CaMP Anthropology

Lisa Mitchell on her book, Hailing the State

April 21st, 2025

https://www.dukeupress.edu/hailing-the-state

Ilana Gershon: Why did you decide to call your book, Hailing the State? What becomes available for analysis when you understand protest as amplifying “efforts to communicate with the state” (p. 202) instead of resisting the state?

Lisa Mitchell: The term “hailing” comes from Louis Althusser, who famously wrote about the process through which individuals are interpellated as subjects of ideological state apparatuses. In his discussion, only representatives of the state (he uses a policeman on the street as an example) are seen as agents of the act of “hailing” and, by extension, the act of surveillance. Those on the street are significant only as the objects of the hailing, as passive recipients of the actions carried out by representatives of the state. But what I’ve encountered over and over again in southern India—actually all over India—are people who desperately want to be recognized by the state, want to be interpellated as subjects of the state, but whose efforts to be recognized and interpellated are repeatedly ignored or refused. They are active agents of a wide range of practices of hailing as they engage in surveillance of the state, seek to hold elected officials to their campaign promises and to existing legal provisions, and struggle to amplify their voices and be recognized and heard by various representatives of the state. In this sense, “hailing” does not mean bowing down before someone or something, but rather refers to collective efforts to get the attention of and be heard by someone in a position of authority when earlier individual efforts to be heard have failed.

The book’s argument draws from the experiences of two particular groups in India who have resorted to collective action in public spaces to amplify their voices, demand more equitable enforcement of existing legal structures, and hold elected officials accountable to their campaign promises. The first are Dalits, or those historically regarded as “untouchable” by orthodox Hinduism, who have organized collectively to insist on the enforcement of existing laws in the wake of violent atrocities perpetuated against Dalits. Scholars of the history of Dalit politics like K. Satyanarayana and Parthasarathi Muthukkaruppan have documented the repeated failures of state officials to ensure the prosecutation of upper-caste groups who have carried out brutal mass killings of Dalits, including in the wake of massacres at Kilvenmani in Tamil Nadu in 1968, Belchi in Bihar in 1977, and Karamchedu and Tsunduru in Andhra Pradesh in 1985 and 1991. These scholars have argued that the failures to fairly implement existing legal provisions have mobilized Dalit political organization. The second major source of evidence in the book comes from the movement for the creation of India’s newest state of Telangana, established in 2014 after a long campaign that dramatically intensified from 2009. Notably, three different political parties were voted into office on the basis of their promises to create the new (much smaller) state, but in each case, elected officials reneged on their promise once in office, fueling increasingly widespread collective actions that sought to hold these parties accountable to their campaign promises.

The book argues that people resort to collective assemblies in public spaces when other methods of (individual) communicative action have failed. I’ve been struck by how almost all existing theoretical analyses of collective political assembly frame collective practices only as resistance to or rejections of the state’s sovereignty, or as efforts to overthrow the state—whether Judith Butler’s assertion that bodies massed in public are an attempt “to contest and negate the existing forms of political legitimacy,” (Butler 2011) Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2005 description of collective strategies to gain recognition and inclusion as “techniques of challenging the sovereignty” of those in power, or Dario Azzellini and Marina Sitrin’s 2014 claim that slogans like “they don’t represent us!” are “a general rejection of the logic of representation.” This isn’t the way that many of my interlocutors in southern India talk about the political practices that they engage in. Instead, they demand that elected officials act to carry out the law equitably and fulfill their campaign promises because they expect officials to represent the voters who elected them.

William Mazzarella has pointed out that collective forms of political assembly tend to be seen as belonging to an “earlier sepia-tinted version of industrial modernity.” Scholars usually regard collective actions as playing a role in transitions to democracy (or as an external force on democracy) rather than as playing an integral or ongoing role within democracy. Instead of approaching the practice of hailing as uni-directional, then, one of the goals of the book is to take a relational approach to the analysis of the state and its representatives. The book recognizes that it is not just state representatives who hail subjects of the state, but that those on the street also engage in practices of hailing (and surveiling) representatives of the state, and that this is an important part of how democracy works in between elections. Far from seeking to escape the state (as scholars such as James Scott and David Graeber have argued happens in other contexts), many of my interlocuters in southern India actively desire to be recognized by state represetantives and incorporated into networks that connect them with the state in enduring ways, whether via government employment, through access to formal legal protections or state welfare programs, or by means of the recognition granted by state issued ID cards or formal land ownership documents.

In illustrating these desires to be interpellated by and more directly connected to the state, I trace the longer genealogies of collective representational practices like sit-ins, hunger strikes, mass outdoor meetings, road and rail blockades, strikes, the encircling of elected officials, processions, political pilgrimages, and human chains that preceded electoral politics. To fully understand the meanings of electoral politics we need to understand the existing sets of representational practices into which elections were introduced and the ways that these sets of practices shaped elections and were in turn reconfigured by them. Not all collective actions are efforts to hail the state—majoritarian collective actions, for example, often see their primary audience as minority groups within which they hope to instill fear rather than state representatives by whom they wish to be recognized. However, collective actions that do seek to gain the attention of the state are not simply demands for exceptions to the law, as Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between political society and civil society might suggest, but rather are very often seeking fair and equal application of existing laws or the implementation of the campaign promises made by elected officials.

Ilana Gershon: You not only argue that certain protests occur only because all other avenues for redress have failed, but also that when faced with these forms of protest, government and corporate officials are learning new ways to respond. Could you talk a little bit about what you think anthropologists should attend to when encountering similar dialectics of strategies in their fieldwork?

Lisa Mitchell: I’m glad you’ve asked your question that way. Part of my goal in writing this book has been to encourage anthropologists to open up our analytic vision and attend not just to what’s fashionable—focusing on governmentality and its expansion, for example—but also to pay attention to the many ways that states refuse to recognize or interpellate those within its vision. This means paying attention not just to those who participate in collective actions but also to the audiences toward which they are addressing themselves and, even more importantly, to the actions of those in power. I’ve written about the long history of associations between anger or other strong emotions and marginalized groups and have advocated for the need to attend not just to the emotions of the marginalized but also to the emotions of those in positions of authority who often seek to represent themselves as rational actors uninfluenced by emotion and who use the strong emotions of others as excuses to not recognize their communicative acts. What does the policeman feel? The university hostel warden or Vice Chancellor? The District Collector? The school board president?

There’s a long history of efforts to silence, derail, discredit, or criminalize forms of collective assembly in India, particularly under British colonialism, but also since independence in 1947 using colonial-era sedition laws that have never been removed. I argue that it’s important to pay close attention to these mechanisms of silencing, discrediting, or selective criminalizing. Gayatri Spivak famously asked whether the subaltern can speak. In this book I explicitly trace the ways that authorities try to prevent the subaltern from being heard, pointing to the limits of our existing theories of deliberative democracy. Rather than arguing that civility and soft, polite speech are preconditions for democracy, I demonstrate through a wide range of historical and contemporary examples that civility—the ability to speak softly and be heard—is instead an effect of political recognition, which ensures that loud speech or collective action becomes unnecessary. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to speak softly and know that they will still be heard.

Ilana Gershon: How has the introduction of different media changed the ways in which protest happens in India?

Lisa Mitchell: There are clear historical shifts in the ways that collective assemblies have been organized in relationship to available media. One of the important contributions of Hailing the State is to approach road and rail networks not simply as forms of transportation but more importantly, as communicative networks—in effect, as forms of media. So the book pays close attention to the ways that enabling and blocking the movement and smooth flows of large numbers of people function as communicative mechanisms to telegraph political messages across great distances, whether via processions or long-distance pilgrimages to a seat of power, road and rail blockades, or ticketless rail travel to political rallies. There’s a reason that rail blockades in India most often target the express train to the nation’s capital in Delhi. The railways are centrally administered, so railway lines are targeted when groups want to send a message to the central government. Bus systems, on the other hand, are state controlled, so they tend to be targeted for state-level issues. And as I discuss in Chapter 7, members of historically marginalized groups whose voices have a long history of not being heard begin to see themselves as having “arrived” politically when the government adds extra carriages or trains to accommodate their ticketless travel to political events.

The expansion of televisual and social media forms have also had profound impacts on the nature and locations of collective forms of assembly. One of the biggest shifts in the south Indian city of Hyderabad—India’s fourth largest and fourth wealthiest city where I’ve done most of my research—has been the establishment in the 1990s of a designated space for collective assembly. In Hyderabad, this is known as Dharna Chowk or demonstration square, but other cities in India have established similar designated spaces, including Jantar Mantar in Delhi, Azad Maidan in Mumbai, and Freedom Park in Bangalore. When first proposed in the 1990s, activists were strongly opposed to the establishment of Dharna Chowk, as it was located a couple of kilometers away from the State Secretariat on a quiet street off the beaten track. Yet with time and with the recognition that television and newspaper outlets offered regular coverage of events held there, people began to embrace the location, so much so that efforts to move it to the outskirts of the city in 2016 were met with strong opposition and residents of other cities like Tirupati have begun to demand their own designated assembly locations.

Even with the advent of social media—which some predicted might lead to the death of collective assemblies in public spaces—it’s become obvious that the massing of bodies in public spaces have remained important as the substance of many social media posts. And because of these shifts in the role of media, we now see political parties—more than ever before—trying hard to get out in front of popular movements to claim leadership, even where they have not previously played a role. Examples from India include gender demonstrations like the women’s wall in Kerala and farmers’ movements, in which political parties have tried to capitalize on momentum generated by others.

Ilana Gershon: In the past, we both have been inspired by a German media theorist, Friedrich Kittler, and I was wondering if you see traces of Kittler’s inspiration in this book as well?

Lisa Mitchell: That is such an important reminder! Although I don’t actually cite Kittler in Hailing the State as I did in my first book on the making of the concept of the mother tongue, I’ve been profoundly influenced by his call to pay close attention to the channels and networks through which societies are able to select, store, and process relevant information or data. As you know, while Foucault focused on the production of discourses, Kittler took this further to focus on the channels through which discourses were able to move and be received. Shifts in technology have enabled new forms of local and long distance communication, but they have also brought about reconfigurations of what counts as presumed proper language versus merely noise. In addition to the ways that railways and roads came to be available as new networks for long-distance communicative action which I mentioned in response to your earlier question, another central focus of the book is on the factors that have determined whose voices are able to be heard in the public sphere.

In this regard, my thinking has been deeply influenced by a longstanding advocate for the creation of Telangana state, Kaloji Narayana Rao (1914-2002), who I interviewed in the 1990s and who I discuss in Chapter 3. I remember him narrating the history of the Spoken Telugu Movement of the early 20^th century, a movement that has otherwise been almost exclusively historized as a liberal effort to expand literacy in Telugu by making the written form of language more closely resemble spoken language. At the time of independence, Telugu was the second most widely spoken language in India. And yet, as Kaloji pointed out, advocates of this movement chose a very particular dialect of spoken Telugu drawn from dominant caste groups in the wealthiest districts of the coastal region of Telugu-speaking South India as the spoken language upon which to base the new written language.

