Dog Whistles and Designer Genes

September 8th, 2025

by E. M. Elshaikh

Last month, American Eagle released an ad campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney, modeled after a 1980s Calvin Klein denim ad. The campaign plays with the homophone jeans/genes. In one version, Sweeney crosses out “genes” on a poster reading “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” replacing it with “jeans.” Another ad features her saying, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” The camera pans to her face as she says, “My jeans/genes are blue,” with no jeans in the frame.

This ad set off a fierce debate around its indeterminate meanings. As one commentator asked, “Are we supposed to want pants or Aryan features?” (Cunningham 2025). A vocal minority argued it was a dogwhistle for eugenics and white supremacy, while others insisted it was simply about Sweeney being hot. Beyond the jean/gene pun, there is also indeterminacy about which “genes” are being invoked, ostensibly her conventional attractiveness: her pouty lips, blue eyes, blonde hair, and “buxom” chest (“Hey, eyes up here!” she rebukes the camera in another ad).

The debate is animated partly by the politicized contradictions of Sweeney’s image, which is “semiotically potent and yet ideologically unfixed” (Jones 2025). Alongside acclaimed roles, Sweeney has lent her brand to numerous ad campaigns. Many of her roles hypersexualized her image, which she has alternately lamented and embraced, making her a right-wing darling as conservatives embrace “raunch” and celebrate her as an ideal female form that will end “wokeness.”

“Eugenics vibes”

For many, this ad was “fashy coded.” Some online commentators, like @Dewwwdropzz and @midtwesterngothic, called the ad Nazi propaganda, while others noted its “eugenics” or “master race” “vibes.” Right-wing commentators dismissed these interpretations as hysterical, treating accusations of Nazism as preposterous, characterizing it as “everything is Hitler” (a common right-wing refrain).

But eugenics and white supremacy was not just Hitler’s project. Trump has described immigrants as having “bad genes” and expressed preference for immigrants from blue-eyed countries; his time in office has seen expanded civil commitment for those deemed mentally ill, a massive expansion of ICE, and expanded habitual offender statutes(Cunningham 2025; Norwood 2025; Miller 2025). Trump recently federalized the California National Guard to suppress protests against deportations and took over the capital’s police to respond to “crime,” a racial dogwhistle.

These moves resonate with the rise of Christian nationalism and “great replacement” rhetoric (Ali 2025), both of which promote demographic engineering. Just weeks before the ad aired, the Department of Homeland Security amplified this vision, tweeting paintings that valorize Manifest Destiny. They were captioned: “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage” and “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Commentators suggested the capitalization itself was a dogwhistle (Ali 2025).

The MAGA-led government has also energized RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement, described as social Darwinist “soft eugenics” for withdrawing care from targeted populations and stigmatizing neurodivergence and mental illness (Beres 2025; Sexauer 2025; Giroux 2025). Coupled with the hard eugenics of the genocide of Palestinians and callous indifference to disposable lives here and elsewhere (Miller 2025; Giroux 2025), these developments mark the normalization of dehumanizing ideologies.

At the same time, other groups are encouraged to reproduce. Pronatalist movements promoted by tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, with support from the Heritage Foundation, valorize “good genes” and fuel demand for gene-edited “designer babies” (Stein 2025; Elinson 2025). Within this pronatalist, anti-choice framework, some conservatives even point to pro-choice policies and liberal institutions such as Planned Parenthood as the real eugenics.

“It’s not that deep”

This slide to fascism is perceptible, yet for many “all of this reality is stripped away” (Warzel 2025). To them, it is just an ad, just about Sweeney being hot, or just about jeans.

This dismissal is bipartisan. PragerU pundit Amala Ekpunobi ridiculed “chronically online” Leftists who should “touch grass,” insisting the ad “didn’t mean anything.” Liberal commentators likewise treated it as a distraction unworthy of “incredible complexity” and analysis (Jones 2025; Ali 2025). Some argued that engaging with the controversy benefits the right, since “the right-wing-media apparatus has every incentive to go at the Sweeneystuff, as the MAGA coalition struggles to distract its base from Donald Trump’s Epstein-files debacle” (Warzel 2025).

“Woke is dead”

If liberals were hysterical, conservatives were triumphant. While mocking liberals as snowflakes and crybabies (McIntosh 2020) and insisting “it’s not that deep,” right-wing media reanimated a MAGA battle cry (Mendoza-Denton 2020): “Woke is dead!”

When asked whether Sweeney or Beyonce won the denim war, one pundit called the ad “normal” and declared it the “final nail in the coffin” of “woke.” Fox defines woke as “progressive, politically correct stances on race, gender ideology, and other hot-button topics,” but the political correctness framing is misleading (Beliso-De Jesús 2020). Its indexical range is much broader. While White House communications director Cheung decried “Cancel culture run amok,” Cruz and Vance talked about the attack on “beautiful women.” On the Ruthless podcast, Vance quipped, “everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi,” adding “she’s a normal all-American beautiful girl doing like a normal jeans ad, right?”

Trump characteristically said the quiet part out loud, praising the ad and contrasting it with ads by Jaguar and Bud Lite. MAGA media was feeling the vibe. A Fox News pundit said, “We’re over this woke agenda. We’re over the Lizzos, we’re over the Dylan Mulvaneys. If this was a 300-pound non-binary person, they would be applauding her.” On one podcast, hosts said they were sick of “DI stuff with big girls,” wanted more “ideal images” of “perfection,” and joked there should be “legislation against plus sized models.”

