal understandings of mental health, especially in relation to the moral and practical aspects of mindfulness you discuss?
Joanna Cook: Thanks very much for some great questions and I’m delighted to hear that you enjoyed reading Making a Mindful Nation! It was a labour of love, so it’s great to hear that people are engaging with it. You’re right that this book represents a shift from meditation to mindfulness in my work. My first book, Meditation in Modern Buddhism, was about Buddhist monks and nuns in a monastery in Northern Thailand who practice and teach an intensive form of meditation called Burmese Vipassana. Meditating in the monastery involves taking on moral precepts and committing oneself to disciplined comportment. It is also often figured in relation to soteriological goals of cutting attachment to a sense of self and freeing oneself from suffering. As I was finishing that book, I started to get interested in the introduction of mindfulness in mental healthcare in the UK. As I show in Making a Mindful Nation, mindfulness shares genealogically links with the meditation in the monastery, but it is figured very differently: psychologically informed mindfulness is characterized by befriending the mind and integrating mindful awareness into the daily ups and downs of workaday lives; family struggles, relationship dynamics, stress and burnout. I set out to explore that transformation ethnographically.
What I found is that mindfulness provides a window onto a moment in which the category of ‘mental health’ has shifted radically: Mental health is now commonly thought of as a transversal issue, as important for psychologists as for patients, probation workers as for prisoners, politicians as for constituents. And it is no longer only framed in a negative register. In this new framing of mental health, the prevention of suffering remains important, but this is complemented by a positive framing of mental health as flourishing, happiness, purpose, psychological resilience, and so on. And, importantly, people across society have come to think of mental health as something that can be cultivated. This matters because, in the transversal shift from the prevention of illness to the cultivation of health, what one does about mental health far exceed the realms of professional psychological intervention. Mental health practices, like mindfulness, are incorporated into the small moments of daily experience (washing up, waiting for a bus), and living well is associated with maintaining a healthy relationship with one’s own mind amidst the ups and downs of everyday life.
Bingjing Yang:You have noted that philologists’ interpretations of Buddhism have shaped the British understanding of its core principles, presenting Buddhism as an ethical religion suited for modern principles through practices of “intercultural mimesis” that interpret its fundamental logic as non-superstitious and contemporary. This transformation illustrates how Buddhism has been simplified at the linguistic and pragmatic levels to serve the modern struggles of the UK. Furthermore, the romantic appropriation of Buddhism and the projection of values onto it—encompassing a fascination with mysticism, magic, and spiritual experiences, which are also classic subjects of anthropological study—shows that while Buddhism has evolved into a science of the mind in contemporary UK, it retains a romantic essence in psychological terms. Exploring the roots and significance of Buddhism in the UK can greatly enhance understanding of the dual utility of mindfulness today.
Joana Cook: I think so too! My intention in exploring the cultural history of British engagement with Buddhism since the 19th century was not to dismiss mindfulness as a decontextualised or inauthentic version of putatively real or true Buddhism. Nor was it to champion mindfulness as a distillation of the essence of Buddhism, shorn of the polluting effects of cultural accretion. Instead, I wanted to explore the meaning, value and effects of meditation in different cultural and historical contexts. That might seem like an obvious intention for an anthropologist, but it’s important, I think, because both Buddhism and meditation are often characterized as timeless, authentic or culture-free. I’m really interested in the ways in which people navigate the worlds in which they find themselves and their efforts to lead good lives. And I found it fascinating to chart the history of meditation practices as they were constituted by and constitutive of prevailing cultural and intellectual concerns.
Bingjing Yang: You have described resilience as a goal of mindfulness practice, necessary for adapting to changes in the world and for individuals to develop stronger resilience and enriched self-management practices. Beyond the interplay of rationalism and romanticism, the blending of Buddhist doctrines with scientific validation in mindfulness practices, what exactly is resilience pursued as a goal? Is there a history in resilience thinking similar to pragmatists’ rationalization of Buddhist logic during the Enlightenment? You mentioned that “resilience thinking has increasingly drawn on a relationally embedded understanding of the subject in response to intractable problems, such as mental health.” (p. 41) How does this change in resilience thinking reflect a change in psychological subjectivity? What is the relationship between changing attitudes towards resilience and the evolution of the mental health category?
Joanna Cook: I found an ethnographic take on resilience interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because resilience has its own cultural genealogy and, secondly, because resilience is a buzz word that does important political work. In Britain, earlier iterations of psychological resilience often framed it as an inner capacity, akin to grit or fortitude. It is what enabled people to weather adverse experiences, or get back on the horse. This framing of resilience as a capacity to bounce back has largely shifted to an emphasis on the capacity for reflective awareness of oneself: resilience is increasingly characterized by responsiveness and flexibility in a changing and complex world. This is an important part of how the people I worked with (patients, psychologists, parliamentarians, and political advocates) understand mental health, relate to themselves and engage with others.
But resilience thinking also has an important political role. In the work of political advocacy, resilience has been used to understand everything from the war on terror to international development aid, and David Chandler opens his great book on the subject (Resilience: The Governance of Complexity, 2014) by describing it as ‘the policy buzzword of choice’. I focused on how non-professional advocates developed a policy conversation about mindfulness in the British parliament. Engaging with existing political narratives and terms was an important way in which advocates communicated to parliamentarians what they understood to be the importance of mindfulness, and how they shaped mindfulness as a policy object in a highly professional political environment.
Bingjing Yang: I find your pragmatic approach to bridging the gap between anthropology and psychological diagnostic categories very enlightening. It effectively balances the analysis and therapeutic application of diagnostic categories with their social purposes, while focusing on the cultural specifics of mental health that anthropology examines. Mindfulness, for instance, skillfully circumvents the claims and stigmatization associated with diagnostic categories, emerging as an ethical and moral practice that reconciles cognitive structures with modern commercial developments. Could this achievement in the development of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) be considered a milestone in the trajectory of medical anthropology?
In Britain, the popularity of mindfulness reflects a recent destigmatisation of depression and anxiety, and mental health more generally. In the book, I chart the reclassification of depression as a relapsing condition that can be addressed through psychosocial training, and I explore the development of preventative interventions, like Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). Through ongoing practice-based training, MBCT participants learn to establish a ‘friendly’ relationship with their own minds in order to prevent depressive relapse. This shows that diagnostic categories, meaning and self-cultivation mutually reinforce each other as practitioners learn and respond to a cognitive theory of mind. The implication of this is that, in preventative healthcare, the locus of intervention often lies far outside the remit of medical science and encompasses the relationship an individual has with herself, and the subjective values and shared beliefs that motivate or inhibit health-seeking behaviours.