Kaloji went on to call the Spoken Telugu Movement the biggest atrocity that has ever been inflicted upon other caste gropus and residents of other regions of Telugu-speaking south India. He illustrated his point by describing a Telugu-language children’s radio program that had run continuously for the previous forty years. Every week the program aired three to five times, during which the voices of twenty to thirty different children would be heard on the air in each episode. And yet, he challenged, despite the fact that at least two to three million children had participated in the radio program overall, the only children whose voices were ever heard were those from the dominant communities of the two coastal districts of the state where what came to be recognized as “standard Telugu” was spoken. The voices of all of the other Telugu-speaking children in the state were, quite literally, not able to be heard on the radio. In Kittler’s terms, their voices did not even constitute data and could therefore not be conveyed through the existing communicative channels. Kaloji’s story also points to the dramatic limits of the deliberative models of democracy that dominate political theory today.

Ilana Gershon: How has writing this book shaped the ways in which you understand contemporary protest these days, especially the pro-Palestinean protests that are sweeping campuses right now? [swept campuses last year?]

Lisa Mitchell: There are clear parallels with other movements both here in the United States and elsewhere in the world in which voices have not been able to be heard or acknowledged, either individually or collectively. The biggest takeaway is that it’s important not just to devote attention to these communicative actions, but also to the other end of the communicative chain—what the late anthropologist Richard Burghart has called “the conditions of listening,” or the larger structures of power that determine whose voices are able to be heard. In other words, we need to attend to whose words register as data, and to the structures and channels that enable and empower refusals to hear. This returns us also to the point I made earlier that the option to speak softly is not available to everyone. Too often scholars focus exclusively on moments of collective, even violent uprising, without attending to the much longer histories of efforts to communicate that have been ignored, silenced, or even criminalized.

Attention to longer temporal histories and to the genealogies of communicative channels and circulation are crucial. This means also following the money, tracing the ownership and control of media channels and outlets, tracking the legal frameworks that regulate (or don’t regulate) these channels, and attending to efforts to subvert and regulate these forms of control. There are two recent historical moments I would point to in the United States as crucial to the reorganization of the discursive networks that shape our current media environment. The first was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which had required licensed media broadcasters to devote airtime to the discussion of controversial matters of public interest and to give airtime to contrasting views on these matters. And the second was the 2010 Citizens United supreme court case which overturned existing (bipartisan) restrictions on the political spending of corporations and profitable organizations and newly empowered such entities to engage in unlimited (and untracked) campaign financing and the funding of political media. This has unleashed corporate and dark money and media influences in ways that that amplify the voices of the wealthiest and most powerful. You can draw a direct line from these decision to today, when we have the world’s wealthiest man—one who bought and now controls major media outlets like the social media platform formerly known Twitter—systematically dismantling regulatory systems and abolishing existing structures of political checks and balances. It’s precisely these regulatory systems and structures of political checks and balances that can help prevent marginalized voices from being drowned out, ignored, and silenced.
Xiaofang Yao on her book, Power, Affect and Identity in the Linguistic Landscape

April 14th, 2025

https://www.routledge.com/Power-Affect-and-Identity-in-the-Linguistic-Landscape-Chinese-Commun/Yao/p/book/9781032341064

Paul Gruba: Could you briefly define linguistic landscape and perhaps tell us what first motivated your interest in the area?

Xiaofang Yao: Linguistic landscapes refer to signs on the streets. What fascinates me about these signs is their diversity and creativity. I’d like to share an excerpt from my book that discusses my initial inspirations and motivations for this research:

“My interest in the linguistic landscape was sparked nine years ago when I first set foot in Melbourne, Australia, in 2015. Although it was not my first overseas experience, I became deeply fascinated by the multilingual and multicultural nature of this vibrant city. While I lived mostly in the City of Melbourne and enjoyed the diversity of cultures and languages, I constantly felt a sense of ‘foreignness’. This feeling of foreignness, however, was less about being the only Chinese person among local Australians and more about seeing Chinese-looking people and realizing that I could not simply identify with this Chinese group.

During my leisure trips to the Chinese suburb of Box Hill, I noticed a variety of languages on shopfronts, billboards, advertisements, and even dustbins, including but not limited to Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. More intriguingly, simplified Chinese characters often coexisted with traditional ones. I began to wonder if these Chinese languages I observed were used in the same way as in my everyday interactions, and if I shared beliefs, values, and social practices with these Chinese communities abroad.” (p. vi)

For me, the linguistic landscape is what inspired me to explore the hidden diversities under the umbrella term of Chinese.

Paul Gruba: Your book is titled Power, Affect, and Identity in the Linguistic Landscape. In the next series of questions, I would like to further explore the three central themes of your work. Let us start with power. You write that linguistic landscape studies ‘offer a unique lens to examine the relationship between language and power’ (p. 77). Again, could you define the term briefly, and then provide us with a local example of power in the linguistic landscape? You focus on tourism as an area to illustrate concepts, but more broadly, is power constantly at play across the linguistic landscape?

Xiaofang Yao: In the context of linguistic landscape studies, power refers to the regulatory force of language policy that governs what languages can appear in the public and in what order. In the absence of formal language policy, societal norms and expectations function as the regulatory force. The semiotics of power is thus a matter of visible presence in relative terms. This means languages put in prominent positions relative to other languages will be considered as the preferred code or more powerful in their political, sociocultural, or economic status.

In my study, I explored how the history of the Chinese community in Australia has been commodified as a packaged experience. This top-down decision was not met with resistance but rather with cooperation from the Chinese community. So instead of victimising the object of tourism commodification, I argue for the power of the Chinese community since they get to decide how the Chinese heritage is shared among residents, at least to a certain extent.

A local example of power in the linguistic landscape can be seen in the order of languages on warning signs found in public spaces here in Hong Kong. For example, Guinto (2019, p. 10) mentioned that Chinese, English, and Tagalog are used precisely in this order due to the power relations among them. The presence of Tagalog on an official sign challenges the norm of its usual absence in this city. Those of you who are familiar with this context would know very well that behind this evident language hierarchy is the bilingual language policy and the reality that domestic workers from Southeast Asia tend to gather in gardens and other communal spaces on weekends. The warning signs are intended to regulate hawking or littering, and the use of Tagalog targets at the Filipino minority, likely the domestic helpers. They assume that this section of the population might commit prohibited behaviours.

Paul Gruba: Affect is often a component of “emotionally charged political discourse.” (p. 51) You discuss this concept through the analyses of two Chinese restaurants in Australia. One is in a rural setting; the other is located in an urban space. Both restaurants are located in a Western country, Australia. Would you say that much of your analyses of affect can also be applied to restaurants here in Hong Kong? How might parts of your analysis differ, if at all?

Xiaofang Yao:I began Chapter 3 by examining how affect has been framed in current studies, and I found that a major theme is its circulation in political discourse. For example, in Chapter 3 (p. 51), I wrote that “hope and hate that are semiotically distributed and made visible by injurious signs in protests …” (Borba, 2019). These signs and other material objects, structure our space in ways that enact, stimulate, and regulate the emotions of participants. Lionel Wee (2016) terms this as ‘affective regimes’, highlighting the capability of material configurations to shape and govern affective responses.

In my study, I analysed the affective regimes in two Chinese restaurants in Australia. In the rural restaurant, I found that the affect of nostalgia (longing for the past or homeland) was made visible through a range of decorations, including its shopfront, interior (plastic flowers, paintings, cross-stitch), menu, and food. In the urban restaurant, Chinese semiotic artifacts (dragon, Sichuan opera, string instruments, panda) were infused with a flair of coolness as part of the pop culture genre, aiming to foster the affect of conviviality (amiable fusion of cultures). It’s interesting to note that in this context, an Australian Chinese restaurant serving mainly a local clientele can be very different from a ‘Chinese’ Chinese restaurant catering to more sophisticated tastes through regional cuisines.

As for applying my analyses to Hong Kong restaurants, I would say the concept of affective regimes can certainly be applied, as it directs us to the signs and materials that evoke desired affective responses. The foodscape in Hong Kong, from my limited observation, is quite complex. For example, Hong Kong-style restaurants are very different from expat restaurants. Nostalgia might be a common theme in these spaces, as seen in the neon signs and the types of food often found in cha chaan teng (local tea restaurants). Expat restaurants may similarly use national flags and national symbols to create a nostalgic ambiance. There are also elements in the city space that may be part of the nostalgic regime, such as Hong Kong movies, ‘Ding Ding’ trams, dense buildings, and flyovers.

As for conviviality, I discussed it in the context of cultural fusion in the Australian setting. However, this type of merging of cultures is quite mundane and normative in Hong Kong, given its colonial history. Therefore, analysing the visual semiotics for clues of conviviality in Hong Kong restaurants might be less revealing, as the blending of cultures is already deeply embedded in the city’s fabric, such as French toast (西多士).

Paul Gruba: Issues of identity are often intertwined through research in sociolinguistics. To illustrate it in your work, you explore the role of identity in online spaces. I was fascinated by your analysis of a WeChat Moment to illustrate a series of concepts. With the rise of AI, particularly as it assists with replies for example, how do you think personal identity will change? Do we each simply become variations of the output from a Large Language Model? Will the online Linguistic Landscape become more boring?

Xiaofang Yao: In my study, I explored the self-presentation of a group of new Chinese migrants in the online space, focusing on their negotiations of identity. This included roles such as being Chinese ambassadors in the face of discrimination and managing peer policing when misunderstandings about their identity arise. What I noticed was that their Chineseness was often neutralised unless conflicts emerged. They were less eager to associate with traditional Chinese culture or customs compared to descendants of Chinese miners, who had lost their linguistic heritage and clung to their cultural memory.

As for the potential changes in personal identity with AI-assisted replies, it’s helpful to consider the nature of the space we are discussing. In linguistic landscape studies, we distinguish between private, semi-private, and public spaces. It is true that online linguistic landscapes, particularly in social media spaces, are filled with generated content. However, when we look at semi-private spaces like WeChat Moments or Facebook Stories, and even private spaces like WhatsApp chats, we can still observe interactions that are more humanistic. Even with AI-assisted replies on publicly viewable platforms, the key issue is who is behind the AI and directing its use for specific branding purposes.

I’d also like to clarify the idea of online linguistic landscapes (OLL). While it might be intuitive to equate this with online digital space in general, my take on OLL has always focused on the online-offline interface. For instance, how do material objects in offline spaces become re-semiotised and recreated online, and thus adopting different meanings? How do online memes recirculate back to offline spaces and become concrete through various mediums and materials? These are the questions I’m keen to explore when studying OLL.