Other pundits also mirrored Trump’s rhetoric with fidelity. Tomi Lahren contrasted Sweeney with Dylan Mulvaney, saying conservatives want “hot people.” Matt Walsh called the ad “a move back to normalcy” and away from “freakish nonsense.” Other pundits added: “Woke ads are out and beautiful ads are in. Yes, welcome to 2025 where Dylan Mulvaney has been replaced by Sydney Sweeney” and said:

“This seems to be simply a return to normal…they changed and they started to use hideous people…people don’t want to look like Lizzo…they want to look like Sydney Sweeney….they’ve had ugly platformed for so long…we actually aren’t all created equal…we all look different.”

A Fox commentator called the ad “consequential,” representing the demise of “fat pride and gender androgyny and DEI.” Megyn Kelly praised Sweeney as “all woman,” “natural,” and “normal,” saying she hadn’t “Kardashianized herself,” and declaring, “we are fucking done with the Lauren Sanchezes of the world” and with “enormous lips,” and rejoicing at the return to “classic American beauty.”

The blonde bombshell’s others

MAGA commentators had been celebrating Sweeney as a return to classical ideals long before the ad. When she hosted Saturday Night Live in a low-cut dress, she had already “killed woke” (Grady 2025). Commentators lamented that body positivity had brought “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack … to the brink of extinction” (Furlano 2025) and that white people had been “banished from advertising.”

In this discourse, “woke” and “DEI” index what Sweeney is not: black, big, non-binary, non-feminine, non-traditional, working as shibboleths for dispreferred social types. “DEI” itself has become a “strategically deployable shifter” (Urciuoli 2025), “relayed” into a new domain (Gal 2018) and resignified as a slur that “clasps” (Gal 2018) Sydney Sweeney to ideal images of womanhood and clasps all her opposites together as undesirable social types.


Sydney Sweeney		“DEI” “Woke”
Normal		Weird, freakish
Beautiful, hot		Ugly, hideous
Thin		Big, fat
Feminine		Androgynous
Cisgender, heterosexual		LGBTQ+
White		Non-white
Traditional, classicNatural		FuturisticUnnatural, freakish
FertileAuthenticAll-American		Childless, infertilePolitically correctForeign, diverse, mixed

The “blonde bombshell” recalls midcentury Americana, when the white feminine figure was unrivaled. Nostalgia for this time situates the campaign within a revival of regressive, white-washed femininity, from pinup girls to tradwives (Furlano 2025). Fascist movements have historically weaponized this ideal.

Sweeney’s image, combined with the ad’s images and language, draws on this charge: the paradox of white femininity as both sexualized and innocent. It enables a right-coded idealization of white, fertile, feminine beauty (Grady 2025; Cunningham 2025), set against the racial and gender diversity that unsettles a pronatalist white supremacist vision of a homogenous America.

Dogwhistles and semiotic containment

American Eagle’s campaign was a success, if only for the attention it generated. Its strategy: “Flirt with the public’s fear (or excitement) about fascism—with the help of Sydney Sweeney” (Cunningham 2025).

This flirtation plays with dual addressivity and multiple layered semiotic indeterminacies to send a dogwhistle. Dogwhistles are messages with an innocent meaning for most addressees and a coded one for some (Haney-López 2014; Slotta 2020). They are political uses of semiotic indeterminacy (Gershon 2025), and such indeterminacy is not always symmetrical (Dénigot and Burnett 2020).

Moreover, the participation framework and production format is complex (Goffman 1981). Dogwhistles are uttered by a “duplicitous speaker” who differentiates among “savvy” and non-savvy listeners (Dénigot and Burnett 2020), and this corporate ad, voiced by an actress speaking as herself but through a script, amplifies this duplicity. Even savvy listeners are multiplied: the target audience aligned with a racialized message and its liberal opponents who identify and repudiate it. Moreover, the indeterminacy here has a binary logic, with competing polarized meanings.

Racialized dogwhistles are central to conservative self-conceptions, exemplified by Lee Atwater, a pro-segregationist who directed campaigns for Reagan and Bush senior and later chaired the RNC (Haney-Lopez 2014). Atwater avoided the semiotic determinacy and rigid performativity of taboo language like the n-word (Fleming 2011; 2018; Miller 2022) by using “abstract” terms like forced busing or tax cuts, explaining that these economic policies would “hurt blacks worse than whites” while avoiding explicit slurs.

Dogwhistle tactics also use indeterminacy to differentiate within a single listener, bifurcating conscious commitments to equality from unconscious racism, so dogwhistles are hidden partly from the target audience itself (Smith 2016; Haney-Lopez 2014; Mendelberg 2001). This complicates the notion of the identity-based dogwhistle (Dénigot and Burnett 2020).

Indeed, identity here is unstable. “Woke” functions as a shifter designating not only an ideology one can adopt but also refers to groups of people who are like Lizzo, Dylan Mulvaney, or Oprah–even those who don’t adopt “woke” beliefs. Many “woke” critics of the ad were feminine white women, and many of its defenders were people of color or liberals. These “woke” identity positions don’t intersect neatly with “woke” listener positions.