In my analysis of mindfulness and the prevention of depression, I developed a both/and analysis as a way of bridging a common gap in scholarship between psychological and cultural knowledge. I argue that, in response to changing nosologies of depression and therapeutic intervention, psychological and cultural practices are braided together. I highlight that in the prevention of depressive relapse, depression is understood both as a clinical diagnosis and as something that can be addressed through ongoing training. That seems really important to me – that experiences of mental illness and healthcare are affected by beliefs, practices and expectations embedded in interactive relationships – but I am by no means the first person to say this. Scholars like Julia Cassaniti, Randall Horton, Laurence Kirmayer, Usha Menon and others have made important contributions to this discussion before me. I hope that my analysis contributes to a growing body of scholarship that examines the interrelationship of culture and mind.
Thank you very much for such thoughtful and thought-provoking questions. It’s been a pleasure to engage with them.
Biella Coleman:Drawing from fieldwork in three global cities and three hacker spaces, Common Circuits examines how hackers in these collaborative spaces have developed and supported community-controlled tools—spanning from surveillance protection to environmental monitoring. Tell us how you got to this project and set of questions around the common/s, selfhood, conviviality (among others) you tackle in your book.
LF Murillo: One way to tell this story is to go back to the circuits that informed my work as conditions of possibility for the project that I present in the book. This is what I tried to do in the introduction where I explain how I came to work at the intersection between anthropology and computing. My trajectory is not unique in any way, but shared with various technologists across projects and community spaces that figure in the book on a rather short temporal scale (that feels like a lifetime in internet years) from the late 1990s to the present. As a student, I happened to find myself in the middle of the technopolitical effervescence in the 1990s. Public universities went on strike against neoliberal austerity measures. Classroom debates involved the history of social movements, but also a serious concern for the so-called paradigmatic crisis of the social sciences in which serious limitations were perceived in our capacity to explain and interpret post-industrial and postmodern phenomena. The global gathering of the anti-corporate globalization movement was happening in my hometown with the World Social Forum, drawing me and tons of others to a pluriversal politics of knowledge. At the time, free radio, free software, and networked forms of communication were being experimented with for political action, creating new circuits that we learned to inhabit, but also to help create anew. It was in this context that I first learned about the common as an autonomist political orientation toward conviviality (that is, as a vector for sociotechnical and cultural transformation that moved in the opposite direction to the excesses of industrial developmentalism). It was also in this context that I started to learn about selfhood as a relational question, following a classic and well-known formulation of Gilbert Simondon for the study of the individual (be it a technical object, a concept, a person) through the process of individuation not the “individuation through the individual.” This is to take the reality of relations very seriously through ethnographic work without falling into the trap of (formal) relationism.
Biella Coleman:The field of hacker studies has been around since the 1990s (with quite bit of journalistic coverage pre-dating this period). What do you consider your book’s most significant contribution to this area of scholarship, and how does it build upon or challenge existing work in the field?
LF Murillo: The literature on hacking was really important for me in preparing the book. Your work, for example, and the work of other colleagues in the humanities and social sciences paved the way for us to be able to do what we do now. I always joke that our topic used to be very exotic, so we needed to figure out ways to communicate through established topics of social inquiry. I am very curious to see how people will interpret the book and find shortcomings and contributions that I have not anticipated. Maybe one of the things that I believe to be a contribution is the way I organized the book to respond to a common question (“what are the implications of the politicization of computing expertise?”), but to take a different route in responding to it by exploring the spatialization and the personification of hacking. First, by exploring how hacking constituted a technical and political practice beyond the Euro-American axis, getting spatialized in community spaces worldwide; and, second, by studying through trajectory analysis how technologists cultivated themselves as hackers (under quite distinct and socioeconomically-distant conditions). I realized that hacking suffered from a similar problem that we find in the study of other marginal-turned-mainstream movements. Punk, for example, always came to mind for me. There are so many national and regional expressions of punk, and, yet, mostly of what is narrated is through the historical experiences in the US or the UK (and, to a much lesser extent, around Western Europe). The topic of hacking suffers from a similar problem: what is currently known in the literature is quite limited to the dominant narratives and the political experiences in the Euro-American circuit. That is why I decided to pay more attention to minor circuits of computing. I believe that to be a contribution, albeit modest, to the existing literature on hacking.
Biella Coleman:One of the most fascinating aspects of your book is how you chose to organize it around both spaces/places and people’s life histories. Tell us more about this format. What were you hoping to achieve with this two-part structure, and how does it help readers understand some of your arguments.
LF Murillo: I am very grateful for your kind remarks about the format! To be honest, I did not know if it was going to work… because it reads as a traditional format that is being used to present a non-traditional multi-sited research design. I say traditional because I decided to communicate to our colleagues by drawing from well-established areas of inquiry of space, place, personhood, techniques (of computing and the body) and the gift. I thought something could be done productively (still) in that space by bringing forth their potential for the study of contemporary technopolitics. We know that any medium will take a life of its own by entering other circuits of interaction and interpretation, but I was hoping that a return to the question of cultivation of technologists as hackers and their convivial spaces (as spaces that are not the industry, the school, the government, or the start-up) would help us engage with alternative technopolitical projects, especially now as Big Tech has become the communicational, financial, and technical infrastructure of authoritarian regimes. It was fundamentally with this concern in mind that the notion of common circuits first came into being to explain the conditions of possibility but also interdiction of what is allowed to be presented as hacking. One way I believe to be particularly generative is for us to look into technical and personal trajectories, pursuing extensions where people, projects, technical objects, and spaces are created through commoning (here understand as the practice of placing things in common as an alternative to public/private modes of governance). I do not want to spoil the ending for our colleagues who might want to read the book, but I conclude with an answer to the opening question: “are these collective experiments in commoning prefiguring alternative technopolitical futures?” I think we can continue to study this technopolitical phenomenon across contexts to identify expressions of the common that are experienced through a quite different vernacular than that of social movements.
Biella Coleman:A central theme you explore in your book is the concept of the common. Tell us why you chose this framing and why, given our current political climate, it is a particularly urgent topic to consider.