Paul Gruba: Finally, give us some idea of areas to explore the linguistic landscape further. What are some of your future projects in the area?

Xiaofang Yao: One area I’m keen to explore further is the temporal dimension of the linguistic landscape. My book primarily focused on the spatial dimension, examining different ethnic Chinese spaces. However, it would be fascinating to investigate how power, affect, and identity change from moment to moment. I’m particularly inspired by works like ‘Tempo of Space’ (Greg Niedt, 2020) and ‘Language Assemblages’ (Alastair Pennycook, 2024).

For example, the linguistic landscapes of community festive events are often ephemeral and transient. In such cases, the power, affect, and identity of Chinese communities may only be temporarily emphasised or accentuated through assemblages of people, rituals, and installations. On the other hand, there are more permanent and enduring linguistic landscapes, such as Chinese cemeteries in Victoria, which were erected to commemorate early Chinese migrants on the goldfields. Unlike cultural festivals, these cemeteries are not well maintained or regularly regenerated. I’m very interested in how a more diachronic approach could help reveal the contrast between temporary and permanent linguistic landscapes, as well as the sociocultural status and history of Chinese migrants in Australia.

Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. Click here to read online or download.
Erin Mellett takes the page 99 test

April 7th, 2025

Page 99 of my dissertation, “Language, Identity, and Belonging: An Ethnography of Deaf Immigrants in the Northeast United States,” falls towards the end of its first ethnographic chapter. It is in this chapter that I detail some of the story of Isabel, a deaf woman and mother of three who was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States as an adult. Through a position in the Deaf Services department of an independent living center in a northeastern city of the U.S., I worked with Isabel as she navigated the U.S. naturalization process. Page 99 comes after my description of the day when Isabel, following years of paperwork, scheduling setbacks, preparation, and studying, successfully passed the naturalization interview/test to become a U.S. citizen.

The chapter (and the dissertation as whole) are meant to emphasize a few things. First, the dense policies and procedures of the U.S. immigration/naturalization process are simply the newest in a longer legacy of policies that have excluded deaf and disabled people from the United States. Second, contrary to notions of deaf immigrants as linguistically impoverished, my interlocutors had varied and flexible semiotic repertoires and demonstrated an ability to navigate communicative encounters with an immense degree of proficiency. Third, and what the heart of Page 99 really entails, is that the social and interpersonal dimensions of communication are as significant, if not more so, than the linguistic dimensions. Working with emerging ASL-users, I found that the affordances of sign languages (such as their iconicity) enabled cross-linguistic communication in ways not possible through spoken language, but much more important to deaf immigrants’ capacity to navigate communicative encounters were collaborative language brokering practices and a moral orientation towards establishing understanding across and despite difference. Particularly in sites where the stakes for effective communication were high, like in encounters with the U.S. immigration regime, moments of language brokering or informal interpretation emerged as crucial enactments of a deaf solidarity and relationality that enabled my interlocutors to better navigate a system designed to exclude them.

I find myself feeling appreciative of the opportunity to revisit my dissertation in this current moment as I am reminded that practices of collaboration and intentional care work have been (and will continue to be) crucial in an age of increasing intolerance towards those whose bodies/minds have been deemed nonnormative.
Roxanne Varzi on her anthropological novel, Death in a Nutshell

March 31st, 2025

Sherine Hamdy: Roxanne, it was such a delight to read this book! I’m not sure what I was expecting – well, I’ll admit that I was expecting a more breezy murder mystery – but you did so much more! It was a real page-turner, I couldn’t put it down and was very intrigued and wanted to know what would happen next, but I definitely didn’t expect to encounter so much anthropological theory. And I don’t know how you did that without bogging down the pace!

I’d never seen Marx’s commodity fetishism explained so clearly – and I loved the discussion of Walter Benjamin’s misgivings about reproduced images, and all the interrelations between the camera and the gun. You tackle the history of visual anthropology and photography, the ethics of war photojournalism, paleontology, the use of dioramas – all the while keeping up the suspense – it was really so much fun for me.

So, I guess my first question is: who was your audience for this? Why so much anthropological theory? I mean, again, I loved it – but would non-anthropologists love it too? Who were you trying to reach? Aside from a good murder mystery, were you also thinking of it as a pedagogical tool?

Roxanne Varzi, with her student’s projects. Photograph by Luis Fonseca.

Roxanne Varzi: That’s a great question! My goals were to advocate for students with ADHD and dyslexia and teach some anthropology while breaking methodological boundaries in anthropology. I hope the book will serve as a good introduction to anthropology for undergraduates, will attract students to the major, even as early as senior year in high school, and help retain the students that come. I also wrote it for all those people who think anthropology is cool, but don’t know a lot about it and who happened to like a murder mystery. And I wrote it for people who like or need to learn through stories. I was appalled at the level of fake news and science denial, and everything that was going on politically during the pandemic and thought anthropology could be a great tool for everyone to use. Just this quarter my students said the most valuable thing they learned was how to read images.

I spent over a decade homeschooling a student with dyslexia who learns differently and I’ve learned so much about the importance of storytelling as a form of pedagogy and so I started experimenting. I really liked the idea of field notes as a way to bring in curriculum. I had already experimented with this in Last Scene Underground.

The murder mystery first came to me when the character of Pete appeared in my head on my way home from Bozeman. I literally wrote the idea down on a napkin with traces of peanuts during my flight back. And then we landed in California, and I didn’t have any time to write until the [pandemic] lockdown, which is when I wrote the majority of the book.

Sherine: Flight from Bozeman, Montana? Well, you anticipated my next question! Did you go to Bozeman to do the research for this book? Because it is all detailed so vividly as the setting of Alex’s graduate anthropological research and, well, someone else’s murder.

Roxanne: No, I didn’t. I was there on a family trip at winter break, and my son is huge into paleontology and so we spent a lot of time at the museum of the Rockies.

I also have a close family member who lives in Bozeman so we had a local guide who took us to all the cool hikes and places that I probably wouldn’t have gone to otherwise.

I’ve been out there twice – both in the snow and without the snow, so I’ve had an opportunity to experience Yellowstone in two seasons. I’m very saddened about the extensive firings of National Park staff which is going to put the parks at risk for all sorts of things – fire, vandalism, less support to keep them open for visitors. Our National Parks are one of the best things our country has to offer. They are an amazing system, and they are the perfect blend of research, entertainment, education, and nature and it’s horrible to purposely undermine their ability to keep with that mission.

We must have spent a lot of time in the Maiasaura exhibit because that was very vivid in my imagination when I started writing the book.

I did make up the commercial places in Bozeman based on places that I had been, but the Honey Hive came right out of my imagination, and all of the names of those places like the Feed Barn, I also made up.

Sherine: Wow, again that’s really impressive.

I had never heard of Frances Glessner Lee – who I learned, was the first female police captain in the U.S. and known as the mother of forensic science. Her Nutshell Murders is a blend of domestic dollhouse craft and forensic science and form the basis of detective training. They are an important anchor throughout the book. Was her work the initial spark for this book project? How did you come to learn of her and her nutshells?

Red Bedroom, by Frances Glessner Lee, the Smithsonian

Roxanne: I taught in the UCDC program [University of California’s program in Washington, D.C.] and I went to see her nutshells at the Renwick Gallery and I was absolutely mesmerized. I think I went back to the show a couple of times. I read up on her and just became completely fascinated.

I don’t know if it’s an anthropological thing or a writerly thing but I tend to squirrel away experiences and nuggets for later and that was a big one that I knew I wanted to do something with, but I wasn’t sure what.

I wrote my very first academic article for Public Culture back when I was a graduate student and it was about this little miniature world in Iran that was full of all of the iconic places to visit and I became very interested in theories of the gigantic and the miniature and was deep into reading Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press, 1992).

I think I’ve always been a little fascinated by dioramas; I had a dollhouse when I was younger, but I had it more out of architectural interest. I’m also very into theater so it served as a stage as well. And now I am using dioramas as pedagogical tools, but I didn’t come to that until after I wrote the murder mystery. So my protagonist in a way led me to using dioramas in the classroom. Just this week in a reaction paragraph a student said she felt like Alex as she explored ethnography through a diorama project in class.

Parsonage Parlor, by Frances Glessner Lee. Collection of the Harvard Medical School

Sherine: It sounds like you are a jeweler: you stow away all these gems, and wait to be inspired to put them all together into something really artful and beautiful.

Roxanne: I love that, thank you! Another big theme in the book is that what some people call learning disabilities like dyslexia and ADHD can be superpowers in other settings. The protagonist has dyslexia and ADHD, and while she struggles with some things related to her coursework and dissertation, in other areas her different ways of learning prove to be a really helpful way to look at the world (and solve mysterious murders!)

Sherine: Why was writing about dyslexia so important to you and this book?

Roxanne: My son was diagnosed with dyslexia when he was in kindergarten and it was very clear even back then that the public school system could not cater to students with dyslexia who are also gifted or what we call twice exceptional – kids who are gifted in some areas with learning disabilities in others. I believe that anyone with dyslexia or ADHD who has made it into college has been using all of their strength-based dyslexia skills to get there, and that they are most likely incredibly gifted, but it gets muted by the incredible struggles that come with dyslexia when it is not properly supported.

I initially wrote the book thinking about high school students and college students who struggle with dyslexia like my son but then after I was diagnosed, I understood my struggles keeping up with a lot of reading in graduate school. I especially had a hard time entering into works that were dry and that didn’t paint a picture – which is very necessary for dyslexic readers.

At the same time, I would say that the other side of the coin with the inability to engage in dry theoretical texts lent me an ability or a strength at making theory relevant and real because it’s the only way I can see it. I need to apply theory immediately to something out in the world in order to understand it, and as a result, I am a better translator of theory perhaps – going back to your first question about why there was so much anthropological theory in there.

Sherine: You then bring Frances Glessner Lee’s nutshells together with anthropology, when our protagonist Alex, who struggles with dyslexia, proposes a multimodal approach to ethnography: instead of text alone, she will complement her dissertation by building dioramas of her interlocutors’ life stories of migration into Bozeman, Montana. Is this an actual method in multi-modal anthropology that you saw somewhere? Or did you – and your protagonist Alex – just entirely invent a new genre for doing anthropology?

Roxanne: Alex and I may have invented a new genre! It’s funny to have written it fictionally before I ever tried it myself. And then the next thing I knew, I was suddenly teaching it in the classroom. This is where fiction can create new realities… Which, rabbit hole alert … is why I love teaching about Neorealism. More about that in the book!