In this way, a dogwhistle can hail white supremacist listeners while avowing a colorblind position (Dick and Wirtz 2011). If Sweeney’s “good genes” are about being hot rather than white or feminine, then hotness is universal, equal opportunity even. Listeners who hear racialized meanings are paranoid racebaiters, bearing the liability of racialization. Cultural value accrues to those who cannot hear it, who are figured as rational, and colorblindness enables racist discourses to proliferate under a guise of neutrality (Dick and Wirtz 2011; Williams 2020). As Haney-Lopez predicted, dogwhistle politics has evolved to recruit nonwhite support (2014). Racial identity is therefore a poor predictor of reception.

TikTok user @heyitstwig25 remarked, “So, the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad isn’t racist, but the only people I see supporting it and defending it are openly racist…got it.” This suggests the issue is less about identity than about participation in chains of discourse through which themes and cultural stories become intelligible (Slotta 2020). Names and labels work as condensed abbreviations for these stories (Ibid), and allusions or “vibes” similarly direct attention toward particular contexts–but only if those contexts are already available. Dogwhistles are one form of “strategically restricted communication,” relying on differentiated awareness of context, such as white supremacist discourse in right-wing media, without which the message is inaudible (Mendoza-Denton 2020). Further differentiation also depends on awareness of the cultural history of white supremacy, its motifs, values, and unspoken commitments. Heterogeneous audiences thus bring heterogeneous indexical associations (Agha as cited in Gershon 2025), enhancing and multiplying semiotic indeterminacy. Even defenders of the ad are heterogeneous.

This heterogeneity and indeterminacy is key to the plausible deniability that sustains racializing discourses (Dick and Wirtz 2011). By suppressing or manipulating context, speakers avoid responsibility for racist discourse and strategically differentiate their messages (Hodges 2020). This relies on ideologies of communication that privilege semantics and grammar over interactional context, common in the MAGA base and central to Trump-era tactics (Hodges 2020). Trump’s “dark innovation” has been to extend plausible deniability even further than his predecessors (Smith 2016).

The American Eagle ad exploits this affordance, building on the MAGA movement’s use of entertainment and humor as a “containment strategy,” a way to speak taboos while denying violating norms (Hall et al. 2016). The strategy also works on liberals and leftists who dismiss the ad as trivial, epiphenomenal froth atop a sea of material conditions. One LA Times critic asked why anyone cared about a silly ad when DHS was increasingly militarizing (Ali 2025). This dismissal shows how dangerous rhetoric slips by not only through semiotic indeterminacy but also because some genres render signs unserious and “not that deep.” Even the ad’s brevity functions this way. One critic wrote, “a 15-second denim commercial is not a rich enough text to sustain this level of analysis” (Jones 2025), reinforcing the idea that the micro doesn’t matter (Lempert 2024).

Does the ad even need indeterminacy? When Elon Musk can evade responsibility for a Nazi salute, with the ADL calling it “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm” (Connolly 2025), plausible deniability is already abundant. Nazi salute-like gestures now circulate widely on social media. Even determinate taboo signs are rendered indeterminate through selective disavowal (Resnick 2024; 2025). A rigid designator like the swastika can be framed as “just about” something else (Resnick 2025). This “determined indeterminacy,” like colorblind discourse, naturalizes white supremacy by denying its existence (Resnick 2024). As with political dogwhistles, it enables speakers to espouse repugnant views while appearing to conform to liberal norms (Resnick 2024).

This is why American Eagle did not need to apologize. One need not be accountable for vibes. It could dismiss criticisms by insisting the ad was just “about the jeans.” Though some videos were removed, Sweeney said nothing, and the company posted only one non-apology:

This message narrowed the contextual aperture. Regardless of uptake—which both critics and supporters saw as extending beyond jeans—they affirmed meaning only in what was explicitly spoken: Sweeney’s personal “jeans” and “story.” The inclusive gesture to “everyone” nodded to the criticism while deflecting it with a universalizing message. Anyone who saw race, it implied, was seeing things that weren’t there.

This affirms a restricted meaning based only on explicit referentiality, instructing readers and viewers to ignore co-textual signs and context (Hodges 2020; Gershon 2025). Only speaker intention counts, and any further inference is cast as illusion (Gershon 2025). This form of gaslighting (Ibid) reflects a semiotic ideology of containment, empowering bad-faith speakers and listeners to dictate what something is “just” about.

Dogwhistles as canaries in coal mines

Liberal outlets such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Cut, and Vulture ran op-eds framing the controversy as misunderstanding or trivial (Andrew, Scottie et al. 2025). In this architecture of false equivalences, the dogwhistle is reduced to a failure to communicate across party lines or “read the room” (Battle 2025). Writers urged readers to “not be weird” and stop making Sweeney a proxy for broader debates, arguing that too much context is problematic and “Sometimes a pun is just a pun” (Jones 2025). Others lamented that “the discourse is broken,” with both sides only discharging outrage (Warzel 2025). Many blamed the Internet or social media for polarization.

The “discourse” is indeed shaped by algorithmic media that mines attention through ragebait and infinite scrolls. But the Internet did not break the discourse. Racist dogwhistles long predate it; there has never been a good faith bipartisan conversation (Slotta 2020). Reasoned dialogue with white supremacists is neither desirable nor possible. The metadiscourse is broken too: if bad-faith speakers mobilize semiotic ideologies of containment, then talking past one another is not a failure but an achievement. And semiotic containment will only increasingly normalize dangerous rhetoric and admit it into respectable discourse.