LF Murillo: This is perhaps what motivated me the most to write the book for a more interdisciplinary, but also non-academic audience. The more I examined examples of hacking across contexts, the more I found that there was something common within their circuits that could furnish us with yet another piece of the puzzle of technopolitical conviviality as a form of resistance to the fast-growing ascension of authoritarian regimes, backed by algorithmic governance—a form of resistance that is not to be confused with the techno-libertarianism of the computing industry. The common I identified in the book strikes me as an urgent (but invisible) collective project that can point us toward the creation of technopolitical and ecological alternatives that are not limited to the exhausted (and violent) alternatives of states and markets. In the social sciences and humanities, we have an immense ethnographic record of political, economic, and technological alternatives that predate and extrapolate the politico-economic experiences of Western modernity. It is in these experiences that we can find other ways of conceiving of the political. Just like the private and the public seem to foreclose our political imagination today when it is mostly needed, making us unable to respond to various forms of political violence, so does the concept of the commons as usually understood through a rational choice lens. What I am trying to suggest, rather, is that it seems urgent to engage with the “vernaculars of the common” in science, technology, and ecology not to anticipate their configurations based on what we already know about other modes of commoming, but to contribute to present and future studies of what counts as the political that is not perceived as such (and that includes the otherwise mundane practice of software or hardware design as I describe in the book). Common circuits is this attempt to identify practices of commoning across contexts—honoring as well the difficult challenges of discrimination and reproduction of socio-historical inequities that are certainly part of the experiments I describe—with an emphasis on minor circuits within and beyond the Euro-American circuits of hacking. In this regard, your work has been extremely important for us for demonstrating how to engage anthropologically with deterritorialized technopolitical movements. Thank you you so much for your thoughtful questions! As our common friends usually say, the importance of getting off the internet in recognition of the limits of digital political action: “I will see you in the streets” or at a community space!
(Author’s Note for Context: The preface and introduction of Kill Talk make clear that this book does not claim to encompass the full range of U.S. military language or experience—realities far too varied and complex to be fully captured here. Instead, it centers on the language of U.S. infantry combatants, with a particular focus on the Marine Corps.)
Norma Mendoza-Denton: Congratulations on your brand-new book! It’s a really good read, a really, really, good read. I guess I just wanted to first of all ask you how you came to this topic. What compelled you, what propelled you? How long has this idea been in gestation?
Janet McIntosh: Well, it started young, for me. In the preface I talk a little bit about being a middle schooler who was assigned certain books about war, and I was so –
Norma Mendoza-Denton: – it was All Quiet on the Western Front, right?
Janet McIntosh: Yeah, and Elie Wiesel’s Night. I was so privileged that I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the idea that people could do these awful things to each other. I think I combined that with my anthropologist’s curiosity about what I call human impressionability; our tendency to kind of soak up ideologies and belief systems and diverse ways of being that are around us, which can impel us to take certain actions. Merging those obsessions with an interest in linguistic anthropology, plus a recent preoccupation with the American right wing, brought me to this moment.
Also, I filled in years ago for Hugh Gusterson when he was at MIT, teaching his class called “Anthropology of War and Peace.” Reading the material on his syllabus brought these old questions about the worst aspects of humanity back to life for me. I grew up in a sort of Quaker inflected family, so the idea of committing violence on behalf of the State felt very distant and kind of alien to me. But we know the people who serve as the “tip of the spear” are just people, sometimes volunteering for and sometimes forcibly put into a situation that can get pretty awful for them and their adversaries. I wanted to understand how anyone could achieve this frame of mind as combat infantry, becoming not only potential killers but also more killable from the state’s perspective. So I think that’s what brought me to it—it was partly fed by my own incomprehension.
Norma Mendoza-Denton: The books that we write are sometimes very impenetrable and so I’m wondering if you had a sort of overt strategy to try to make it a book that could reach as many people as possible.
Janet McIntosh: Well, thank you for that. I really did try with this book. You know, in the book that you and I edited (Language in the Trump Era, 2020) we were careful to try to make it teachable. We unpacked and clarified theoretical terms for readers who hadn’t been initiated into linguistic anthropology or language studies. So that’s something I was mindful to do in this book as well, like when I explain iconicity in semiotics, or explain humor theory as it applies and doesn’t apply to certain military jokes, or describe military kill talk as a kind of linguistic infrastructure that tries to shunt and stop empathic emotions and thoughts rather like a road nudges traffic this way and that.
I also showed draft portions to quite a few veterans. One of them told me that an earlier version of my intro was like “a wall of words” to him, so I tucked my tail between my legs and thought, how can I write this in a way that can reach him more successfully? I don’t want to overstate the book’s importance to veterans, but some I showed it to did feel it was interesting or helpful. One said, “It’s like we’re locked in a box of our personal experience and you’re dumping out all our boxes on the table and recombining them to make more sense of them in a way we can’t. Plus, it helps me know my shit is not isolated or unique.”
Norma Mendoza-Denton: One thing that I really liked about the book was the structure of it, from Marine Corps boot camp, to combat, to the linguistic and semiotic aftermath of war for some combat veterans. I want to know what the fieldwork was like, and how you incorporated fieldwork notes into this incredibly vivid narrative that takes the reader through boot camp, and forces the reader to wonder: would I also disintegrate like this?
Janet McIntosh: So it would have been challenging for me to enlist in the Marines for participant observation, but after a couple of false starts I did manage to get access to the Marine Corps Training Depot in Paris Island, South Carolina. I was a fly on the wall for a drill instructor’s reunion, which was several days long. And that was a remarkable opportunity, because they were doing all kinds of activities on the island, and recruits are sometimes visible in training outdoors. The veterans were reminiscing and joking among themselves, and then all these different events for the group were set up by active-duty drill instructors. I couldn’t formally interview the active-duty, but I did hang out with them, and it was fascinating.
Separate from that, I interviewed and hung out with quite a few veterans of the Vietnam war and the “War on Terror,” plus used documentary footage, memoirs, social media, and a lot of primary sources including some from the military itself, like official training policies. I learned to take some of those with a grain of salt, like their prohibitions on verbal abuse, which I talk about in the book. The ethnographic descriptions of basic training and also combat language are pieced together from all of these, starting with the most experience-near material. And I spent a good amount of time with the veteran writers’ groups and poets and artists I discuss in the last third of the book.
Norma Mendoza-Denton: When I think of how to teach this book, of course I would teach it under bureaucracy and the state, war studies, conflict studies. But also, I would like to see it paired with studies of language socialization, including Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps’ famous book. Because you can really see the transmission of particular modes of being through the “verbal laceration,” as you call it, that’s inflicted on recruits by drill instructors. You say it’s expected to be reproduced by soldiers onto the targets of their actions.