The diorama is an amazing tool, because as we learned in the murder mystery, it’s a great way to interview people about their space and their lives and material culture tells us a lot about a person. For example, some of my students decided to do a catalog of found objects in their junk drawers, which led to asking them all sorts of questions about where they got things and why they had them and it ended up being very philosophical. It also shows the research in a way that is more accessible, which is what the museum is all about… so it can be both a research tool and an output medium.

Sherine: I love all the interdisciplinarity and multimodality that you bring together – it’s so funny to me when people get hung up on their specific disciplines and don’t want to cross-contaminate – as if knowledge is actually bounded by these arbitrarily-made disciplines! Your book is full of so much knowledge and different pathways or fields a person could pick up, depending on their proclivities and interests, which is so generous of you as a writer/scholar, and also so generative for the reader.

In your preface, you mention that Jack Horner is the only real person whose name you use. Well, I guess the only person who is still living. You also talk about Frances Lee Glasser, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Susan Sontag and others who were also real people!

Can you tell us a bit about how you came to know of Jack Horner and his work, and how he made it into these pages?

Jack Horner, Museum of the Rockies

Roxanne: I had started the book with Jack Horner as a character. Everyone else was in there as referents in discussions of academic theory, but he actually plays a role as one of the characters and he really belongs in the book, though I didn’t know why at the time.

I just thought of him as the paleontologist who discovered the Maiasaura at the center of the exhibit at the Museum of the Rockies. I didn’t really pay much attention to who he was beyond that. And then one day, my son came home from a mentoring program for dyslexia at Chapman University, and he was excitedly looking for his fossils to show the new faculty mentor who was a paleontologist.

And I sort of absently asked him who it was, and he said Jack Horner. I’m not kidding. I had no idea Jack has dyslexia. I had no idea that Steven Spielberg, who is also dyslexic, had made Jurassic Park based on Jack’s work and that Jack was the model for Dr. Grant, the paleontologist character in Jurassic Park.

And so of course I insisted on driving Rumi to Chapman the following week so I could talk to Jack and he was lovely. I told him he was a character in my murder mystery and he gave me his permission. Just last month, he was in the audience at a book talk I gave at Chapman, so it was really amazing to come full circle.

I wanted him to see what I had written about him before going to press and as Jack still doesn’t enjoy reading text, I met him at a cafe and read those parts of the book aloud to him, which was even more gratifying, because I got to see his reaction on the spot.

I really love reading out loud, although most people with dyslexia do not. Which is why I also really enjoyed narrating the audiobook myself.

Sherine: Is it true you’ve created a whole series? Can we expect a sequel soon?

Roxanne: Yes, there will be sequels! Book 2 takes place in Oslo, Norway, and focuses on the theories of sound and attention and will be coming out this year. Book 3 takes place in Joshua Tree [National Park, Southern California] and focuses on the anthropology of performance.

I had broadly conceived of doing a series with each book focusing on a different area of my own expertise: visual anthropology, sound, performance and so on. When you sign off serial rights anything can happen, especially if you’re not given full editorial control. For example I envisioned it as a National Parks murder mystery series, but then I ended up in Norway. I prefer to have the freedom not to define it before it’s finished!

Another reason to be the publisher is that I can change things in the moment. I think a book can change and transform in the same way that its author does in her lifetime. If I want to edit or change anything I can do that immediately and re-distribute.

You cannot do that once you’re bound to a publishing contract with a traditional press. But they, on the other hand, will have the right to change your words and language as they see fit in future editions and I’ve never liked the idea of giving away that kind of control.

Sherine: Congratulations on the start of a new series, Roxanne – the book is so smart and so much fun, and I hope it gets many, many readers and listeners!

If you want to read more about Roxanne Varzi’s publishing decisions, read here.
Editors of Freedom of Speech discuss their new volume

March 24th, 2025

Matei Candea, Taras Fedirko, Paolo Heywood, and Fiona Wright

https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487548841

We’re delighted to announce the publication of our new edited volume, Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power, which emerged from a five-year European Research Council project titled ‘Situating Free Speech: European Parrhesia in Comparative Perspective.’

This book arrives at a critical moment in public discourse. In recent years, freedom of speech has become the focus of extensive and embittered debates within the US and Europe. Critics fear the rise of a cancel culture and accuse proponents of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and no-platforming, thus challenging freedom of speech. Those critiqued, in turn, accuse their critics of invoking freedom of speech disingenuously to protect established interests.

Yet while free speech has long attracted extensive theoretical attention in legal studies, philosophy, and political science, our understanding of how people relate to free speech in their everyday lives – in concrete historical and geographic contexts – has remained paradoxically limited. Our project and this resulting volume address this gap by putting these Euro-American debates about freedom of speech into a broader and richer comparative frame.

Our ERC project, based at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, brought together ethnographic studies of how free speech is lived on the ground by activists, teachers, politicians, intellectuals, and artists in times of crisis and political transformation. Four key case studies formed the core of our research, each chosen to highlight intra-European differences between types of actors, political orientations, legal and institutional frameworks, and cultural and historical backgrounds.

In Paris, Matei Candea examined a court specializing in free speech law, where French republican principles are tested and debated daily through concrete cases (Candea 2019, 2021, 2024). In Italy, Paolo Heywood focussed on the small town in the heart of the Italian red belt where Mussolini was born and is buried – a place that remains haunted by the spectre of fascism and recently grappled with the prospect of hosting Italy’s first and only museum of fascism (see 2022; 2023; 2024). In the UK, Fiona Wright studied a pioneering psychotherapeutic practice known as ‘Open Dialogue,’ which brings together a patient’s social network in a single context and values each voice equally, raising questions about how free speech functions not only politically but as a channel for inner states and relationships (Wright 2022; Forthcoming). Finally, in Ukraine, Taras Fedirko investigated how journalists’ debates about freedom of speech played out broader conflicts about liberty of their labour from censorial control by oligarch media owners, and about Ukrainian nation’s political independence from imperialist domination in the context of the war in Donbas (Fedirko 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023; Dzenovska and Fedirko 2021).

This comparative approach informs our edited volume, which expands significantly beyond these initial case studies to examine freedom of speech through an even broader lens. Our contributors reveal the remarkable diversity in how different societies imagine and enact the relationship between speech, freedom, and constraint from Ireland to India, from Palestine to West Papua, and from contemporary Java to early twentieth-century Britain,.

The book challenges the common assumption that an unlimited aspiration to individual freedom of speech is a distinctive feature of modern Western liberalism. For some, this assumption makes freedom of speech an avatar of a cherished way of life perceived as being under threat. For others, it makes appeals to such freedom potentially suspect, insufficiently socially conscious, and culturally parochial. Our volume suggests that both perspectives miss the mark by oversimplifying a complex reality.

The book is organized around four key themes that emerged from our research:

First, we examine various traditions of free speech, exploring both the internal diversity of Western liberal thought and its complex historical interactions with other religious and secular visions. These range from ancient Greek parrhesia to Islamic notions of reasoned criticism, from early twentieth-century Vietnamese rethinking of Confucian language norms to Mormon truth-speaking in the contemporary American right. This section troubles the idea that concerns about free speech across the world are necessarily a derivative discourse of Euro-American political thought.

Second, we investigate how different societies negotiate the relationship between free speech and public life. Our contributors explore the diverse ways in which publics and counter-publics are constituted, challenged, and unmade in and around discussions of freedom of speech. We examine how people seek to render their speech effective in eliciting responses from economically powerful others, how social critique becomes incorporated into the very forces it seeks to challenge, and how states attempt to influence what can be said beyond their boundaries.

Third, we explore the intersection between freedom of speech and historical memory. Chapters in this section examine how different societies use free speech in remembering, witnessing, and working through difficult pasts. We trace how the historical and the personal, event and memory, the collective and the singular are interwoven through practices of speaking freely from South Korean islanders publishing eyewitness accounts of state violence to Syrian documentarists producing narratives of uprising and its aftermath.

Finally, we examine the unexpected connections between therapeutic practices and freedom of speech. Contributors here show how ideas about healing through speaking freely shape both individual and collective transformation, while also exploring the limits and paradoxes of such therapeutic imaginaries. This section ranges from American radio call-in shows to UK psychotherapy practices, from Cold War debates about behaviourism to contemporary Indian discussions of sexuality and gender.

Throughout, our contributors demonstrate that freedom of speech is never a simple matter of removing constraints on expression. Rather, it involves complex negotiations over what can be said, by whom, in what way, and to what effect. The volume argues for moving beyond simplistic debates about censorship versus freedom to examine the varied ways in which societies navigate these questions.

This book represents the culmination of years of research, discussion, and collaboration. During the project, we hosted numerous seminars and masterclasses addressing questions of freedom of speech with prominent anthropologists (including Dominic Boyer, Dace Dzenovska, James Faubion, Jessica Greenberg, Lotte Hoek, Cymene Howe, Douglas Holmes, Webb Keane, Toby Kelly, and Natalia Roudakova), legal scholars (John Bell, Meir Dan-Cohen, Davina Cooper, Ivan Hare, Jake Rowbottom, and Jim Weinstein), and classicists (Mary McCabe). These interdisciplinary conversations hugely enriched our understanding and shaped the comparative framework of the volume. They have also helped us identify three crucial interventions that this book makes in contemporary debates about freedom of speech.

First, through careful ethnographic attention to everyday practices, we show how the stark oppositions that often structure debates about free speech – between individual liberty and social constraint, between Western and non-Western values, between speech and silence – break down on the ground. When we examine how people actually navigate questions of speaking freely in their daily lives, we find nuanced negotiations rather than absolute positions, creative adaptations rather than rigid adherence to abstract principles.

Second, our comparative approach reveals how in different contexts we find sophisticated and often unexpected ways of thinking about and practising freedom of speech. From the complex interplay between speech and silence in Islamic theological debates to the ways in which therapeutic practices reimagine free speech as a tool for both personal and collective healing, our contributors document approaches to speaking freely that challenge and expand conventional Euro-American frameworks. This comparative work is not merely descriptive – it provides concrete examples of alternative ways of conceptualising and organising the relationship between speech, freedom, and constraint.

Third, by examining freedom of speech across such varied contexts, we shed new light on fundamental questions about the relationship between language, power, and human flourishing. Our contributors show how speaking freely (or being prevented from doing so) shapes not only political life but also personal relationships, historical memory, collective identity, and psychological well-being. This broader perspective helps us understand why debates about freedom of speech often become so heated – they touch on fundamental aspects of what it means to be human and to live in society.

These insights come at a crucial moment. Current debates about freedom of speech have become increasingly polarised, often seeming stuck in unproductive binaries between absolute freedom and necessary constraint, between individual rights and collective responsibilities. Much is at stake, politically, but rather than reiterate such arguments, we suggest that anthropological perspectives can help reframe them entirely. The varied cases in our volume demonstrate that there are many more ways of thinking about and practising freedom of speech than current debates typically acknowledge.