This dynamic extends beyond the American Eagle ad, which condenses broader cultural movements. A “leftist meltdown” is overstated; most leftists didn’t care. MAGA media amplified faint signals (Warzel 2025) to occasion the celebration of the death of “woke” and rebirth of “normal.” The same pattern followed Dylan Mulvaney (Holmes 2025).

A select few spoke of dogwhistles, others of canaries in coal mines. On Breaking Points, the host read the ad as carrying white supremacist and eugenicist overtones; the guest scoffed, calling it “just an ad, not a canary in the coal mine for the rise of fascism.” Others insisted it was exactly that: for critical savvy listeners,it was an early warning of danger.

A “canary in a coal mine” once referred to bringing canaries underground to warn of toxic gases. As a metaphor, it’s a signal of imminent threat. Yet the canary is not a signal but a sensitive receiver, like a savvy listener who can reconstruct the discursive milieu and anticipate construals.

Listening is political work. The pragmatics of reception, who listens, to whom, how, and why (Slotta 2023), are further complicated by algorithmic mediation which creates micro-publics. As linguistic anthropologists, we cultivate sensitive listening within and beyond field sites and across publics. So when we hear the cry “woke is dead!” as the military-industrial complex ramps up domestically and abroad, we should continue to ask what that cry presupposes and entails. Such listening may provide early warnings or perhaps reminders of dangers long present.

References

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CaMP is 10 years old today

September 4th, 2025

The CaMP anthropology blog has been running for 10 years — our very first post was on September 4^th, 2015. During this decade, we have celebrated 122 dissertations, and 302 new books.

The blog started because when Indiana University dissolved the innovative and beloved department of Communication and Culture, five ethnographers moved to IU’s anthropology department. We joined six other people interested in linguistic anthropology, media anthropology, and the anthropology of music and art. Eleven people, all in the same department, and yet it was a concentration that seemed likely to fly under everyone’s radar. We wondered how to let anthropologists know about the department’s new strength, and hit upon the idea of creating a blog devoted to communication, media, and performance. We were making lemonade out of bureaucratic lemons (ah, the institutional melodrama I am omitting here in this bland account of how a blog came to be). Susan Seizer was the editor for the first year, and Sarah Mitchell designed the blog, getting the ball rolling.

But blogs are hungry beasts, and we had to figure out ways to feed it content. So in November 2015, I hit upon interviewing authors of recently published books, honoring the arduous work we pour into these texts. Honestly, it helped that I was on leave that year, and longing for a bit of legitimate distraction from writing The Book. Aneesh Aneesh was the first author we ever featured. And then I began to wonder why we weren’t also celebrating dissertations more – these too have taken years and years of challenging intellectual work. Elizabeth Kickham was the first to turn to page 99 of her dissertation, and discuss how it related to her dissertation as a whole.

Ten years later, and CaMP anthropology is still chugging along, releasing a post every Monday morning. This is thanks to all of you – so many have participated over the years, helping this amorphous intellectual community rejoice in what careful and hard-won analysis can reveal about our social worlds. May the blog celebrate many more books and dissertations in the years to come.
Davine A. Sorapuru-Mitchell takes the page 99 test

September 1st, 2025

My dissertation, With Other Men: Love, Narrative, and Belonging Among Same-Sex Attracted Men in New Orleans, is an ethnographic study of how love narratives—structured around the phrase “I love you”—are interdiscursively linked to broader histories of racialized exclusion, public health discourse, and queer social life. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with same-sex attracted men in monogamous, polyamorous, and open relationships, the project traces how “I love you” is used at four key relational moments: its first utterance, after an argument, in times of joy, and at the end of a relationship.

Page 99 is in the second chapter, “‘I Love You’ After an Argument,” and begins midway through a paragraph in which I write:

[For the men in this study] repair is not just about resolving a linguistic misunderstanding—it is about re-establishing affective alignment, reaffirming commitment, and negotiating belonging within intimate relationships. This process of attunement is dynamic rather than linear, meaning that repair does not necessarily mean returning to a previous state, but rather constructing a new relational equilibrium. In this sense, misunderstanding is not merely a failure of communication, but a pivotal site where love, trust, and intimacy are tested and reconfigured.

For my interlocutors, especially those navigating intersectional histories of racial and sexual marginalization, repair becomes a moral and affective process through which belonging is reframed and love is sustained.

Page 99, therefore, does not capture the full scope of the dissertation, but it does highlight a central insight: that love and belonging are as fragile as they are enduring, and that it is through practices of repair, intersubjective attunement, and the ongoing efforts of choosing to remain with one’s partner(s) that new forms of intimacy, deeper connections, and new futures are made possible.

—-

Citation:

Sorapuru-Mitchell, Davine A. (2025) With Other Men: Love, Narrative, and Belonging Among Same-Sex Attracted Men in New Orleans. CUNY Academic Works.
Tim Thurston on his book, Satirical Tibet

August 25th, 2025

https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295753119/satirical-tibet/

Shannon Ward: In the Introduction, you discuss zurza as a uniquely Tibetan genre of humour. Can you say more about how you first discovered zurza as a genre? Do you remember the first Amdo Tibetan satire you heard? And, how did you as a researcher gradually come to understand continuities in how Tibetans identify zurza across artistic practices and media forms?

