CaMP Anthropology

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

Howard Morphy: Rhetorics of Value is breathtaking in its scope and coverage but based on rich case studies; it can enter into academic discourse in substantive ways. I think you are opening up a topic that, as you say, is ‘essential but overlooked’. But I begin with some more personal questions.

How important are exhibitions to you? Have they always been something that engaged you? Do you enjoy exhibitions as a form of theatre? When did exhibition design first interest you? How important has your practice as a photographer been in attuning you critically to the value creation potential of exhibitions?

Cory Kratz: Thanks, Howard, it’s a pleasure to talk about exhibitions, design, museums, and anthropology with you. Let me take these questions together. Traces of childhood museum visits – souvenirs and blurry diorama photos taken at age nine – suggest they impressed me early on, though I don’t recall the visits themselves. I find many aspects of exhibitions engaging – their theatrical staging, varied narrative strands, case arrangements, and specific objects/images. Every exhibition combines those designed affordances differently, just as visitors bring varied interests and experience to exhibits. 

I think my interest in exhibit design and communication heightened while curating my first exhibit, a photographic exhibition that opened at Nairobi National Museum and the focus of The Ones That Are Wanted. As it traveled across U.S. venues, it had distinct installations and presentations. But the interest may have developed in part from arranging photo displays and multi-screen slide presentations – as an undergraduate I showed a two-screen slide-audiowork in a traveling visual sociology exhibit. Thinking about image orderings, juxtapositions, and using black space to create pacing and impressions was an early foray into aesthetic/conceptual questions involved, value creation potentials, and visual analysis. However, my analyses of how Okiek in Kenya created affecting, efficacious initiation ceremonies through multimodal performance (for example, in Affecting Performance) was key to that heightening as I brought that communicative framework to exhibitions and other display contexts.

Howard Morphy: Do you think that exhibitions might have begun to take too great a role in museums’ agenda, rather than, for example, collections access, or the magic provided by wandering through galleries stuffed full of things? Have museums as archival collections become too influenced by the ‘art museum turn’?

And within anthropology, there seems to me to have been a contradiction between the place that museums and their collections have been given in the critique of anthropology and the neglect of positive engagement with museums. The failure of anthropology more broadly not to use museums and collections means they have been more used in critical theory than in positive interventions.

Cory Kratz: Exhibitions are essential to museums’ public-facing role, a key visitor interface and platform for engagement. As you know from your own work, museums must strike a difficult balance when allocating resources and labor between collections, exhibition development, other research, and various community engagements. Museums juggle that balance differently, with shifts over time, but ideally those activities enhance and support one another. I note in Rhetorics of Value that the last forty years saw more pluralist, collaborative, community-focused approaches across these areas, moving towards what I’ve called the interrogative museum, and also mixing design elements to blur earlier genre distinctions among ethnographic, art, and history exhibitions.

Broad critiques sometimes essentialize museums and museum collections, treating them homogeneously and dismissing them as simple handmaids of empire. More nuanced work recognizes their great range — from community museums to immense national institutions – and their entangled histories – with some tightly involved with colonial enterprises, nationalist projects, and/or class formation in certain periods, with all the contradictions those hold, some taking explicitly critical stances, and all internally differentiated, changing over time, adapting to and helping shape larger social-political circumstances. Museums are complex, fascinating enterprises, both institutions and a kind of portable social technology that can “be made new, even as they carry and counter earlier histories” (p. 138). Museum anthropology and museum studies broadly include critical studies of their complicated histories, analyses of particular projects, community engagements, and ongoing and developing modes of restitution for problematic and unethical practices that shaped parts of their collections. I agree that anthropology broadly should better recognize that range of work and its possibilities, beyond simple critiques. Rhetorics of Value seeks to bring attention too to the central work of design in exhibition communication, which has oddly received little sustained critical attention.

Howard Morphy: The idea of contact zone emerged out of thinking of relationships between museums and source communities. Why have we failed to build more positively on the concept and build it centrally into our practice? I feel that repatriation and decolonisation have been easy for theorists and allowed governments to evade the issues, without providing the resources that cross-cultural engagement and discourse require. Does the work that you have been engaged with in Africa show positive ways forward?