We envision this book not as the final word on freedom of speech but as the beginning of a new kind of conversation – one that brings together theoretical sophistication with ethnographic nuance, that places contemporary Euro-American debates in broader comparative perspective, and that remains attentive to both perennial concerns and the specific forms that shape how different people in different contexts imagine and enact the freedom to speak. This conversation has implications not only for scholarly discussions in anthropology, sociology, political science, and communication studies but also for how we think about and practise freedom of speech in our various contemporary contexts.

As new technologies reshape how we communicate, as political polarisation strains our ability to speak across difference, and as global crises demand new forms of collective dialogue and action, the questions our volume raises become ever more pressing. We hope that by documenting the many ways people have found to navigate these challenges, our book can contribute to more nuanced and productive discussions about what it means to speak freely in the contemporary world.

References

Candea, M. 2019. ‘The Duelling Ethic and the Spirit of Libel Law: Matters and Materials of Honour in France’, Law Text Culture, 23, p. 29.

——— 2021. ‘“When I see what democracy is…”: bleak liberalism in a French court’, Social Anthropology, 29(2), pp. 453–470. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13038.

——— 2024. ‘French Law, Danish Cartoons, and the Anthropology of Free Speech’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, pp. 1–28. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417524000252.

Dzenovska, Dace, and Taras Fedirko. 2021. ‘Embattled Futures on the Margins of the Liberal Empire’. Anthropology News Website, October 21, 2021. https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/embattled-futures-on-the-margins-of-the-liberal-empire/.

Fedirko, Taras. 2020. ‘Self-Censorships in Ukraine: Distinguishing between the Silences of Television Journalism’. European Journal of Communication 35 (1): 12–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323119897424.

———. 2021. ‘Liberalism in Fragments: Oligarchy and the Liberal Subject in Ukrainian News Journalism’. Social Anthropology 29 (2): 471–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13063.

———. 2022. ‘In the Shadow of Power: Ethics and Material Interest in Ukrainian Political Reporting’. L’Homme, no. 243–244, 61–94. https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.43812.

———. 2023. ‘Failure and Moral Distinction in a Ukrainian Marketplace of Ideas’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 29 (S1): 62–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13902.

Heywood, P. 2022. Ordinary Exemplars: Cultivating “the Everyday” in the Birthplace of Fascism. Comparative Studies in Society and History 64: 91-121.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000402

——— 2023. Out of the ordinary: everyday life and the “carnival of Mussolini”. American Anthropologist 125: 493-504.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000402

——— 2024. Burying Mussolini: Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Wright, F. 2022. Making Good of Crisis: Temporalities of Care in UK Mental Health Services. Medical Anthropology 41, Article 3

——— forthcoming. The pedagogy of (un)safe spaces and therapeutic speech: Containing the permeable subject in contemporary Britain. Current Anthropology.
James Meador takes the page 99 test

March 17th, 2025

My dissertation Making Chinese Orthodox explored the Chinese Orthodox Church as a site of interaction between Russian and Chinese states. Page 99 comes at the end of the first full chapter, which examined the entanglement of multilingualism and religious confession in the first contact between Russian and Qing Chinese empires (17th-18th centuries). After 1720, at the end of this opening era, Qing texts began to refer to Russian Orthodox priests as lamas, a term otherwise reserved for Tibetan or Mongolian Buddhist clerics. Prior to this, Orthodox Christianity was not distinguished from Catholicism. This change in nomenclature was never formally announced, but followed the conclusion of the Rites Controversy and its partial ban on Catholicism in Qing China. Russian Orthodox priests appear to have been quietly reclassified as lamas in order to exempt them from this ban. This special treatment emerged in the context of an emerging diplomatic system that provided for the regular rotation of Russians through Beijing. Page 99 elaborates what I argue is the reason for this shift:

a major motivation had to be the necessity of securing a renewable and controllable source of language contact to train interpreters and translators to work directly between Manchu and Russian. For the [1689 Treaty of] Nerchinsk generation, this work had been performed by native Russian speakers of the Russian Company.

The Russian Company in the Qing’s Eight Banners organization was introduced earlier in the chapter. Originally a group of Siberian Cossacks who left Russia to enter Qing service, they subsequently became low-ranking hereditary members of the Qing’s Manchu elite. The normalization of Russian-Qing relations after 1689 and the first attempt to create a territorial border meant that these kinds of transfers were no longer officially permitted by either side. The Russian Company members’ intermarriage with other Eight Banner families in Beijing led to rapid language shift. Within a generation, members of the Russian Company did not speak or read Russian, though they retained nominal adherence to Orthodox Christianity along their patriline (as was the custom for Manchu family religion). A handful of Orthodox priests were dispatched from Russia on 10 year tours of duties to provide pastoral care for these Russian Company families – primarily life cycle ritual and annual festivals like Pascha (Easter).

Much like their designation as lamas, this pastoral care was partly pretext. The driving motive appears to have been to engineer situations of language contact and socialization. Why was it necessary to work directly between Manchu and Russian? Why not communicate in Mongolian, for instance, which was spoken and written by subjects in both empires? Neither the Russian nor Qing elites trusted Mongols, who retained a great deal of autonomy in this period. Instead, agents of both states sought to rely on kinds of persons whose social reproduction and personal survival were both dependent upon the state. A key tool in this regard was neglect. The salaries given to the Russian visitors in Beijing were woefully insufficient, so over a decade of poverty, Russian priests often found themselves moonlighting as assistants to the Qing’s Russian translators, as the translators’ job required a competence in Russian they did not possess and had no means to acquire. Surprisingly, this system served for generations as the engine of linguistic expertise enabling high-level official communication between the Russian and Qing empires, a diplomatic system that preserved peace between the two empires for the better part of two centuries. The simultaneously ad-hoc and complexly institutionalized character of these practices offer a helpful illustration of the seemingly paradoxical nature of imperial rule—a mix of autocratic will, bureaucratic precedent, and spontaneous self-organization that could be both homogenizing and diversifying at the same time.
Shawn Bender on his book, Feeling Machines

March 10th, 2025

https://www.sup.org/books/anthropology/feeling-machines

Nick Seaver: Readers may have heard about care robots before, perhaps even within the context of the aging population of Japan, but your book takes a fairly unique approach to examining how care robots actually work in practice. What would you say is distinctive about the methods you use in this book, and what kinds of things did these methods orient you toward finding out?

Shawn Bender: I think you’re right to see a link between the aim of the research for the book and the methods that I used in order to carry it out. From early on, I was curious about how care robots were used in practice, particularly the care of the aged. This is not to say I had no interest in laboratory research. In fact, my first contacts in the field of care robotics were academics in Japan who were doing laboratory research on human–robot interaction. As fascinating as much of this work was, I wondered about how closely the use of robots in sites of care matched claims about the utility of these devices. What features would care workers see as vital? What would they minimize? What would leave them satisfied or dissatisfied? How would robots be treated once their novelty wore off and they came to be integrated into care routines? On the one hand, I thought that a view from the everyday might temper, or at least nuance, sometimes sensational claims I had read about the benefits of robotics for Japan’s aging society. On the other, I believed that this approach could add to work of other researchers who had introduced robots into care facilities through shorter-term field studies.

This interest in observing what happens on the ground with care robots would ultimately lead in three directions. First, it took me out of Japan once I learned that some of the earliest and most energetic adoptions of Japanese care robots were happening outside of Japan. For example, the furry seal robot called Paro, which was invented in Japan, was first integrated into dementia care in Denmark. And it was German doctors who first adopted the robotic exoskeleton HAL as a tool in the rehabilitation of walking disabilities. Following these two devices turned into fieldwork in both Denmark and Germany. The case of HAL in Germany would also lead me to expand the scope of my research to include the care of people with disabilities, in addition to older adults. Finally, and perhaps somewhat ironically given my initial pathway into the project, I realized over time that I could not so easily separate the integration of care robots in sites of care from the work of developing them technologically in the laboratory. Work with care robots in the field, I learned, was entangled with the technical refinement of robots in corporate laboratories. In sum, a project that I intended to complete in one site in one country in one year turned into a study that had me visiting multiple countries several times over a number of years.

Nick Seaver: The multisitedness and focus on actual users of these technologies certainly expands the frame and routes around some of the hype and hype-puncturing that captures much discourse on the subject. One common question that comes up in multisited projects is this: Are you studying one geographically distributed phenomenon or a collection of diverse, yet related phenomena? For instance, would you say that you encountered culturally distinct understandings of care robots in Denmark, Germany, and Japan? Or were differences more a matter of the particular institutional settings you found yourself in?

Shawn Bender: It’s certainly the case that including multiple countries in the research frame settles some questions and raises others. Commonly aired beliefs about the deep Japanese affection for robotics, for example, run into trouble when viewed against higher adoption rates elsewhere. Similarly, the idea that Japanese prefer robotic helpers over immigrant caregivers suggests that there is some inherent incompatibility between the two. Such a claim makes little sense in Denmark, for example, where immigrant caregivers work alongside Paro and other kinds of digital technologies. Clearly, other factors are at work. Restricting one’s view to one national-cultural frame can sometimes obscure rather than enlighten.

At the same time, it really wasn’t an interest in comparison per se that drove my fieldwork in these three countries. Instead, the primary impetus was a curiosity about how people were using Japanese care robots in practice. It turned out to be that caring with Japanese robots is geographically distributed in a way that I didn’t initially anticipate. The inclusion of three countries in my study was thus incidental to the process of learning about actual care practice. But, while it was never my primary aim to get, say, a Danish view on care robotics in comparison to a Japanese one, the approaches to care taken in my field sites were certainly shaped by a range of local social, political, and cultural understandings. There were also attitudes toward caring with robots that were shared across national sites—machines do not travel without a package of ideas accompanying them. Perhaps most surprising, and somewhat deflating as an anthropologist, I found that one of the most powerful influences on whether a technology was adopted here or there had nothing to do with cultural attitudes toward technologically assisted care. Instead, it was the presence or absence of an insurance system that supported the cost of caring with new technologies, robots or otherwise.

Nick Seaver: That’s a really interesting outcome: it seems to deprioritize some of the more culturally essentialist ways of thinking about technology (especially that overloaded Japan/robots nexus) in favor of an account that’s more focused on social structures, institutions, and the distribution of resources. Do you see this as significant for the anthropology of technology more broadly? Does it tell us something about how we, as anthropologists, might want to reorient toward our objects?

Shawn Bender: You’re right that I did have to push back against assumptions about those Japanese and their robots. Essentialism is one thing, but I would be hesitant to minimize the role of cultural understandings in shaping how technologies are designed, deployed, and given meaning in specific places. Part of this is my own bias. I’m most interested in studies of technology that strive for holism and that use fine-grained ethnographic accounts to show how material objects are embedded in social contexts. These is the kind of writing that anthropologists still do, even as we have absorbed the influence of science and technology studies and sociologists of technology—that is, fields that tend to emphasize the role of structure and institutions over norms, values, and beliefs.