Tim Thurston So, I’m an inveterate language learner. I love learning languages, and trying to understand the social worlds with which they are intertwined. Being curious about language is about 95% of my research method. It’s in the process of learning language that I start to pay attention to different grammar structures, but also to the terminologies and classification systems that are part of their world. I first heard the term zurza in an interview. I was sitting in a public space on a university campus in Ziling, and talking to a young man who enjoyed the comedies. And he talked about how each one “did zurza.” About one or more “social problem(s).” Prior to this, I had been really focusing my research on the social problems angle. But hearing the word then helped to make sense of something. In the verb-final Tibetan language, it literally meant “to eat” (za) the “sides” (zur). Not so much an individual verbal practice, it was an approach to communication that privileged indirection as a way of articulating critique. I started paying attention, I realized that I was hearing it again and again in interviews. When I listened back to previous interviews, I saw that it also had been used there, but I hadn’t really caught on to it yet. Initially, I thought it was something pretty specific to the comedies I was researching for my dissertation, but then I heard a rapper use it. And another person used it to refer to forms of traditional poetry, and I realized that it was much more significant than I had initially thought.

Shannon Ward: Your book provides a remarkable account of Amdo as a distinct cultural region within Tibet, supporting efforts within Tibetan studies to show the nuances of identity amid changing social, economic, and political conditions on the plateau. Through your diachronic approach to the dynamic practices of satire, you show the adaptability of Tibetan cultural producers. At the same time, many of the satires themselves articulate essentialized views of Tibetan language and culture. Can you say more about how this tension between essentialization and adaptation plays out in identity formation through zurza?

Tim Thurston: Folklorists sometimes refer to folklore as “the stories people tell themselves about themselves.” I think of the texts in this book as the “modern stories Tibetans are telling themselves about their (ideally) modern selves.” These texts are both a funhouse mirror and a prism. They (exaggeratedly) reflect Tibetan society back on itself, but also refract it, separating different points out for audiences to examine and consider. In this way, the comedies and rap songs examined in the book are sort of prescriptive: they simultaneously say “this is who we are” and “this is who we should be.” This always involves both adaptation to emerging policies and priorities, and essentializing statements about “who we are.” There’s a degree of Herzfeld’s “cultural intimacy” in this: the sort of embarrassing and the backward parts of ourselves that unite our identity.

In the context of the People’s Republic of China, this question about the place of Amdo is an important part of it. The state identifies all of these people as Tibetan. Anthropologist Charlene Makley and historian Gray Tuttle have shown that the Tibetan word bod (བོད།) and the Chinese term zangzu (藏族) that we would translate as Tibetan refer to unique projects of identity making. The Tibetan bod traditionally only referred to people from Central Tibet, and not from Amdo or Kham, but is now used for all Tibetan. The Chinese Zangzu, meanwhile, is a state classification that includes a variety of groups, some of them quite different. At the same time, written texts and oral traditions suggest a recognition of shared identity. In versified oral traditions ‘black-haired Tibetans’ mgo nag bod མགོ་ནག་བོད། or ‘red-faced Tibetan’ (གདོhང་དམར་བོད།) were common noun-adjective formulae for performers (including in Amdo and Kham) to use in their songs and speeches. Comedians, rappers, and other artists are naturally navigating this. Many are fervent nationalists. And so, while their life experiences, humor, the stories they compose, and their language practices are very much based in local knowledges and experiences of people in Amdo, but their ultimate goals involve saying something broadly about the Tibetan nationality or ethnic group.

Shannon Ward: Your chapters demonstrate the evolution of zurza in new media forms, which are closely connected not only to the availability of new technologies, but also to political and economic goals such as urbanization and development that emanate from the Chinese state. Can you say more about how you see Amdo Tibetans navigating the availability and evolution of media technologies, amid constantly changing political agendas that may frequently shift between promoting and censoring zurza?

Tim Thurston: So zurza itself was never really promoted or censored, not least because it never really rose to something the State or its representatives really recognized as something worth governing. But I would say that the support for Tibetan language media and the space for social critique expands and contracts at different moments. Across these moments, however, it is generally accurate to say that the bigger one gets, the more important it is to adhere to the Party line. In Amdo in the 1990s and early 2000s, mass media (radio and television) were just about the biggest game in town. Comedians and other performers were keenly aware that they had to set just the right tone. They had to entertain with stories that were realistic but not quite real. They had to promote the State’s policies, but also wanted to embed their performances with important social critiques that might not always align with the State’s priorities. Zurza are the flexible set of practices and approaches to humor through which Tibetans can approach an issue obliquely rather than directly. In this way it provides artists with precisely the skills and the toolset necessary to navigate and accommodate shifts in policy, changes in media preferences, and the evolution of Tibetan concerns in these contexts. It allows comedians in the 1990s and early 2000s to promote a form of Tibetan nationalism, based largely in language purism and cultural preservation, while also fitting State demands. But it also empowers hip hop artists to critique young urban Tibetans who do not know their culture, to playfully rework folksongs into hip-hop beats, and to critique unrealized visions of their predecessors. It continues into the present, when people take to livestreaming and video sharing platforms to share any variety of entertainment.