Cory Kratz: The notion of contact zone is often attributed to Mary Louise Pratt’s 1992 work Imperial Eyes, which Jim Clifford developed for museums, but the concept spread widely. Pratt herself borrowed it from work on creole languages, which drew attention to interactions, relationships, and new cultural forms created in contexts of multicultural encounter. Boast’s critique (2011) underlined contact zone asymmetries, often defined by incommensurate values and conflicting ideas about the relationships they enable. The term contact zone suggests collaborative work, including and accommodating different epistemological and cultural stances. That takes time and raises questions about representation, reckoning with diverse goals, power asymmetries, and more. Aboriginal communities and museums in Australia, including your work with Yolngu, have often been in the forefront working through such questions. Serious work recently around restitution engagements related to African objects in museums, including human remains, seeks to jointly define relationships and obligations entailed by restitution’s particular contact zones. This includes the multilateral Benin Dialogue Group, Digital Benin, the Collaboration, Collections, and Restitution Best Practices for US MuseumsHolding African Objects report (2025), and “time-consuming, emotional, often painful, enriching acts of restoration, and transitional justice“ (Rassool and Gibbon 2023:1). As you note, this all requires long-term work, relationship building, and reorienting resources for support.

Howard Morphy: Something that struck me is that exhibitions have the illusion of belonging to a set that might include articles, monographs, films, lectures. But museum exhibitions on the whole don’t have authors and today, as you note, the process might include ‘curatorial teams; community members; topic specialists; education staff; internal designers, writers, and fabricators; outside design firms and fabricators; and others.’ I think there is a major role for University Museums to change the agenda, with smaller, more targeted exhibitions that are incorporated within the curricula. How do you see the role of authorship in the future of exhibitions?

Cory Kratz: I think exhibitions have always been collaborative creative endeavors to some extent, though the array of people involved hasn’t always been visible and more specialists and stakeholders might be included now. Some exhibitions now display credits, more like a film, recognizing that collaborative process. Curator is an important role, but not the same as author (though curators sometimes draft exhibition texts). The question of exhibit authors, though, is wrapped up with the voice(s) and perspective(s) exhibits present. The time is past when most exhibits had an institutional voice of god narrator textually. Some do still proffer an anonymous authoritative voice, but that is one among many options. Some include signed labels, showing their mosaic of authorship and voice. Visitors are also now attentive to the perspective(s) and voice(s) exhibits include. I think it’s important to show perspectives included, how exhibits are created, and exhibit the question to engage visitors. I agree that university museums can help expand and try out exhibition models while drawing in faculty and students to develop effective communicative and pedagogical approaches. I’ve just been at the 2025 ACIP Workshop “We Need New Names” on southern African university museums, addressing such questions. Skidmore’s Tang Teaching Museum works along the model you raise, with greater exhibition turnover and interdisciplinary, collaborative exhibits involving faculty and students – a way for all to learn about museums, exhibitions, and to develop informed critical thinking.

Howard Morphy: You preface the final two chapters of the book with the question as to ‘how exhibitition design and communication can be part of broader changes in values and societies.’ And one of your case studies provides an outstanding and positive analysis of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In terms of your theoretical project you demonstrate the rhetorical power of affective design. You show that while inevitably the material evidence of histories of slavery, racism, and exclusion on occasions is going to have a visceral impact on visitors, the overall design is a sensitive and non-ideological historicization of events. Nonetheless you acknowledge the polarisation of opinion surrounding it. Are you still optimistic about the ways in which museum exhibitions can influence the future direction of society?

Cory Kratz: My focus on exhibition design and communication helps explore that capacity of exhibitions, as visitors bring personal experience and knowledge to exhibition encounters within the context of other cultural institutions and popular culture trends. Affective work is part of that potential, with dramatic contours, compelling stories, exposition and argument all shaped through an exhibition’s multimodal design. The visceral impact NMAAHC’s History Galleries has for some visitors arises from the interplay of entwined histories, an interplay between cruelty, injustice, and oppression and the inspiring courage and persistence of the fight against them. NMAAHC presents those historical complexities masterfully. It has been overwhelmingly popular and well-attended – over ten million visitors in seven years (2016-2023). Yet political polarisation in the US also makes it a target, as with Trump’s recent Executive Order against the Smithsonian. But museum exhibitions retain their capacity to engage and move visitors and the thousands of museums in the US and elsewhere can help document these dark times, defend freedom and knowledge, and be part of the painful recovery needed. We don’t yet know whether there will be efforts to dismantle or alter NMAAHC’s exhibitions, but I’m glad my book helps document and analyze their original presentations, set in relation to exhibitions at the Legacy Museum and elsewhere. Rhetorics of Value can be a resource for teaching and learning about how exhibition design helps create and shape the power of exhibitions.