Janet McIntosh: Exactly. There’s this broad, unconscious analogy, I believe, that the drill instructor is to the recruit as the future Marine is to the enemy—it doesn’t apply perfectly, but there are ways I really think it does. Also, there are conscious rationalizations for why Marine Corps boot camp can be so harsh and weird, sometimes morally topsy-turvy; a lot of drill instructors will say it instills “toughness” and “discipline” and “obeying orders without hesitation.” But they don’t even, I think, fully understand how brilliantly they’ve managed to follow the kind of rite of passage structures that Van Gennep and Victor Turner described so many years ago.
Recruits are ground down by drill instructors’ harsh language, like their sonic blasts of yelling, and feminizing insults, and weird unwinnable head games—we know being ground down is part of what Turner identified as a common starting point of a liminal phase. But also I believe the content of some of this harsh stuff starts to actively build them back up into their new role. In other words, the harshness and weirdness themselves look pedagogically important to me. Like, the sonic patriarchy of yelling and the insults are tools for a recruit in turn to dominate and dehumanize others when they are in the theater of war. And sometimes, the insane yelling a few drill instructors do where they start to sound “like a dead man” because their vocal cords are blown out and they’re still yelling through pain—it’s like an enactment of putting your body on the line for the state, which is exactly what combat infantry will need to do when it comes to the crunch. The head games drill instructors play to mess with recruits in the barracks are like a microcosmic lesson about the inverted moral universe Marines may find themselves in when they’re in combat. And so on.
Norma: Yeah, that’s just incredible. Now, you and I talked a tiny bit outside of this context about some former military members who are now in Congress, especially Tammy Duckworth, who started dropping F-bombs in news interviews and chalked that up to her military training. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Janet McIntosh: I remember that she dropped an F-bomb, and she gave herself an out by saying, “Sorry, I’m using my Army language.” I mean, profanity is overdetermined in military contexts. It seems to be more tightly connected to the limbic system, and to strong emotions that can go along with the extremes of combat or high stakes situations. It indexes masculinity in the US, maybe especially working-class masculinity—and when you’re in the military, indexing masculinity is not just for guys. The very sound of profanity in the English language is often one syllable, ending with a plosive consonant – it sounds impactful, like violence. It’s also transgressive and norm busting, like kinetic violence. Semantically, a lot of it refers to bodily rupture; things coming into and going out of the body, which also mirrors kinetic violence. So it’s overdetermined in being connected to the emotions, connected to military masculinity, even connected iconically in its form and its norm-busting qualities and its semantic references to things like penetration. No wonder it’s considered military. On that note, I was reading Pete Hegseth’s 2024 book recently, The War on Warriors-
Norma Mendoza-Denton: You’re just a glutton for punishment here.
Janet McIntosh: Ha ha. And I was looking at his acknowledgments section. Hegseth makes this move that is actually diagnostic of a major semiotic and linguistic trend that I discuss in the book. He has one sentence that very piously says something like, “I’d like to thank my Lord God and Jesus Christ my Savior for all the blessings,” and so forth. And then in the next sentence he says something like: “And please forgive all the profanity in this book. You can take the man out of the Army, but you can’t take the Army out of the man.” Even in those few lines you can see a dualism of registers or repertoires. On the one hand, you have this official, proper language—Hegseth’s is overtly religious, or it can sound very polite, from the “sirs” and “ma’ams,” or very bureaucratic with all the acronyms and euphemisms. So there’s that restrained, bloodless type of language in the military, which is drastically contradicted by its underbelly, this transgressive, raw, profane, feral verbal repertoire. It points to the duality of the military “supercitizen,” as Catherine Lutz calls them, especially combat infantry, which on the one hand takes on the lofty status that can come with military service, and on the other, sometimes out of sight of the public, engages in all these illiberal transgressions of conventional morals – which is a path you probably have to go down if you might be taking lives for a living.
Norma Mendoza-Denton: You have taken us through this narrative, where you get the young recruit. They go to Paris Island, or wherever, and they get hardened. Then they get deployed, where they might kill all these people. When they come back, they begin to reflect on all the things that happened. And in the case of your respondents, they might even wind up in a support group where they start to deconstruct some of that edifice of militarism that has in some senses taken over their consciousness.
Janet McIntosh: Yes, in my last chapters I talk about connecting with disenchanted veterans and their language. Some of them went on to become poets, sometimes doing a lot of metalinguistic poetry work to demilitarize themselves and speak back to what war did to them and others. Some engage in the practice of making their uniforms into paper, which is a semiotically incredible thing. They do it in an inverse rite-of-passage where they cut up the social skin that was meant to de-individuate and depersonalize them, and then they reconstruct it into this blank canvas, on which they can begin to reflect and express their personal sensitivities. It’s actually a genius concept that veterans themselves invented, and it opens room for both self-work and a lot of political expression.
Norma Mendoza-Denton: But what happens to the people who don’t deconstruct that training? Because not everybody comes back and is able to transcend all of the symbolic and physical violence that was done to them by this incredible system of dehumanization.
Janet McIntosh: You are right, countless veterans don’t have the luxury of encountering those groups, or they’re just not inclined to. From what I can glean there are really a lot of different paths. Some people are really good at compartmentalizing, so for them the language and headspace of combat successfully kept certain things at bay for them, and they’re very high functioning. A few veterans have a kind of anger or military nostalgia they may channel elsewhere, like into militias. (By the way, military folks are not disproportionately radical, but militias are disproportionately stocked by military veterans.) And then some people have trauma and moral injury that starts to leak out, sometimes a very slow leak that might not be felt until two decades after combat, for example, by which time some people are just devastated by these traces in their psyche and soul. The question of how to help is an open one; biomedical approaches can only go so far. Some folks I worked with mostly felt like the best help would be to stop unnecessary wars before they even begin, because they are a tragedy not only for “the enemy” but also for members of one’s own military.
Norma Mendoza-Denton: Yeah. I have one other question that’s a little bit broader; it’s about your incredibly captivating term “semiotic callousing.” Part of the reason it’s so captivating is because it is so apparent to me, how that’s supposed to work. You get the sense that this is something that built up over time from verbal lacerations, just like a callous that protects your body from repeated injury, that also allows you to, I don’t know, walk on hot coals, right? And of course, it’s very intertextual with your other work on the right wing. So, I really, really like that term, and I can’t help but think about it in the current political landscape. I wanted to ask you about semiotic callousing as not just the military strategy, but a wider political strategy.
Janet McIntosh: I think it was very startling to a lot of liberals and progressives when Trump was first coming to power, how many insults he would rain down on his political adversaries, and then how many people seemed to take his cue and do the same. It was like some floodgates of verbal abuse opened. And now it feels like it’s happening again on steroids.