Shannon Ward: Especially in your discussions of hip hop, you have shown how zurza serves to valorize the Tibetan language, but also how it can articulate linguistic purism. How do you see zurza potentially affecting the ways that Amdo Tibetans conceptualize and use language in their everyday lives?

Tim Thurston: The way I see it, these hip-hop artists and the comedians before them wanted to valorize and center Tibetan language in the nationalist project that has emerged in Amdo across the post-Mao period. Language has a complex place in China. The Chinese state is bound by constitution and the basic principles of Marxism to support officially recognized “minority nationalities” to “develop” and “promote” their own language. Additionally, the government has, over the last 70 years, developed extensive Tibetan language mass media apparatus as well. Cynically, we might say that Tibetan media is primarily for propaganda and spreading the news, but there is also some space for entertainment programming as well. But despite this support, language is also closely monitored. We sometimes hear that Tibetan singers have been arrested for singing or speaking about Tibetan language, or that Grassroots Tibetan literacy classes are sometimes closed by the government. Too direct an approach is not necessarily safe. What zurza does is allow people to promote language (and language purism) through example, through humor, without directly saying it.

Shannon Ward: In recent news media, much is being reported about Tibetan children’s decreasing access to their language and culture, especially given the rise of mandatory boarding schools that run almost exclusively in Mandarin. Being raised apart from family members can take away opportunities for children to experience Tibetan artistic practice in everyday practices like watching tv and streaming videos from smart phones. How do you see young people’s ability to connect with and produce zurza potentially changing in this new political context?

Tim Thurston: This is a great point. Intergenerational transmission of cultural knowledge is under threat from a variety of sources. Some students now go to school in inland urban centers like Beijing or Chengdu. But to my understanding, most of the schools are still in periurban Tibetan communities with almost entirely Tibetan student bodies. Students in these schools often live in dorms during the weeks (or as many as two or three weeks at a time) and then go home on the weekends. In this way, they have at least some opportunities to engage with Tibetan language and culture. Without meaning to downplay the tremendous impact of removing teenagers from their homes, intergenerational support structures, and contexts in which cultural transmission happens, one of the bigger concerns for many young parents I have met is about modern media, and this appears to be independent of the boarding schools. Young people, they say, prefer watching Chinese cartoons, and listening to Chinese music. With all the changes to the fabric of Tibetan life, and to Tibetan language competences in the region, it shouldn’t be surprising that some older comedy performances will not resonate with students who lack the lived experience of herding livestock, of first using a telephone, or of the oral traditions sometimes parodied in comedies. Similarly, there is good reason to believe that the uniquely Tibetan aspects of zurza may indeed begin to fade with the gradual cultural and linguistic shifts. But whether loss of language can wholly supplant some of these characteristics and practices, and the concept of eating the sides entirely remains to be seen. Certainly, the skills of indirection, humor, and entertainment remain as relevant as ever.
Rachel Howard takes the page 99 test

August 18th, 2025

“After one candidate, the only one in a suit, described the many virtues of community involvement, a heckler shouted, “Frank, what clubs are you part of in the community?” leading the candidate to admit that he hadn’t gotten the opportunity to join any clubs…yet. The other candidate ended up winning her seat, returning to work with the Board members who had deposed her over the issue of her pickleball involvement” (page 99).

There are the things you study and then there are the things you realize your work is actually about. My dissertation, titled The Ends of the American Dream, studied retirement in the Southwest, but it is also about many other things: it is about families that we originate and that we make; it is about aging and confronting sickness and death; and it is about the way certain landscapes are used for leisure at the expense of future environmental sustainability.

Page 99 of my dissertation is the final section before the conclusion of Chapter 2 and includes the last bit of an ethnographic anecdote about a contentious Homeowner’s Board election cycle. It includes a brief description of the way that two of the candidates fit into (or don’t) the acceptable personae in the neighborhood. That chapter is all about what it is like to age in a housing development that was built especially for older bodies…It is also about aging in the 21^st century, in a youth-oriented culture that often reviles the aging. The community where I did my research has worked hard to combat the assumption that it is “just for old people.” It has done this, in part, by creating an ideal-type retiree who fits into its unofficial tagline: “if you’re bored here, you’ll be bored anywhere.”

If my research and dissertation had turned out the way I thought it would when I planned it out, this point in this Chapter would have fulfilled Ford Madox Ford’s proposal. Instead, this moment acts as a jumping off point for some of the other concerns of the dissertation: namely, the historical, political-economic, and ecological backstories that provide some of the foundations—for some people—inhabiting a post-Covid, and (maybe) post-liberal world. Further in the dissertation, I ask who gets to belong in the U.S. and how and why that answer came to be. So I suppose that one thing Page 99 shows is that, without those who are willing to enact the boundaries and erasures of belongingness, even in one relatively small community, that answer could look very different.
Lara Mertens takes the Page 99 Test

August 11th, 2025

Page 99 of my dissertation drops the reader into what I call a “technological (dis)connective happening.” It captures a moment during the pandemic, when offline events moved online. In this scene—part of an Airbnb Online experience on Zoom—my internet connection cut out for two minutes:

We could not see the others’ responses to our absence, if they stopped the experience or simply continued on, and apparently on their side of things, our video frame was completely static. When we were able to rejoin, the host said, ‘You’re back! We thought for a while you were statues because you were frozen!’