Howard Morphy: Thank you for your thoughtful answers to my questions. I’d like to conclude if I may by a brief personal reflection that as it turns out brings a number of things together. In opening the pages of Rhetorics of Value I came across its simple dedication: ‘For Ivan, always’, and memories came flooding back. I remember first meeting you in 1986 at the fourth international Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies. I was introduced to you by James Woodburn, fulsome in his praise of your research with the Okiek. A decade on, at a meeting of the AAA, you introduced me in turn to Ivan. Serendipitously, I had reviewed Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, which he edited with Steven Lavine, for Current Anthropology – favorably! I began my review “It is always a pleasure to read a book on a theme or series of themes that have come of age.” Your book brings to the fore a theme whose time has come.

Cory Kratz: I remember that meeting well! I came from Nairobi, where I was starting to write my dissertation and had done comparative work with James in Kenya and Tanzania. I hope you’re right about the time being ripe for greater attention to the power of exhibit design and the communicative work and visitor engagement it enables. Thank you for this great conversation, Howard.

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

Sherine Hamdy: Yasmin, I loved this book, and I want to start by saying how much I admire the amount of work and careful thought and writing that went into this. The topic is about televangelist-styled Islamic preachers’ use of satellite media in 21st century Egypt, when the state can no longer fully control or contain what its citizen-subjects have access to. 

But it’s really about much more than that: you are basically describing a society with deep divisions about what it means to be a pious Muslim in the contemporary world, and what it means to be a civically engaged Egyptian at a time of revolution . 

I’m so impressed with the breadth of ethnographic detail: You describe the behind-the-scenes aspects of producing the television shows and the political economy of religious satellite television throughout the Arab world. 

Most impactfully, you were really able to capture the emotional power and sense of intimate connection that the preachers hold with their fans. 

Yasmin Moll: Thanks Sherine for your close reading and engagement with my book! As a long time admirer of your own work on Islamic ethics in relation to bio-medicine in contemporary Egypt, I am delighted to be having this conversation with you. 

Sherine Hamdy: So my first question: Who did you imagine was the audience for this book?

Yasmin Moll: The book is intended for several readerships. The most obvious are readers interested in contemporary Islam in relation to the 2011 Arab Spring. While there are  many journalistic accounts and activist memoirs about these once-in-a-life-time popular uprisings, there is still a dearth of scholarly monographs based on first-hand ethnographic fieldwork.

More broadly, I hope the book will be read by anthropologists interested in religion and media as well as those in the still small field of the anthropology of revolutions. I bring these two foci into the same analytic frame. Hopefully this juxtaposition will be generative for conversations on mediation, theological ethics, and radical social transformation. 

Ultimately, I deliberately aimed to write a book that will be attractive to readers – and instructors looking for texts accessible for undergraduates – interested in a deep and nuanced dive into the lived stakes of Muslims’ internal debates over what makes something Islamic, be that a television program or a revolution.  

Sherine Hamdy: You get to the heart of a question that has for centuries riddled scholars of Islam – and Islamic theologians – but also people of faith more generally. And that is: Who can mediate the relationship between a believer and God? On what authority? And through what means? 

Were these the questions that led you to this research? Or did the research lead you to these questions?

Yasmin Moll:  I started thinking about Egypt’s New Preachers – specifically Amr Khaled – as an undergraduate writing an honors thesis back in 2003. More broadly, I was interested in Islamic televangelism, or styles of Islamic preaching (daʿwa) programs that resembled US Protestant television preaching in various ways. 