I guess as someone who works primarily in Japan, my preference would be to expand what we might include as parts of the culture. Some parts of the world, like Japan, occupy a slot within anthropology in which cultural factors border on overdetermining. And it seems that there is general agreement as to what those cultural factors are (for example, emphasis on the group over the individual, or beliefs that machines have souls like humans). Other than analyses of, say, individualism or bounded personhood, there is far less of this for places in Europe or North America. Technologies from these parts of the world emerge basically culture-free. Take for example, the iPhone. There have been so many studies of smartphones and smartphone culture, but very few of them consider the iPhone itself as a product of American culture or as a distinctly American object. As a product of a unique Silicon Valley ecosystem, yes. But as a particularly American technology? I don’t think I can name one. This is not to suggest that such a study couldn’t be done. It is to say that this is not where most analysis begins or is even expected to begin. Yet, for studies of Japanese technology, culture is often the starting point (or endpoint).

At the root of this is an assumption that Japan is more isolated from global trends than other countries. In my work, however, I found that the cultural factors of most relevance were more global than national. These were connected to new norms and values regarding health and the ends of care. I’m referring to attitudes toward care that see health as more than the absence of disease and that view the goal of care as maximizing the quality of life lived, not just preserving or extending life itself. Standards of care for dementia have evolved to place greater emphasis on stress reduction, social integration, and psychological wellbeing. Interventions to manage symptoms of chronic disease and injury increasingly respond to a patient’s subjective experience of physical wellbeing. This culture shift has led to new ways of evaluating good and bad care, which in turn has led to public and private insurance schemes to support them. I think it’s hard to understand the appeal of care robots for many, but of course not all, welfare systems without understanding how this culture of health has become normalized worldwide.

Nick Seaver: For potential readers out there, I think the book does a great job of taking that holistic approach, while also following its objects transnationally. Looking forward from here: What are you working on now? Are you continuing along the lines started in this book?

Shawn Bender: Yes and no. I want to continue exploring the social effects of robotics and automation but in a different context than care. I’ve been struck by efforts over the past decade in Europe, the US, and Asia to automate more and more aspects of agricultural work. You may have heard that a number of large manufacturers have been pushing the development of fully autonomous, self-driving tractors. While the commercialization of fully autonomous tractors is unlikely to be happen, it is the case that most existing tractors already operate at least semi-autonomously. (For example, GPS guidance has been standard on most crop machines since the late 1990s.) The drive for complete autonomy in crop agriculture made me curious about existing applications of robotics, AI, data analytics, drones and crop surveillance, among other forms of automation in the agricultural sector.

I’m most interested in how increasing levels of digital automation are reshaping what it means to be a farmer. Right now, I’m staying close to home to examine how local dairy farmers who have adopted automatic milking systems think about their animals and their work, but I anticipate extending my project scope to include other forms of food production and to expand my field sites to include comparison cases abroad in Japan. Despite the drastically different sector of activity, I’ve been surprised so far at how similar concerns about an aging workforce are driving the push for automation in agriculture just as they have in the field of eldercare. This is not a project that I think I would have developed had I not done the research that went into Feeling Machines, and I look forward to applying the insights gained through that projectto this new area of study.
Robert Foster on his book, Uneven Connections

March 3rd, 2025

https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/pacific/uneven-connections

Ira Bashkow: Uneven Connections is a fascinating study of mobile phones in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Phones used to be expensive and scarce in PNG until the mobile network operator Digicel elbowed its way into the country with aggressive government relations and marketing strategies it had previously deployed in the Caribbean. Tell us about the Digicel playbook.

Robert Foster: Beginning in the 1990s, a wave of liberalization swept over the telecommunications sectors of countries across the Global South. Digicel rode this wave by challenging inefficient and under-resourced state-owned telcos unused to intense competition, making markets in places such as Haiti thought to be terminally unprofitable. When Digicel expanded to the Pacific Islands, it drew upon experience setting up network infrastructure in rugged terrain, building towers in remote areas of PNG underserved or ignored by the state telco Telikom. Rural villagers had little money to make calls, but their wage-earning relatives in town welcomed the chance to stay in touch. Digicel made this connection possible by subsidizing the cost of basic handsets and making airtime credit in small pay-as-you-go amounts readily available from an army of street vendors. Digicel’s marketing strategies in cities and towns recalled for me those of The Coca-Cola Company when it expanded in PNG during the 1990s—a combination of promotions, contests, give aways, sponsorships and ubiquitous advertising in the form of billboards and point of sale displays in signature red and white colors. The result was a remarkably quick uptick in mobile cellular subscriptions, from 2 per 100 inhabitants in 2007 to 26 per 100 in 2010. Digicel, at least in its first few years, was widely praised for giving Papua New Guineans access to telecommunications that the state had long failed to provide its citizens.

Ira Bashkow: One of the things I like about the book is its holistic approach to technology. It looks at everything from the international politics of undersea internet cable infrastructure to the informal economy that sprung up around selling mobile phone credit, repairs, and battery charging. What are the things that most surprised you in this project, and how did you innovate in your research techniques to capture such a wide view?

Robert Foster: Uneven Connections grew out of joint research with anthropologist and media studies scholar Heather Horst. We worked in Fiji, where Digicel also operates, as well as PNG. Our methods were guided by our conceptual framework of company/consumer/state relations, which was itself formulated out of my experience studying The Coca-Cola Company and Heather Horst’s pioneering ethnographic work on cell phones in Jamaica. We were of course interested in how people were using their mobile phones, but we also sought to understand the larger moral economy in which companies and state agents as well as users (consumers) all deal with their claims on each other. Many of these claims have to do with the cost and control of infrastructure, and I was surprised by how much I had to learn about the operation of solar-powered cell towers, the geopolitics of undersea cables, and the possibilities of satellite technologies. The research was right in line with the so-called infrastructural turn taken by the humanities and social sciences in the last two decades.

I was also surprised by the creativity of both companies and consumers in adapting to each other’s attempts to control access to the mobile phone network. Digicel, for example, introduced its Credit Me/Credit U service to get one user to pay for the airtime of another. Users, in turn, developed a code whereby free credit requests for a certain amount could communicate messages such as “love you” and “goodnight.” Learning the ins and outs of using mobile phones on a prepaid basis—what Jonathan Donner calls “the metered mindset”—was eye-opening to someone from the Global North accustomed to using mobile phones on a postpaid basis with little concern for when credits expire or when promotions for double credits were available.

Ira Bashkow: Digicel’s philanthropy arm gives out grants to build classrooms, but schools that succeed in gaining one are sometimes left disappointed at the end about how the company relates to them. Why is this?

Robert Foster: Your question highlights another aspect of the moral economy of mobile phones in PNG, namely, corporate social responsibility (CSR). The Digicel Foundation has done a lot of work that one usually associates with the modern state, such as providing schools and health centers. This charitable work is important, especially to rural communities. It was also important to Digicel, a private and foreign owned company, as a way of generating goodwill and embedding itself in the PNG landscape. (The Australian company Telstra purchased Digicel’s Pacific operations in 2022, continuing to operate under the Digicel brand name.)

As anthropologists know well, charity is not the same thing as gift giving. I relearned this lesson on visits to two different schools where Digicel Foundation classrooms had been built. The teachers were happy to have these facilities and proud of how they took looked after the buildings. But they were disappointed that the Digicel Foundation had not provided additional resources such as computers and books. For many Papua New Guineans, gifts engender and sustain ongoing, open-ended reciprocity. That is, the teachers regarded the classroom buildings as the first move in a long-term gift relationship in which assistance in erecting the buildings and care for maintaining them would elicit the acknowledgment of further gifts. From this perspective, the Digicel classrooms seemed more like a one-off act of charity than the beginning of a genuine gift relationship.

Ira Bashkow: Some PNG people had high hopes that mobile phones would shake up the economy and bring greater prosperity, but that didn’t happen. Instead, they are eroding trust and disrupting certain social relationships. Can you explain?

Robert Foster: In her previous work with anthropologist Danny Miller in Jamaica, my research partner Heather Horst found that mobile phones enabled low-income folks to cope better with poverty (for example, by communicating with relatives in a position to share resources). But the phones did not seem to promote greater entrepreneurship. There is some evidence in PNG that mobile phones improve the logistics of transport and, with the advent of smartphones, allow individuals to market goods online (for example, selling fresh fish on Facebook for delivery to city residents). This activity, however, hardly bears out claims for significant increases in GDP with every 10 per cent increase in mobile penetration. I would argue that one important economic impact of mobile phones has been the creation of formal jobs for company employees and third-party service providers, and the creation of an informal economy of airtime vendors and phone repair technicians—the latter a subject that our research documented in the short video Mobail Goroka.

On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the one-to-one communication that mobile phones afford has strained trust relations, especially marital relations. (Ethnographers of mobile phone users in other places, including Africa and India, have made similar findings.) Uneven Connections reviews anxieties about infidelity and clandestine relationships associated with mobile phones in PNG, including anxieties about “phone friends” who make initial contact through calls to random numbers. Some Papua New Guineans welcomed phone friendships as an exciting form of social intimacy, while others resented being called by “unknown numbers” and supported government plans for SIM card registration in the hope that it would curtail such harassment. SIM card registration, however, along with new cybercrime legislation that punished online defamation, led some Papua New Guineans to wonder if the government was suppressing the rights of citizens to criticize government officials and policies. In this sense, mobile phones disrupted not only interpersonal relationships, but also relationships between citizens and the state.

Ira Bashkow: A very interesting part of the book is about mobile money, which Digicel tried to promote. But phone-based banking and digital payments did not take off in PNG (as it did in Kenya, with its now-famous M-PESA). In PNG, only mobile phone credits themselves have become a new currency of gift relationships. Why, and what do you make of this?

Robert Foster: Heather Horst and I expected that we would be looking at the emergence of mobile money and accordingly selected Goroka, a hub for PNG’s coffee trade, as one of our two main field sites. That never happened for infrastructural reasons in addition to low digital literacy rates, including the difficulty of establishing a reliable network of rural agents for making cash withdrawals. Rural people require cash for purchases of betel nut, yams, tobacco and other marketplace goods.

Phone banking has gained traction in urban areas, reducing the need for in-person visits to bank branches with painfully long lines, and many urban residents use mobile phones to purchase vouchers for recharging their PNG Power electric meters. There is, morever, a regular exchange of phone credits among family and friends, an exchange that is both well suited to local conventions of kinship and gift giving and facilitated by Digicel’s free credit request service. Managing these exchanges–deciding when to grant credit requests and when to deny them–is an everyday feature of the moral economy of mobile phones in PNG.

