CaMP Anthropology

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691244471/making-a-mindful-nation

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 19^th 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.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/kill-talk-9780197808023

(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.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/rhetorics-of-value

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.

https://www.sup.org/books/revolution-within

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.