We laugh, and I shrug—just another reminder of how unpredictable connectivity could be.

These moments were everywhere in my fieldwork. They weren’t mistakes; they were the material. Participants and hosts navigated them through mute and video buttons, sudden exits, and uncertain returns. These weren’t actions on or by technology, but co-constituted entanglements—emergent expressions of human-technology relations always in flux. Page 99 names “the glitch”—what Betti Marenko calls “glitch-events,” which bring forth the “uncertainty, contingency, and indeterminacy” of digital processes (2015: 111). Or as one interlocutor on this page put it: “You don’t lag in real life.” But of course, we do. The digital simply renders that latency legible. It’s the infrastructural version of “shit happens.”

Zooming out, my dissertation explores how connectivity isn’t a binary (connected/disconnected), but a process of emergence—what Karen Barad might call an “ongoing reconfiguration of the world,” or what Tim Ingold frames as agencing, a becoming-with rather than a doing-to (Barad 2003: 818; 2007; Ingold 2017, 2020). “Control”—by humans or machines—was never absolute. Uncertainty wasn’t a defect; it was the condition for relation.

While this material now feels contextually dated, revisiting this page made me reflect on today’s technological shifts. As AI systems strive for perfect coherence and uninterrupted flow, I find myself returning to the glitch—not because it’s nostalgic, but because it’s revealing. The fantasy of seamless AI rests on a premise my research disassembled: that connectivity is binary, expected, and ultimately controllable. Perhaps, like my work on connectivity, intelligence, too, may be reframed from something measured by output to something defined by relation.

Just as (dis)connection isn’t a switch, intelligence isn’t merely a smooth response or rational reply. It’s not necessarily about getting things “right,” but about the conditions of emergence–about being entangled in a world that is unpredictable and shared. As AI becomes part of our social worlds, we need a conceptual vocabulary beyond prediction and polish. Glitches aren’t just breakdowns to be fixed; they’re reminders. Page 99 doesn’t just describe relational uncertainty; it invites it.

References

Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831.

———. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2017. “On human correspondence.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (1): 9–27.

———. 2020. “In the gathering shadows of material things.” In Exploring materiality and connectivity in anthropology and beyond, edited by Philipp Schorch, Martin Saxer, and Marlen Elders, 17–35. London: UCL Press.

Marenko, Betti. 2015. “When making becomes divination: Uncertainty and contingency in computational glitch-events.“ Design Studies 41: 110–125.
Revisiting BioShock in Trumps America

August 6th, 2025

by Clare Wiznura

The 2007 video game BioShock explores what might happen when individuals have the option to keep all the fruits of their labour, free from taxes or restrictions on their work. The game builds on the ideas of Ayn Rand, but also the practices of current US president Donald Trump. The game interrogates Rand’s ideas, revealing their failure. Ultimately, the most radical action in the game (and the only way out) is to help another.

BioShock is set in an underwater megapolis, Rapture, in the year 1960. Rapture was intended to be a libertarian utopia, founded on the principle that every person should be free to do as they please without having to worry about being pushed around by those in higher positions of authority: “No Gods, No Kings. Only Man.” (Bioshock, 2007) The tantalizing promise at Rapture’s founding was the freedom to do whatever its inhabitants wanted, without restrictions, where science flourishes. Ethics are sacrificed in the name of advancement, not unlike Nazi experimentation during the Holocaust, and, in some cases, appear to continue that very same Nazi research. The horrifying reality is that when people can do whatever they want, anyone can do whatever they want, and society quickly collapses as people look out only for themselves, at any cost. How does this game make this clear? Scientific advancement in Rapture has allowed for editing of a person’s genetic code through the use of a substance found on the ocean floor called “Adam.” Adam has allowed for various mutations, cosmetic and otherwise, purchased at a market level. Only characters called Little Sisters gather Adam. To make a Little Sister, a young girl is genetically lobotomized to become an Adam-harvesting Drone. Built on Adam, Rapture is far from its intended Utopia, the city is one of destruction- most of the residents are dead and the city is in ruins in the aftermath of a class war enacted by two greedy libertarian bigwigs.

The games’ links to Ayn Rand are not subtle. The two antagonists are named for characters in Ayn Rand: Andrew Ryan (named after the author herself), and Frank Fontaine (named after the character in The Fountainhead). Even Frank Fontaine’s alias, “Atlas”, refers to the novel Atlas Shrugged. Both of these antagonists have bought into the libertarian ideology hook, line, and sinker, and find themselves at odds as they fight for the same thing: power.