Ira Bashkow: How does this project relate to or grow out of or bring together aspects from your prior work?

Robert Foster: Uneven Connections reprises a few themes of my prior work. For example, the book extends research on the anthropology of corporations begun with my study of the globalization of Coca-Cola. Because Digicel is a private company, I was unable to buy shares and attend annual general meetings, but Heather Horst and I were able to interview company officials in both PNG and Fiji. We were also able to consult with officials at government regulatory agencies, thereby gaining insight into tensions in the market that I had not been able to explore in my soft drink research.

Similarly, the book extends prior research on commodity consumption in PNG, especially the spread of relatively inexpensive fast moving consumer goods sold by large transnational firms such as Nestlé, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever. Digicel officials imagined the products of these firms—cans of soda, packets of instant noodles, and so forth—as the main competitors to their own product, namely, credits for Digicel airtime (voice calls and text messages) and data. I had previously considered how the consumption of such everyday products was bound up with the emergence of a national culture in my book Materializing the Nation. Digicel often publicized its efforts to build a “bigger, better network” as an exercise in uniting the nation, promising to offer the kind of infrastructural citizenship that the PNG state was unable to guarantee.

The larger project from which the book grew diverged from my previous work in two key methodological respects. First, the project was comparative. The telecommunications scene in Fiji is very unlike that of PNG: it was Digicel’s least successful Pacific market, mainly due to the dominance of government-supported Vodafone. Fiji, where about 55 per cent of the population is urban and well-connected to mobile networks, provided a useful lens through which to view PNG (and vice-versa!). Second, the project was collaborative. In PNG, Heather Horst and I worked with research assistants at the University of PNG and the University of Goroka, and we sponsored a BA Honours student, Wendy Bai Magea, whose research on the informal economy of mobile repair and credit sales was instrumental in producing the video Mobail Goroka. Our research assistants came from many different parts of PNG, which broadened our view of mobile phone use, and their diverse personal experiences using mobile phones shaped many of the questions and topics that the project addressed. Although I had earlier argued that more-than-one-person collaborative fieldwork was ideally suited to the multi-sited ethnography that tracking globalization required, I had never participated in such research. The experience was enlightening and affirming, and the results would have been far less rich otherwise.

The book Uneven Connections is available at bookstores or for free from the ANU Press. Click here to read online or download. (This is an appropriate title to read on a mobile device!)
Alex Pillen on her book, Endurance

February 24th, 2025

https://brill.com/display/title/70944?language=en

Interview by Janet McIntosh

Janet McIntosh: It’s really a remarkable book. I’ve never read anything quite like it. It’s incredibly original. It’s so thoughtful. It’s so subtle. It’s beautifully, sensitively written. You’re being so exquisitely careful as you write. And I was really struck, of course, by some of the through lines between your first book and this volume because in both cases, you’re looking at a population that has been traumatized, whether it’s by civil war in Sri Lanka or persecution, the threat of annihilation, human rights violations in the Middle East. And then looking at how people use language to navigate this delicate aftermath. They have been denied their identity, their homelands. They’ve been subject to real cruelty and in your words, political abjection. And then once they’re in London, you say, Kurdish speakers tell stories about their past incessantly. And you engage in such careful noticing of the patterns in Kurdish discourse to make this nuanced case that language offers them the right handle to take hold of a twisted reality. I have to say I love the way that you don’t claim to actually speak or have fluency in Kurdish, but you say you became attuned to it. And by the end of the book, the reader really understands what that means. I want to delve into some of the details so that people who read the interview can have a chance to engage with the details of some of the arguments in your chapters:

The Role of Precise, Detailed Narratives in Preserving a Lost Lifeworld

Janet McIntosh: You have a chapter about the way that Kurmanji accounts of the past offer a really precise simulation of reality, even a kind of anchor, and you liken that to a sort of cultural security. For instance, speakers will offer these high-resolution linguistic images and a great deal of direct reported speech, sometimes with direct quotes concatenated one after another to sweep the listener along. Can you tell us a little more about the relationship between this speech pattern and the loss of a former life world?

Alex Pillen: In terms of the simulation of a lost reality, people can create a template for time and to a certain extent, through narrative detail, almost create a slow-motion reality. It’s as if the story, retold decades later, is so detailed it seems to move slower than the events that are described. As a listener, you may get that impression. What is remarkable, and this has been documented for other languages too, is that two decades, three later people report a conversation that took place in a village, in the mountains, in the Kurdish regions through an almost word-for-word recollection. Of course, so much time has passed by, that it is not necessarily completely verbatim, but that’s the impression you are given as a listener. And because such stories are so detailed, it would be very hard to deny their reality. Precise, accurate, full of evidence and detail. If such stories would emerge from an everyday world, a peacetime situation, maybe this wouldn’t be so remarkable. But for Kurdish speakers, the reported interactions may have taken place in a village that was cleared, destroyed. In the 1990s, the Turkish army raided Kurdish villages, orchards were burned, wells poisoned, houses burned too. People were forced to move to cities in Turkey, and some moved to London. Many conversations that are now being quoted and re-quoted belong to a place that no longer exists, has been destroyed or is no longer accessible. That is why precision, accuracy and detailed references have renewed importance. It is as if some aspects of reality only exist within a linguistic domain. Not references displaced by the mere passage of time, but violently eliminated within a short period. In Kurmanji one can say ‘heyata gundi xelas e’, to refer to the annihilation of a life-world. Kurmanji narrative styles operate within this context.

The Significance of the Reflexive Pronoun ‘xwe’

Janet McIntosh: There is a rich, beautiful chapter about the reflexive pronoun xwe, which you very, very loosely translated as ‘one’s self’ or ‘one’s own’, but that doesn’t seem to do it justice at all. I’m wondering if you could explain to us what we can learn from its prevalence in Kurmanji discourse? How does it relate to social spheres larger than the level of the individual? It’s a little bit of a paradoxical term. On the one hand, it points right into the self and on the other hand, in some fascinating ways, it indexes something much bigger.

Alex Pillen: The way that the reflexive pronoun xwe connects to social sphere larger than the individual is interesting and is related to its history. The linguist Benveniste traced its history over millennia to a root in Proto-Indo-European (*swe). This is a word that stands for all subject positions, so it’s not just ‘myself’, but also ‘yourself, himself, herself, ourselves, themselves’. That is why I loosely translated it as ‘oneself’ because ‘oneself’ covers some of these possibilities. If we want to talk about a group you can use it as ‘ourselves’ or it can refer to a social sphere that includes everybody, in the sense of ‘all Kurds’. In many languages, including Kurdish, a multiplicity of subject positions can be expressed via a single reflexive pronoun, the xwe in Kurmanji. This pronoun is thriving today in London and is used to accentuate both singularity and a sense of belonging to varying social spheres. David Parkin’s work on language shadows allowed me to dedicate a chapter to this pronoun’s shadow. I consider chapters 5 and 6 dedicated to Kurmanji’s reflexive pronoun and its shadow the most important ones in the book. They can easily be read as a stand-alone text.

The Suppression of Intonation when Articulating Painful Experiences

Janet McIntosh: So the next question I have is about another linguistic dynamic. The way that painful injustice is articulated through a negation of intonation. You write that, quote, at moments of intense pain or the recollection of painful injustice, utterances are cited as accompaniments of a burning heart and are rendered through a suppression of intonation. You also suggest that this mode of speaking diffuses affective responsibility between the speaker and the listener. I was wondering if you can tell us more about this?

Alex Pillen: My question was why do Kurmanji speakers suppress intonation when articulating distress? When people reach highly affective sections of the narrative, they tend to speed up. The story becomes a rapid concatenation of detail, with reported speech clauses or verbs of action. Reported dialogue punctuates the discourse at high speed. There is an aesthetic of speaking fast. When you speak fast in any language there’s a suppression of intonation. This is not specific to Kurdish. But what is specific to Kurdish and has been discussed in the work of Cihan Ahmetbeyzade is that there is this sense of urgency to stories, but it’s almost a whisper. And because it’s almost a whisper, and because of the negation of intonation, you don’t necessarily have the sense that you’re being addressed. Ahmetbeyzade calls this ‘an invitation to listen’. There is a subtle difference between being an invitee or an addressee.

What goes hand in hand with this kind of articulation of painful distress is the relative absence of labels for emotions. Amongst first generation Kurds in London people did not use nouns such as ‘anger’, ‘outrage’ or ‘sadness’. Instead a sense of endurance was wrapped in subtle ethno-poetic forms of telling. Kurdish women tell detailed stories to family and friends and affect subsides in the interstices of that intonation pattern, that rhythm. Here I relied on the seminal work of Don Brenneis and Judith Irvine and used the concept of ‘situational affect’ to study Kurmanji narratives of painful injustice. The generic phrase I often heard ‘zehmet bû’ or ‘it was hard’ also foregrounds the situation that causes affect. As people tell detailed stories, they create speech events, situations that affect listeners. To a certain extent, this kind of retelling of dialogues, the retelling of the distressing events also is an external affect. A listener is invited to share and interpret such situational affect, and this requires a culture-specific kind of listening. The suppression of intonation can be compared with semantic ambiguity and I called this ‘acoustic indirection’. Affects are not articulated on the surface of speech through dramatic intonation. There is a space for a listener to be drawn into and to be invited into a complex affective sphere.

Uniqueness

Janet McIntosh: I have a question relating to a theme that you raised at the very beginning of your book and that comes up here and there in your chapters. Could you say more about your suggestion that Kurdish linguistic practices underscore their sense of uniqueness and aloneness, both in London and also it seems perhaps more broadly?

Alex Pillen: That sense of aloneness is something that has been picked up in the wider literature a long time ago. The expression that you hear most often is ‘The Kurds have no friends but the mountains’. Historically and politically this makes sense, first stuck between the Ottomans and Safavids, and now stateless. Culturally and linguistically too, whilst living in the vicinity of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic speakers – a sense of solitude and uniqueness does not seem surprising. There is more to it. A less obvious sense of aloneness and uniqueness dwells within the interstices of Kurdish cultural life. Being slightly apart from other kinds of people, a kind of uniqueness that is quotidian, small-scale and transcends ethnicity, nationality or the geopolitical. This lived uniqueness is what I tried to unearth in this book through an anthropology of language practice. This is about a sense of uniqueness that is not only about being Kurdish but about being unique within Kurdish society. This is something I picked up over and over again. I began to question how quotidian language plays a role in articulating such uniqueness. When narrators quote people, the exact words they used, the variant of Kurmanji in a particular village back home more than 3 decades ago, there’s something unique about that. There obviously was a linguistic dimension to that sense of the unique and that’s what I tried to grapple with in this book. Reported speech is one way in which people can accentuate whether it was this phrase or another one that was used. I also studied self-quotation, when people report on their own habitual and distinct ways of saying things. This can be translated as ‘I tend to say it like this’, not like the others, the masses. The Kurmanji reflexive pronoun xwe also stood out as a repository of uniqueness, to accentuate a sense of ‘myself-ourselves’. Taken together such linguistic practices underscore a uniqueness, singularity and aloneness that goes hand in hand with the Kurds’ political predicament.