It seems like there are several motivations for this. Obviously, some of this is a twisted jouissance in having the power to parade your political enemies in the town square, a demented medieval politics. (No offense to the medieval folks.) And then, and some of it is using hyperbolic insults, calling adversaries “crooks,” to turn people irrationally against them.
But I do think that folks like Pete Hegseth would favor semiotic callousing facing both outward and inward. As in: we, America, will be stronger and more dominant and have better national security if we are extravagantly verbally vicious, and military folks definitely need to learn to do that and harden way up because the Biden era emasculated them. But also, all these so-called woke people on the left who have been so concerned about microaggressions and so forth are just wusses bringing the nation down. They need to be hardened up too, harden them up or get them out, and so we’re maybe doing them a little bit of a favor by training them to toughen up with some semiotic callousing in the form of verbal cruelty. I think that is part of the national dynamic right now. And it’s running rampant through the streets at the moment.
Norma Mendoza-Denton: Thank you so much. There’s so much to think about in your book. And I’m just going to wrap this up with one last curiosity for our listeners or readers, which is that you know you’ve written this incredible tome that is clearly the result of a ton of fieldwork. But inquiring minds want to know: what is your writing routine? How did you get this done?
Janet McIntosh: Writing with friends has actually proven to be one of my favorite and most effective ways of writing at this stage in my life. Now that my children are older, going on writing retreats with friends for several days at a time is just such a boon and a beautiful thing when it can happen. Or even if it’s just carving out like an afternoon and sitting in a cafe with a friend. I’m a herd animal. I like to be with another cow that has its head down and is munching on the same grass. It’s companionable, and it keeps me focused. I recommend this to all writers in academia who might be struggling in the kind of the solitude of writing in your own room. I would say that doing it in a connected way has been a remarkable thing. That, and deadlines; those are the only things that save me.
Howard Morphy: Rhetorics of Value is breathtaking in its scope and coverage but based on rich case studies; it can enter into academic discourse in substantive ways. I think you are opening up a topic that, as you say, is ‘essential but overlooked’. But I begin with some more personal questions.
How important are exhibitions to you? Have they always been something that engaged you? Do you enjoy exhibitions as a form of theatre? When did exhibition design first interest you? How important has your practice as a photographer been in attuning you critically to the value creation potential of exhibitions?
Cory Kratz: Thanks, Howard, it’s a pleasure to talk about exhibitions, design, museums, and anthropology with you. Let me take these questions together. Traces of childhood museum visits – souvenirs and blurry diorama photos taken at age nine – suggest they impressed me early on, though I don’t recall the visits themselves. I find many aspects of exhibitions engaging – their theatrical staging, varied narrative strands, case arrangements, and specific objects/images. Every exhibition combines those designed affordances differently, just as visitors bring varied interests and experience to exhibits.
I think my interest in exhibit design and communication heightened while curating my first exhibit, a photographic exhibition that opened at Nairobi National Museum and the focus of The Ones That Are Wanted. As it traveled across U.S. venues, it had distinct installations and presentations. But the interest may have developed in part from arranging photo displays and multi-screen slide presentations – as an undergraduate I showed a two-screen slide-audiowork in a traveling visual sociology exhibit. Thinking about image orderings, juxtapositions, and using black space to create pacing and impressions was an early foray into aesthetic/conceptual questions involved, value creation potentials, and visual analysis. However, my analyses of how Okiek in Kenya created affecting, efficacious initiation ceremonies through multimodal performance (for example, in Affecting Performance) was key to that heightening as I brought that communicative framework to exhibitions and other display contexts.
Howard Morphy: Do you think that exhibitions might have begun to take too great a role in museums’ agenda, rather than, for example, collections access, or the magic provided by wandering through galleries stuffed full of things? Have museums as archival collections become too influenced by the ‘art museum turn’?
And within anthropology, there seems to me to have been a contradiction between the place that museums and their collections have been given in the critique of anthropology and the neglect of positive engagement with museums. The failure of anthropology more broadly not to use museums and collections means they have been more used in critical theory than in positive interventions.
Cory Kratz: Exhibitions are essential to museums’ public-facing role, a key visitor interface and platform for engagement. As you know from your own work, museums must strike a difficult balance when allocating resources and labor between collections, exhibition development, other research, and various community engagements. Museums juggle that balance differently, with shifts over time, but ideally those activities enhance and support one another. I note in Rhetorics of Value that the last forty years saw more pluralist, collaborative, community-focused approaches across these areas, moving towards what I’ve called the interrogative museum, and also mixing design elements to blur earlier genre distinctions among ethnographic, art, and history exhibitions.
Broad critiques sometimes essentialize museums and museum collections, treating them homogeneously and dismissing them as simple handmaids of empire. More nuanced work recognizes their great range — from community museums to immense national institutions – and their entangled histories – with some tightly involved with colonial enterprises, nationalist projects, and/or class formation in certain periods, with all the contradictions those hold, some taking explicitly critical stances, and all internally differentiated, changing over time, adapting to and helping shape larger social-political circumstances. Museums are complex, fascinating enterprises, both institutions and a kind of portable social technology that can “be made new, even as they carry and counter earlier histories” (p. 138). Museum anthropology and museum studies broadly include critical studies of their complicated histories, analyses of particular projects, community engagements, and ongoing and developing modes of restitution for problematic and unethical practices that shaped parts of their collections. I agree that anthropology broadly should better recognize that range of work and its possibilities, beyond simple critiques. Rhetorics of Value seeks to bring attention too to the central work of design in exhibition communication, which has oddly received little sustained critical attention.
Howard Morphy: The idea of contact zone emerged out of thinking of relationships between museums and source communities. Why have we failed to build more positively on the concept and build it centrally into our practice? I feel that repatriation and decolonisation have been easy for theorists and allowed governments to evade the issues, without providing the resources that cross-cultural engagement and discourse require. Does the work that you have been engaged with in Africa show positive ways forward?
Cory Kratz: The notion of contact zone is often attributed to Mary Louise Pratt’s 1992 work Imperial Eyes, which Jim Clifford developed for museums, but the concept spread widely. Pratt herself borrowed it from work on creole languages, which drew attention to interactions, relationships, and new cultural forms created in contexts of multicultural encounter. Boast’s critique (2011) underlined contact zone asymmetries, often defined by incommensurate values and conflicting ideas about the relationships they enable. The term contact zone suggests collaborative work, including and accommodating different epistemological and cultural stances. That takes time and raises questions about representation, reckoning with diverse goals, power asymmetries, and more. Aboriginal communities and museums in Australia, including your work with Yolngu, have often been in the forefront working through such questions. Serious work recently around restitution engagements related to African objects in museums, including human remains, seeks to jointly define relationships and obligations entailed by restitution’s particular contact zones. This includes the multilateral Benin Dialogue Group, Digital Benin, the Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices for US MuseumsHolding African Objects report (2025), and “time-consuming, emotional, often painful, enriching acts of restoration, and transitional justice“ (Rassool and Gibbon 2023:1). As you note, this all requires long-term work, relationship building, and reorienting resources for support.