Khaled was at the time just starting to garner Western scholarly and media attention. But within the Arab world, there was already a social narrative about these preachers and their satellite television programs as a nefarious neoliberal commodification of Islam. It was becoming the analytical commonsense that these preachers, despite being dubbed new, weren’t actually offering anything new at all, whether within the piety movement, within the media industry, or within Egypt’s socio-political imaginaries. 

To write my undergraduate thesis, I watched dozens of episodes of popular Amr Khaled programs and analyzed lots of different newspaper articles about this emerging style of Islamic media. But then I became curious about the motivations of Islamic television producers themselves as well as how actual viewers made sense of these new preaching programs.  While there was a lot of opining about the consequences of Islamic televisual media, no one was talking to and spending time with the people to whom this media mattered most: the preachers, their producers, and their viewers. 

My interest in this question led me to NYU’s Anthropology department, one of the best places to train in media anthropology in the US. I ended up doing almost three years of fieldwork at the Cairo branch of Iqraa, the world’s first Islamic television channel and an important launching pad for Egypt’s New Preachers. From 2010 to 2013, I observed and participated in trainings, meetings, focus groups, brainstorming sessions, studio recordings, and on-location shoots. My fieldwork also included talking to dedicated viewers and spending time with them across different spaces, from cafes to Qur’anic recitation classes to malls. I hope the book exemplifies the power of ethnography to go beyond conventional – and ideologically convenient – narratives about new forms of Islamic media by centering the people involved in its theorization, production, evaluation, and circulation. 

Sherine Hamdy: Wow, so this began as an undergraduate thesis! It is such a comprehensive work, so it makes sense that it was the culmination of many years of thought and care.

Were there times that you found yourself personally or politically rooting for your interlocutors and their vision of a New Egypt ?

Yasmin Moll: My positionality in the social world I was researching is complex. On the one hand, I am an insider: I am Egyptian, I am Muslim, and I am middle-class. I could have easily met many of the people that I worked with at the channel at a family gathering or birthday party. On the other hand, I was an outsider in many ways. Compared to people in Islamic television production, I am a religious novice: I don’t have verses of the Qur’an memorized beyond the few that I need to pray, for example. I am also more Westernized — I attended  an American school in Cairo. 

Interestingly, one producer told me that my outsiderness to the social world of Islamic television made me more representative of their target audience. New Preaching producers were very invested in connecting across the screen with ordinary Egyptians like me to chart a pious middle path for us between liberal laxity and Salafi rigidity.  

Did I feel personally drawn to this particular path to piety? Sometimes. I mean, I was definitely not drawn to the Salafi path nor to Salafi political discourse after the fall of Mubarak! If I were ever forced to choose between having to watch New Preaching media or Salafi ones, I would choose the former.  

 But this isn’t an auto-ethnography. I try to keep my own beliefs and politics out of the book as much as possible. I am most interested in analyzing what the New Preachers and their followers find so wanting about Salafism, whether ritually, socially, ethically, or politically. 

While some of their evaluations of Salafism seemed polemical or caricatured to me, I felt it was important to understand how these evaluations played out as they created their own alternative forms of Islamic media. My book asks what implications might these theological appraisals of internal Muslim difference have for our own scholarly theorizations of religious mediation and its relation to both the ethical and the political.

Sherine Hamdy: The other thing that struck me is how different the Islamic televangelists are from their Christian counterparts, despite their recurrent comparisons, and despite the Muslim ones modeling themselves off televangelist programs. Specifically, the political economic structure is very different. Whether in the US, Africa or Latin America, Christian evangelical preachers often solicit money directly from their viewers or congregations. But this is not the case with the Muslim preachers, who are on the whole from the middle and upper-middle classes, and in some cases it’s even a step down for them to become television preachers socioeconomically and professionally. Can you tell us more about this religious media economy and why it matters? 

Yasmin Moll: Iqraa was founded in 1998 as the world’s first self-declared Islamic television channel by a Saudi media mogul and billionaire businessman. That fact alone provokes moral panic, whether by Egyptian intellectuals or regular folk, about how daʿwa has become commodified,  become for dollars. The anxieties speak to deeply held notions of the religious and the economic as domains of incommensurable value. But to understand how, why, and with what effect my interlocutors embraced dollars – that is, capital –  as crucial to revolutionizing Islamic media, we need to go beyond the familiar lament that the monetary corrupts the sacred, which prevails even in the academic literature. 