The Anthropology of Language and the ‘Soul’ of Kurmanji

Janet McIntosh: Another issue you address many times in this book concerns the way that language varieties can create their own mood, atmosphere, ambience, ethos. These are all words that you use here and there. This seems to be one reason for the struggle to translate what you are noticing in Kurmanji into English – for English speaking readers. Can you tell us more about that challenge and how you try to manage it in this book? How can one try to avoid sort of flattening the aura of Kurmanji in a book like this?

Alex Pillen: Great question. Those words – mood, atmosphere, ambience, ethos – I would like to qualify each of them. The term mood in a linguistic sense comes from the work of William Empson. He is a British literary critic who wrote ‘the Structure of Complex Words’. He takes examples from the English language, and asks ‘what is the mood in this expression’? So that’s one way of defining this topic. We could call it the atmosphere, and ambience of a language, or what Michael Bakhtin called the feel or sense of a language. That feel or sense seems to be linked to the atmosphere of a language, sensing that atmosphere. And then I used the word ethos too the refer to the same set of aspects of the Kurmanji language. Ethos is akin to atmosphere as it can both surround and permeate an entity such as language. It reflects a set of values about how a language is supposed to feel. I was keen to use the word ethos for another reason too. On many occasions, I struggled with the translation from Kurmanji into English. This became one of the book’s tropes. The word ‘ethos’ takes up an exceptional place, at the interface of Kurdish and English. Its origin is assumed to be the Indo-European term for custom ‘swe-dhos’, a term with links to the ancient root *swe. This root reverberates into English via ‘ethos’. This is the same root *swe studied by Benveniste, in his oeuvre that plays a major role in my study of the reflexive pronoun xwe in Kurmanji. I thought why not use a term and a concept with links to the history of that Kurmanji pronoun?

There is a beauty to the ways in which each language has picked up that long historical thread, going back millennia. My use of the terms ethos is really about accentuating a mood and atmosphere in Kurmanji. How does it feel to speak that language with its specific values, the things that are important for its speakers? This is an important question for Kurdish because of its dire political and historical circumstances. This question leads to another one, what does it mean to lose that language? Or to fear being deprived of the Kurdish mother tongue? What does it mean to fear to lose that mood, to lose that atmosphere? This seems to be about more than what linguists say about a language, its vocabulary, grammar or discursive structure. Beyond the terms of debate within socio-linguistics and linguistic anthropology, and the study of language as social practice, its role in defining gender, status, ethnicity, class, or even just responsibility for what is being said. These are handy conceptual frameworks and tools for analysis, but what do they mean in terms of a Bakhtinian feel of a language that matters so much? This is what I am grappling with. The fear of a loss of language and its feel is culture-specific and this brings us back into the field of cultural anthropology. Perhaps this is a question not only about Kurdish spoken by millions, but the many small-scale societies that live with the fear of linguistic assimilation into a global order.

Janet McIntosh: You very pointedly make an ethical choice to make the Kurmanji language itself the protagonist of the book. Some of that seems to be because you don’t want to dig too deeply into the context of each story about trauma. You’re not trying to give us the backstory of each traumatic narrative. You focus on the language patterns. It almost feels like the language, the way the language is used is almost its own person in this book. It is its own soul. It’s carrying a soul, speaking its own sort of vast message for this population. Is it a stretch to say that you write about this language as if it’s a protagonist with its own soul?

Alex Pillen: That’s beautifully said. Thank you for that! The Kurmanji language is indeed the protagonist of the book. Very often the researcher, the anthropologist, is the protagonist of the story by saying ‘I went to the field’, ‘I got up in the morning’, ‘it was raining’, ‘I went to see so and so’. Apologies for the quite stark depiction. I didn’t want any of that in the book. Very often key ‘informants’ become the protagonists, their life stories determining the plot lines for cultural analysis. But what if the people you work with really don’t want to be written about, and hope the details of their social lives remain private, protected? Also, when your life is most miserable, you may not want to invite an ethnographer into your home, or only do so reluctantly. I chose to make the Kurdish language itself the protagonist of the book. There is a kind of cultural agency in language; a force and affordance of language available to Kurdish people living in London. Perhaps that is what you mean when you say Kurdish is carrying its soul, ‘is its own soul’. A language tree is rooted in multiple populations branching out through numerous historical periods. In the end this tree has some sort of force inherent in a language spoken today, something that cannot be observed in a material sense, something cultural that is more than the sum of observable speech events. I call it the ethos of Kurdish. I like the way you say it – ‘language as a protagonist with its own soul, speaking its own vast message for this population’.

Janet McIntosh: I thought I would end with that wonderful metaphor you use, which captures some of what I actually admire in your book. You write that, quote, the practice of linguistics could be compared to a dissection of the birds’ wings in a biology class. A sociolinguist analyzes its quotidian flight path and migration routes. By contrast, an anthropology of language is akin to admiring the bird as it flies. So now, I found myself admiring the flight of Kurmanji as it is flying in London, but also the flights of your own language as you so tenderly and carefully described it. It’s a wonderful book, Alex. I hope that it gets exactly the audience that you want for it and that it is appreciated for generations.

Alex Pillen: Thank you so much for your close reading of my book. Thank you for your generosity and this conversation.
Why are all the brown superheroes so… whiny?: A Doubled-Double-Consciousness

February 19th, 2025

Mike Mena, Brooklyn College

Why are all my favorite black and brown heroes so… insecure. They whine. They cry. They question every decision they make. They always ask for help. They never just shine on their own! Is there a good reason for this?

They aren’t like Batman, who always knows what’s best for Gotham. They aren’t like Daredevil, who knows what’s best for Hell’s Kitchen. They aren’t like Superman, who knows what’s best for humanity. The big-league superheroes understand things must be done on behalf of the greater good. And, for some reason, my favorite black and brown heroes don’t want to acknowledge the greater good is even a thing! Why don’t my superheroes get it? I mean, Batman makes universe-altering decisions on behalf of the greater good every 20 pages! So, again, that nagging question: why are my favorite black and brown superheroes always so insecure?

I know two characters that can help us answer this question, and they just so happen to be my two favorite racialized superheroes of ALL TIME. That would be the Afro-Latinx, Puerto Rican Spiderman (Miles Morales) and the Muslim, Pakistani American Ms. Marvel (Kamala Kahn)!

Quick Nerdy Review: Ms. Marvel can manipulate the energy inside her body’s cells, making her capable of shapeshifting and even shrinking or enlarging her own body mass to extreme sizes (from 40 millimeters short to 40 feet tall!). Mile’s Morales (the so-called “Black Spiderman”) has all the usual Spiderman powers, including wall climbing and web slinging and even some extra stuff too.

Admittedly, I gravitate toward comics that acknowledge the concept “race” and the experience of racism. Not all comics do this—sometimes the concept “race” doesn’t exist. In general, I would say the norm in mainstream comic books is to pretend race doesn’t matter—you know, kinda like in real American life.

But then I thought: if my favorite superheroes know they are racialized people even while embodying their superhero identity, then perhaps my favorite superheroes weren’t being “insecure.” What if they were just being really, really cautious? Specifically, maybe they were being cautious in ways a white-male billionaire like Batman would never need to consider.

I began to think that maybe my heroes are cautious because they are fully conscious that they live as racialized persons in an anti-Black, anti-Muslim, pro-white comic book universe—you know, kinda like in real American life. For example, Ms. Marvel immediately knows to hide her abilities lest the United States government mistake her for a potential “terrorist.” Or, Miles Morales—a black, masculine-presenting teenager—is often pictured questioning whether or not the NYPD could be trusted in various situations. Batman, on the other hand, is besties with Commissioner Gordon, head of Gotham police. Even Superman has been portrayed as a one-man international military force taking orders directly from the United States President. Asking official state institutions for assistance is always the last, LAST resort to a character like Ms. Marvel or Spiderman.

Being simultaneously inside and outside the bounds of legality and social acceptability is common for mainstream superheroes. I mean, all the hiding and secret identities are half the fun of comics—gotta make sure granny doesn’t find out! However, rarely do superheroes have to also deal with always being inside and outside of what it means to be an American, where one is always-already positioned as a potential terrorist or yet another black male “super-predator” (to quote Hilary Clinton speaking about black youth). So not only are my favorite racialized superheroes dealing with hiding their superhero identities from their parents and high school buddies. They are also struggling with becoming an acceptable kind of racialized person in a patriarchal, anti-black, anti-Muslim, pro-white comic book universe.

Here, I’d like to refer to what W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) has said about growing up under these kinds of conditions and the kind of racial hyper-consciousness it can produce—or, what he called a “double-consciousness.” To simplify, it’s the idea that if you are a racialized person, you will learn to always look over your shoulder for the pair of white eyes judging your every single move—that is, white society is always watching, always reminding you that you are first and foremost a racialized subject. Eventually, living under a racial microscope can have an effect on individuals: you might start behaving certain ways in front of certain people. Those behaviors might feel faked or inauthentic, almost as if developing a second-version of yourself—necessitating a feeling of twoness, a reality split by a racial color-line.

In other words, folks often feel the need to develop a version of their identity that is, at minimum, tolerable to a white supremacist society. (Racialized folks will know about that tiny voice always tellin’ you to act right, when often you know that just means that you’re supposed to act white—that is, behave as if you are in a never-ending job interview—a performative purgatory. It sucks.)

Back to our heroes: saying that Kamala Kahn and Miles Morales may have a Du Boisian “double-consciousness” isn’t a mind-blowing observation—after all, they are both from highly racialized, highly stigmatized groups. But, this would at least partially explain why they can appear “insecure” in comparison to other heroes. However, what I really started wondering is if their actual superhero identities were also conditioned by a racial double-consciousness—like, a doubled-double-consciousness, so to speak.

It made perfect sense to me. It’s no wonder, then, that my heroes never act with the bravado of Batman or Superman. PLUS, and the larger point here, it’s not that my superheroes can’t figure out what the greater good is, but as racialized heroes they reject the idea that a universal greater good exists. In that sense, my heroes are asking much deeper questions about what constitutes the knowledge to achieve social progress. (Also… it kinda appears that Batman never thinks further than the “greater good” concept you learn about in your standard, snooze-fest Philosophy 1001 undergraduate course. My heroes don’t have time for that white-boy, philosopher non-sense. We got work to do.)