Howard Morphy: Something that struck me is that exhibitions have the illusion of belonging to a set that might include articles, monographs, films, lectures. But museum exhibitions on the whole don’t have authors and today, as you note, the process might include ‘curatorial teams; community members; topic specialists; education staff; internal designers, writers, and fabricators; outside design firms and fabricators; and others.’ I think there is a major role for University Museums to change the agenda, with smaller, more targeted exhibitions that are incorporated within the curricula. How do you see the role of authorship in the future of exhibitions?
Cory Kratz: I think exhibitions have always been collaborative creative endeavors to some extent, though the array of people involved hasn’t always been visible and more specialists and stakeholders might be included now. Some exhibitions now display credits, more like a film, recognizing that collaborative process. Curator is an important role, but not the same as author (though curators sometimes draft exhibition texts). The question of exhibit authors, though, is wrapped up with the voice(s) and perspective(s) exhibits present. The time is past when most exhibits had an institutional voice of god narrator textually. Some do still proffer an anonymous authoritative voice, but that is one among many options. Some include signed labels, showing their mosaic of authorship and voice. Visitors are also now attentive to the perspective(s) and voice(s) exhibits include. I think it’s important to show perspectives included, how exhibits are created, and exhibit the question to engage visitors. I agree that university museums can help expand and try out exhibition models while drawing in faculty and students to develop effective communicative and pedagogical approaches. I’ve just been at the 2025 ACIP Workshop “We Need New Names” on southern African university museums, addressing such questions. Skidmore’s Tang Teaching Museum works along the model you raise, with greater exhibition turnover and interdisciplinary, collaborative exhibits involving faculty and students – a way for all to learn about museums, exhibitions, and to develop informed critical thinking.
Howard Morphy: You preface the final two chapters of the book with the question as to ‘how exhibitition design and communication can be part of broader changes in values and societies.’ And one of your case studies provides an outstanding and positive analysis of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In terms of your theoretical project you demonstrate the rhetorical power of affective design. You show that while inevitably the material evidence of histories of slavery, racism, and exclusion on occasions is going to have a visceral impact on visitors, the overall design is a sensitive and non-ideological historicization of events. Nonetheless you acknowledge the polarisation of opinion surrounding it. Are you still optimistic about the ways in which museum exhibitions can influence the future direction of society?
Cory Kratz: My focus on exhibition design and communication helps explore that capacity of exhibitions, as visitors bring personal experience and knowledge to exhibition encounters within the context of other cultural institutions and popular culture trends. Affective work is part of that potential, with dramatic contours, compelling stories, exposition and argument all shaped through an exhibition’s multimodal design. The visceral impact NMAAHC’s History Galleries has for some visitors arises from the interplay of entwined histories, an interplay between cruelty, injustice, and oppression and the inspiring courage and persistence of the fight against them. NMAAHC presents those historical complexities masterfully. It has been overwhelmingly popular and well-attended – over ten million visitors in seven years (2016-2023). Yet political polarisation in the US also makes it a target, as with Trump’s recent Executive Order against the Smithsonian. But museum exhibitions retain their capacity to engage and move visitors and the thousands of museums in the US and elsewhere can help document these dark times, defend freedom and knowledge, and be part of the painful recovery needed. We don’t yet know whether there will be efforts to dismantle or alter NMAAHC’s exhibitions, but I’m glad my book helps document and analyze their original presentations, set in relation to exhibitions at the Legacy Museum and elsewhere. Rhetorics of Value can be a resource for teaching and learning about how exhibition design helps create and shape the power of exhibitions.
Howard Morphy: Thank you for your thoughtful answers to my questions. I’d like to conclude if I may by a brief personal reflection that as it turns out brings a number of things together. In opening the pages of Rhetorics of Value I came across its simple dedication: ‘For Ivan, always’, and memories came flooding back. I remember first meeting you in 1986 at the fourth international Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies. I was introduced to you by James Woodburn, fulsome in his praise of your research with the Okiek. A decade on, at a meeting of the AAA, you introduced me in turn to Ivan. Serendipitously, I had reviewed Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, which he edited with Steven Lavine, for Current Anthropology – favorably! I began my review “It is always a pleasure to read a book on a theme or series of themes that have come of age.” Your book brings to the fore a theme whose time has come.
Cory Kratz: I remember that meeting well! I came from Nairobi, where I was starting to write my dissertation and had done comparative work with James in Kenya and Tanzania. I hope you’re right about the time being ripe for greater attention to the power of exhibit design and the communicative work and visitor engagement it enables. Thank you for this great conversation, Howard.
Sherine Hamdy:Yasmin, I loved this book, and I want to start by saying how much I admire the amount of work and careful thought and writing that went into this. The topic is about televangelist-styled Islamic preachers’ use of satellite media in 21st century Egypt, when the state can no longer fully control or contain what its citizen-subjects have access to.
But it’s really about much more than that: you are basically describing a society with deep divisions about what it means to be a pious Muslim in the contemporary world, and what it means to be a civically engaged Egyptian at a time of revolution .
I’m so impressed with the breadth of ethnographic detail: You describe the behind-the-scenes aspects of producing the television shows and the political economy of religious satellite television throughout the Arab world.
Most impactfully, you were really able to capture the emotional power and sense of intimate connection that the preachers hold with their fans.
Yasmin Moll: Thanks Sherine for your close reading and engagement with my book! As a long time admirer of your own work on Islamic ethics in relation to bio-medicine in contemporary Egypt, I am delighted to be having this conversation with you.
Sherine Hamdy: So my first question: Who did you imagine was the audience for this book?
Yasmin Moll: The book is intended for several readerships. The most obvious are readers interested in contemporary Islam in relation to the 2011 Arab Spring. While there are many journalistic accounts and activist memoirs about these once-in-a-life-time popular uprisings, there is still a dearth of scholarly monographs based on first-hand ethnographic fieldwork.
More broadly, I hope the book will be read by anthropologists interested in religion and media as well as those in the still small field of the anthropology of revolutions. I bring these two foci into the same analytic frame. Hopefully this juxtaposition will be generative for conversations on mediation, theological ethics, and radical social transformation.