Rather than treat, as most do, Iqraa and its New Preachers as simply reducible to neoliberalism, I approach Islamic television’s political economy as a terrain of struggle for both material resources and ethical efficacy. Chafing against state strictures, many media producers welcomed legalizing privately owned channels on satellite television in the 1990s,.

At the same time, my interlocutors were not indifferent to the perils that dollars potentially pose to daʿwa. As they saw it, the conventional political economy of Arab satellite television is troublingly centered on capital accumulation and profit maximization without concern for the divine accountability awaiting in the Hereafter. However, this required not the condemnation of capital but rather its judicious calibration. While daʿwa should definitely not be for dollars, dollars should be for daʿwa. In many ways the struggles to define the Islamic are inextricable from the struggle over capital’s calibration.

Far from being the disembodied arrangements of predetermined structural logics, media economies are constituted by individualswith different levels of institutional access and power-making choices and different ideas about how to make change. So in other words, taking seriously Islamic television producers’ ethical calibration of capital yields more insights into the actual structures of media political economies than merely tracing who is funding which channel and why.  Again, this is where media ethnography really methodologically and theoretically shines! 

Sherine Hamdy: This brings me to another point of comparison evident in your book between the wider terrains of struggle over and within Islamic television in Egypt and that of struggles over media in other authoritarian Muslim majority countries like Iran.  

In her ethnography Iran Reframed, Narges Bajoghli argues that state-affiliated media-makers in Iran are trying to shore up the dwindling popularity of the 1979 revolution and the system of the Islamic Republic among the younger generation of Iranian citizens taken in by cosmopolitan global media and fed-up with government mismanagement and repressive policies. 

Your work analyzes the ways in which Egypt’s New Preachers and their media producers are also trying to compete with the lure of mainstream entertainment  by aspiring to dazzlement (ibhar) within Islamic media. You argue that this focus on changing the conventional aesthetics of Islamic media was theologically-grounded.  But as you show many Egyptians across the ideological spectrum dismissed the New Preachers and their programs out of hand – as too secular, as too neoliberal, or as too Islamist. So really there is so much you had to argue against as you were writing this ethnography. What was that process like for you?

Yasmin Moll: Incredibly generative, actually, although of course also daunting! 

There have been so many books written both about Islam in Egypt as well as the 2011 revolution by now.. Many of these books start from the premise that the most important fault-line in the country since the 1970s is the secular-religious one, with the state, intellectuals, artists, rights activists and so on all put in the former camp, and in the latter camp are grassroots Islamic preachers, Islamist politicians and lawyers, and ordinary Muslims attending mosque lessons or listening to cassette sermons and so on. After Tahrir Square and especially after the ouster in 2013 of the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammad Morsi from the presidency, the this is a secular versus religious struggle framework became even more central to analyzing Egyptian politics and society. 

My book destabilizes this framing by focusing on how the internal divisions and power struggles of Egypt’s grassroots Islamic revival played out in relation to both Islamic media and revolutionary politics. My claim is that the on and off-screen contestations within Islamic television over the very forms of religious mediation are proxies for more fundamental disagreements about what makes a form of life Godly. The rivalry between New Preachers and Salafi preachers over the definition of the Islamic maps onto the most important theological faultline of Sunni Islam – that between Ashʿarism and Atharism. Far from being confined to musty medieval texts, the Ashʿari-Athari divide continues to preoccupy Muslims around the world as even a cursory Google search for onlineʿaqida [creedal] wars reveals. 

I show how a methodological attunement to these internal, doctrinally-elaborated, fractures allows us to better understand the theological instabilities of what counts as secular versus religious. So a key intervention of the book in terms of the anthropology of Islam is that we need to stop worrying so much about how we should analytically make sense of the Islamic tradition’s internal diversity, or of secular-religious formations, and pay more careful attention to how our Muslim interlocutors themselves theologically evaluate this diversity and these formations.  As I would find out, Islamic television preachers and their pious viewers spend much more time and effort debunking each other than they do secular liberal Egyptians. 