Ultimately, I deliberately aimed to write a book that will be attractive to readers – and instructors looking for texts accessible for undergraduates – interested in a deep and nuanced dive into the lived stakes of Muslims’ internal debates over what makes something Islamic, be that a television program or a revolution.
Sherine Hamdy: You get to the heart of a question that has for centuries riddled scholars of Islam – and Islamic theologians – but also people of faith more generally. And that is: Who can mediate the relationship between a believer and God? On what authority? And through what means?
Were these the questions that led you to this research? Or did the research lead you to these questions?
Yasmin Moll: I started thinking about Egypt’s New Preachers – specifically Amr Khaled – as an undergraduate writing an honors thesis back in 2003. More broadly, I was interested in Islamic televangelism, or styles of Islamic preaching (daʿwa) programs that resembled US Protestant television preaching in various ways.
Khaled was at the time just starting to garner Western scholarly and media attention. But within the Arab world, there was already a social narrative about these preachers and their satellite television programs as a nefarious neoliberal commodification of Islam. It was becoming the analytical commonsense that these preachers, despite being dubbed new, weren’t actually offering anything new at all, whether within the piety movement, within the media industry, or within Egypt’s socio-political imaginaries.
To write my undergraduate thesis, I watched dozens of episodes of popular Amr Khaled programs and analyzed lots of different newspaper articles about this emerging style of Islamic media. But then I became curious about the motivations of Islamic television producers themselves as well as how actual viewers made sense of these new preaching programs. While there was a lot of opining about the consequences of Islamic televisual media, no one was talking to and spending time with the people to whom this media mattered most: the preachers, their producers, and their viewers.
My interest in this question led me to NYU’s Anthropology department, one of the best places to train in media anthropology in the US. I ended up doing almost three years of fieldwork at the Cairo branch of Iqraa, the world’s first Islamic television channel and an important launching pad for Egypt’s New Preachers. From 2010 to 2013, I observed and participated in trainings, meetings, focus groups, brainstorming sessions, studio recordings, and on-location shoots. My fieldwork also included talking to dedicated viewers and spending time with them across different spaces, from cafes to Qur’anic recitation classes to malls. I hope the book exemplifies the power of ethnography to go beyond conventional – and ideologically convenient – narratives about new forms of Islamic media by centering the people involved in its theorization, production, evaluation, and circulation.
Sherine Hamdy: Wow, so this began as an undergraduate thesis! It is such a comprehensive work, so it makes sense that it was the culmination of many years of thought and care.
Were there times that you found yourself personally or politically rooting for your interlocutors and their vision of a New Egypt ?
Yasmin Moll: My positionality in the social world I was researching is complex. On the one hand, I am an insider: I am Egyptian, I am Muslim, and I am middle-class. I could have easily met many of the people that I worked with at the channel at a family gathering or birthday party. On the other hand, I was an outsider in many ways. Compared to people in Islamic television production, I am a religious novice: I don’t have verses of the Qur’an memorized beyond the few that I need to pray, for example. I am also more Westernized — I attended an American school in Cairo.
Interestingly, one producer told me that my outsiderness to the social world of Islamic television made me more representative of their target audience. New Preaching producers were very invested in connecting across the screen with ordinary Egyptians like me to chart a pious middle path for us between liberal laxity and Salafi rigidity.
Did I feel personally drawn to this particular path to piety? Sometimes. I mean, I was definitely not drawn to the Salafi path nor to Salafi political discourse after the fall of Mubarak! If I were ever forced to choose between having to watch New Preaching media or Salafi ones, I would choose the former.
But this isn’t an auto-ethnography. I try to keep my own beliefs and politics out of the book as much as possible. I am most interested in analyzing what the New Preachers and their followers find so wanting about Salafism, whether ritually, socially, ethically, or politically.
While some of their evaluations of Salafism seemed polemical or caricatured to me, I felt it was important to understand how these evaluations played out as they created their own alternative forms of Islamic media. My book asks what implications might these theological appraisals of internal Muslim difference have for our own scholarly theorizations of religious mediation and its relation to both the ethical and the political.
Sherine Hamdy: The other thing that struck me is how different the Islamic televangelists are from their Christian counterparts, despite their recurrent comparisons, and despite the Muslim ones modeling themselves off televangelist programs. Specifically, the political economic structure is very different. Whether in the US, Africa or Latin America, Christian evangelical preachers often solicit money directly from their viewers or congregations. But this is not the case with the Muslim preachers, who are on the whole from the middle and upper-middle classes, and in some cases it’s even a step down for them to become television preachers socioeconomically and professionally. Can you tell us more about this religious media economy and why it matters?
Yasmin Moll: Iqraa was founded in 1998 as the world’s first self-declared Islamic television channel by a Saudi media mogul and billionaire businessman. That fact alone provokes moral panic, whether by Egyptian intellectuals or regular folk, about how daʿwa has become commodified, become for dollars. The anxieties speak to deeply held notions of the religious and the economic as domains of incommensurable value. But to understand how, why, and with what effect my interlocutors embraced dollars – that is, capital – as crucial to revolutionizing Islamic media, we need to go beyond the familiar lament that the monetary corrupts the sacred, which prevails even in the academic literature.
Rather than treat, as most do, Iqraa and its New Preachers as simply reducible to neoliberalism, I approach Islamic television’s political economy as a terrain of struggle for both material resources and ethical efficacy. Chafing against state strictures, many media producers welcomed legalizing privately owned channels on satellite television in the 1990s,.
At the same time, my interlocutors were not indifferent to the perils that dollars potentially pose to daʿwa. As they saw it, the conventional political economy of Arab satellite television is troublingly centered on capital accumulation and profit maximization without concern for the divine accountability awaiting in the Hereafter. However, this required not the condemnation of capital but rather its judicious calibration. While daʿwa should definitely not be for dollars, dollars should be for daʿwa. In many ways the struggles to define the Islamic are inextricable from the struggle over capital’s calibration.
Far from being the disembodied arrangements of predetermined structural logics, media economies are constituted by individualswith different levels of institutional access and power-making choices and different ideas about how to make change. So in other words, taking seriously Islamic television producers’ ethical calibration of capital yields more insights into the actual structures of media political economies than merely tracing who is funding which channel and why. Again, this is where media ethnography really methodologically and theoretically shines!
Sherine Hamdy: This brings me to another point of comparison evident in your book between the wider terrains of struggle over and within Islamic television in Egypt and that of struggles over media in other authoritarian Muslim majority countries like Iran.
In her ethnography Iran Reframed, Narges Bajoghli argues that state-affiliated media-makers in Iran are trying to shore up the dwindling popularity of the 1979 revolution and the system of the Islamic Republic among the younger generation of Iranian citizens taken in by cosmopolitan global media and fed-up with government mismanagement and repressive policies.