Again, taking these differences seriously ethnographically offers new insight into the social life of theology as a terrain of critical contestation in which the boundaries of the secular and the religious are subject to doctrinal elaboration, adjudication and rebuttal, even while being continually affirmed as important to God and crucial for believers to maintain.

And as I hope the book convinces readers, an ethnographic emphasis on the widespread internal contestation over the substantive definition of piety also allows for a more nuanced understanding of what was at stake for many ordinary Egyptians in that incredibly challenging and tumultuous revolutionary period between 2011 and 2013. 

Sherine Hamdy: It is so refreshing to see these Muslim revivalists discussing things that matter to them and their disagreements with each other being taken seriously on their own terms – not just as the foils for the assumptions of Western secular liberalism. 

I was stunned when I read your book that the Tahrir Square protests that captured the world’s attention, years later, were in many ways the enactment of these preachers’ message to the youth, whose hopes and dreams are often thwarted in repressive, corrupt, authoritarian, and jobless circumstances. The Islamic preachers that you study captivated youthful viewers – partly by encouraging them to build society and do something impactful to overcome a pervasive sense of nihilism, precisely the kinds of sentiments that were voiced around the time of the 2011 uprisings. 

When did you first realize that connection?

Yasmin Moll:  My interlocutors always saw themselves as revolutionary – even before the 2011 uprising. Their marshalling of novel aesthetic strategies and performative modes within their television programs was aimed at revolutionizing what daʿwa sounds and looks like for a new generation of youthful participants within Egypt’s Islamic Revival. This reconfiguration of Islamic media was itself predicated on revolutionizing revivalist expectations of what Islamic piety substantively and interactionally entailed, especially in relation to religious difference, whether between Muslims or between Muslims and non-Muslims. Simply put, my interlocutors were dismayed that Salafi doctrines, norms, and practices had become virtually synonymous with the grassroots piety movement and they wanted to subvert that association from within.  So this is the first sense of the revolution within that the book title references. 

The second sense is how this revolution within Islamic media and Islamic piety connected to the 2011 revolution for “bread, freedom, and social justice,” as the famous protest chant went. The Tahrir Square protests broke out six months into my fieldwork. While I participated in this mobilization from the very beginning, and made a short film about it, for a while I kept two different notebooks: one about my ongoing research at Iqraa and the other about the revolution. 

Looking back, I think I did so because I was trying to figure out if I was researching the revolution at a time of Islamic revivalism or researching Islamic revivalism at a time of revolution. The obvious answer is, of course, both! 

My research became about what new understanding of the 2011 uprising becomes possible if we trace its unfolding through Islamic television production. It also became about how a focus on revolution casts a new light on the piety movement. I was able to reflect, from this new vantage point, on topics that have long interested researchers of religious revivalism, from ethics to ritual to the political writ large. 

So to answer your question, I realized the connection between the new forms of Islamic media that I was already researching and the mass mobilizations that seemingly came out of nowhere when I started to understand why my interlocutors thought of their particular media practices in revolutionary terms. They had always insisted on a more capacious Islamic media – capacious aesthetically and substantively – connected to the emergent revolutionary vision of a New Egypt that fostered coexistence across various forms of difference. I was also able to follow how their television programs inspired off-screen initiatives connected to Tahrir’s ethic of social solidarity across various forms of inequality.

Nevertheless, for all their vocal support and active participation in the revolutionary timeline between 2011 and 2013, the New Preachers – and pious producers and viewers more broadly – are rarely counted among the revolutionaries. 

Sherine Hamdy: Exactly – that’s why I was so surprised by the connection in reading your book!

Yasmin Moll: This omission needs to itself be analyzed:  my interlocutors’ stances often mapped onto the same progressive definition of the revolutionaries. They were simultaneously opposed to both the remnants of the Mubarak regime and the electoral-oriented Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood. For many progressive activists, however, the invocation of Islamic idioms, and the moral authority that such idioms carry, is antithetical to the radical promise of Tahrir.

I hope my book convincingly shows how such a dismissal misses the revolutionary salience of Islamic television. I also want to show that many Egyptians connected to the “spirit of the Square” through the Islamic Revival, not against it. 

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.

——— 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.

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.

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!)