Your work analyzes the ways in which Egypt’s New Preachers and their media producers are also trying to compete with the lure of mainstream entertainment by aspiring to dazzlement (ibhar) within Islamic media. You argue that this focus on changing the conventional aesthetics of Islamic media was theologically-grounded. But as you show many Egyptians across the ideological spectrum dismissed the New Preachers and their programs out of hand – as too secular, as too neoliberal, or as too Islamist. So really there is so much you had to argue against as you were writing this ethnography. What was that process like for you?
Yasmin Moll: Incredibly generative, actually, although of course also daunting!
There have been so many books written both about Islam in Egypt as well as the 2011 revolution by now.. Many of these books start from the premise that the most important fault-line in the country since the 1970s is the secular-religious one, with the state, intellectuals, artists, rights activists and so on all put in the former camp, and in the latter camp are grassroots Islamic preachers, Islamist politicians and lawyers, and ordinary Muslims attending mosque lessons or listening to cassette sermons and so on. After Tahrir Square and especially after the ouster in 2013 of the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammad Morsi from the presidency, the this is a secular versus religious struggle framework became even more central to analyzing Egyptian politics and society.
My book destabilizes this framing by focusing on how the internal divisions and power struggles of Egypt’s grassroots Islamic revival played out in relation to both Islamic media and revolutionary politics. My claim is that the on and off-screen contestations within Islamic television over the very forms of religious mediation are proxies for more fundamental disagreements about what makes a form of life Godly. The rivalry between New Preachers and Salafi preachers over the definition of the Islamic maps onto the most important theological faultline of Sunni Islam – that between Ashʿarism and Atharism. Far from being confined to musty medieval texts, the Ashʿari-Athari divide continues to preoccupy Muslims around the world as even a cursory Google search for onlineʿaqida [creedal] wars reveals.
I show how a methodological attunement to these internal, doctrinally-elaborated, fractures allows us to better understand the theological instabilities of what counts as secular versus religious. So a key intervention of the book in terms of the anthropology of Islam is that we need to stop worrying so much about how we should analytically make sense of the Islamic tradition’s internal diversity, or of secular-religious formations, and pay more careful attention to how our Muslim interlocutors themselves theologically evaluate this diversity and these formations. As I would find out, Islamic television preachers and their pious viewers spend much more time and effort debunking each other than they do secular liberal Egyptians.
Again, taking these differences seriously ethnographically offers new insight into the social life of theology as a terrain of critical contestation in which the boundaries of the secular and the religious are subject to doctrinal elaboration, adjudication and rebuttal, even while being continually affirmed as important to God and crucial for believers to maintain.
And as I hope the book convinces readers, an ethnographic emphasis on the widespread internal contestation over the substantive definition of piety also allows for a more nuanced understanding of what was at stake for many ordinary Egyptians in that incredibly challenging and tumultuous revolutionary period between 2011 and 2013.
Sherine Hamdy: It is so refreshing to see these Muslim revivalists discussing things that matter to them and their disagreements with each other being taken seriously on their own terms – not just as the foils for the assumptions of Western secular liberalism.
I was stunned when I read your book that the Tahrir Square protests that captured the world’s attention, years later, were in many ways the enactment of these preachers’ message to the youth, whose hopes and dreams are often thwarted in repressive, corrupt, authoritarian, and jobless circumstances. The Islamic preachers that you study captivated youthful viewers – partly by encouraging them to build society and do something impactful to overcome a pervasive sense of nihilism, precisely the kinds of sentiments that were voiced around the time of the 2011 uprisings.
When did you first realize that connection?
Yasmin Moll: My interlocutors always saw themselves as revolutionary – even before the 2011 uprising. Their marshalling of novel aesthetic strategies and performative modes within their television programs was aimed at revolutionizing what daʿwa sounds and looks like for a new generation of youthful participants within Egypt’s Islamic Revival. This reconfiguration of Islamic media was itself predicated on revolutionizing revivalist expectations of what Islamic piety substantively and interactionally entailed, especially in relation to religious difference, whether between Muslims or between Muslims and non-Muslims. Simply put, my interlocutors were dismayed that Salafi doctrines, norms, and practices had become virtually synonymous with the grassroots piety movement and they wanted to subvert that association from within. So this is the first sense of the revolution within that the book title references.
The second sense is how this revolution within Islamic media and Islamic piety connected to the 2011 revolution for “bread, freedom, and social justice,” as the famous protest chant went. The Tahrir Square protests broke out six months into my fieldwork. While I participated in this mobilization from the very beginning, and made a short film about it, for a while I kept two different notebooks: one about my ongoing research at Iqraa and the other about the revolution.
Looking back, I think I did so because I was trying to figure out if I was researching the revolution at a time of Islamic revivalism or researching Islamic revivalism at a time of revolution. The obvious answer is, of course, both!
My research became about what new understanding of the 2011 uprising becomes possible if we trace its unfolding through Islamic television production. It also became about how a focus on revolution casts a new light on the piety movement. I was able to reflect, from this new vantage point, on topics that have long interested researchers of religious revivalism, from ethics to ritual to the political writ large.
So to answer your question, I realized the connection between the new forms of Islamic media that I was already researching and the mass mobilizations that seemingly came out of nowhere when I started to understand why my interlocutors thought of their particular media practices in revolutionary terms. They had always insisted on a more capacious Islamic media – capacious aesthetically and substantively – connected to the emergent revolutionary vision of a New Egypt that fostered coexistence across various forms of difference. I was also able to follow how their television programs inspired off-screen initiatives connected to Tahrir’s ethic of social solidarity across various forms of inequality.
Nevertheless, for all their vocal support and active participation in the revolutionary timeline between 2011 and 2013, the New Preachers – and pious producers and viewers more broadly – are rarely counted among the revolutionaries.
Sherine Hamdy:Exactly – that’s why I was so surprised by the connection in reading your book!
Yasmin Moll: This omission needs to itself be analyzed: my interlocutors’ stances often mapped onto the same progressive definition of the revolutionaries. They were simultaneously opposed to both the remnants of the Mubarak regime and the electoral-oriented Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood. For many progressive activists, however, the invocation of Islamic idioms, and the moral authority that such idioms carry, is antithetical to the radical promise of Tahrir.
I hope my book convincingly shows how such a dismissal misses the revolutionary salience of Islamic television. I also want to show that many Egyptians connected to the “spirit of the Square” through the Islamic Revival, not against it.
CaMP Anthropology 