Andrew Ryan’s trajectory parallels Donald Trump’s; Ryan is successful in business. but is likened to a god, with golden statues of him around Rapture and voice memos that praise his intellect and business practices. Similarly, Trump fans circulate multiple images of Donald Trump, depicting him as a messiah-figure, even planning to make a 9-foot-tall statue of him (Trump-Statue, n.d.). Andrew Ryan preaches against a central form of government, yet enforces an authoritarian government with the goal of enforcing the status quo; Trump deploys ICE agents to terrorize citizens and military personnel against protestors (Hurley, 2025). Ryan founds Rapture with the promise encapsulated in his iconic quote: “Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?” (BioShock, 2007). Trump portrays an image that he is on the side of the worker, running for president in 2024 with promises of multiple tax cuts (Luhby, 2024) — literally promising to ensure that every man was entitled to the sweat on his brow. The reality, however, is that the wealthy benefit more from tax cuts, increasing the gap between the wealthy and the poor. In Rapture, this gap directly leads to the power grab made by Fontaine, who says in a voice memo:

These sad saps. They come to Rapture thinking they’re gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody’s gotta scrub the toilets. What an angle they gave me… I hand these mugs a cot and a bowl of soup, and they give me their lives. Who needs an army when I got Fontaine’s Home for the Poor? (BioShock, 2007)

Within this quote, we see the manipulative nature of Fontaine as he refers to the disenfranchised as an army, and ultimately, his desire to be the one in control leaves him alone; instead of working with the poor towards common goals, he deploys them as an army in a battle that ultimately ends in stalemate.

While BioShock is not subtle as it warns of the dangers of libertarianism, the message of the game is ultimately one of hope. Throughout the game, we see the dangers of seeing other humans as a means to an end: Suchong, a scientist who experimented on the Little Sisters, is killed as a direct result of striking a Little Sister. Fontaine dies at the hands of his tool- you, the player character. Throughout the game, the player learns that they follow instructions because they have been genetically conditioned to do so; Fontaine is quite literally using the player character. However, while they are not able to make choices for any other part of the game, they are allowed agency in one respect: they choose whether the Little Sisters live or die. Fontaine encourages players to kill the Little Sisters as this allows the player to harvest their power, and to let them live means playing the game with limits on how much power can be attained. This seemingly inconsequential choice, the only choice the player can make, ultimately decides the end of the game. Choosing to kill the Little Sisters grants the player more power, yes, but ultimately, the remaining Little Sisters turn on the player, killing them- the result of seeing Little Sisters as a means to an end. Letting them live, however, ends the game with the ‘good’ ending- escaping Rapture and bringing the Little Sisters with the player towards a brighter future. Ultimately, BioShock claims that even the smallest of choices to help one another bring about a better world; all changes that happen throughout the game happen as the result of working together.

Works Cited

2K Boston, 2k Australia (2007). Bioshock [Xbox 360], 2k.

Hurley, L. (2025, June 10). Military deployment in L.A. puts Trump’s authority to use troops at home in the spotlight. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/military-deployment-l-puts-trumps-authority-use-troops-home-spotlight-rcna212064

Luhby, T. (2024, November 16). Trump made a lot of tax promises. Can he keep them? | CNN Politics. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/16/politics/taxes-tips-trump-campaign-promises

Trump-Statue. (n.d.). Trump-Statue. Retrieved July 16, 2025, from https://www.trump-statue.com
Susan Coutin on her book, On the Record

August 4th, 2025

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/on-the-record/paper

Jennifer Chacon:  You note in the book that when immigrant residents want to avail themselves of various forms of relief from the threat of deportation (or, to be more legally precise, removal), they often have to establish their own exceptionality, demonstrating why they are deserving of legal relief that is not more widely available.  Could you explain how people document their eligibility for exceptional relief, and also about how they resist the narratives of exceptionality, even as they leverage them for legal relief?

Susan Coutin: Depending on the form of relief they are seeking, immigrant residents may need to show that they are qualifying relatives of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, their deportation would cause an exceptional hardship, they were victims of crime and collaborated in the investigation, they have a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin, they immigrated to the US as children and were educated here, or the number of years that they have been in the United States. To do so, they gather records such as marriage and birth certificates, family photos and correspondence, medical records, letters, police reports, country conditions information, school transcripts, immigration-related documents, check stubs, bank statements, rental contracts, receipts, and more. Ironically, as they demonstrate their exceptionality, they are also making themselves socially visible in ways that convey ordinariness: they have relatives, work, study, make purchases, rent homes, go to the doctor. Demonstrating ordinariness resists narratives of exceptionality, claiming that their lives have intrinsic value.

Jennifer Chacon:  You spent a lot of time observing lawyers engaging in legal craft – the processes by which lawyers try to mediate between the immigrant and the state.  You describe situations where documentation is simultaneously a necessary element of claims for relief and a potential detriment to those claims.  What did you learn about how lawyers navigate this mediating role? Are there any notable differences between the ways that attorneys describe their role and what you observed in the course of your study?

Susan Coutin: Lawyers’ and other service providers’ mediating role was complex! I learned that they sometimes discovered forms of eligibility of which their clients were unaware. A striking example was an appointment at which a paralegal reviewed an undocumented Salvadoran client’s expired work permit, asked if they had applied for asylum during the 1990s, and announced that the client was potentially eligible to apply for residency. From a code on the expired permit, the service provider knew that the client had applied for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the early 1990s, a requirement for the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. This client left with the hope of becoming a lawful permanent resident! More often, attorneys had to deliver the devastating news that clients were ineligible to apply for anything or were even barred from future admission. And most commonly, attorneys and service providers’ mediating role consisted of assessing documents’ evidentiary value and identifying discrepancies in their records that had to be corrected or explained as their cases moved forward. Service providers typically referred to their roles by the type of case or the specific task performed, such as a screening appointment or a TPS renewal. I termed providers’ work legal craft because of the expertise involved in reviewing records, completing forms, taking declarations, and assembling applications.

Jennifer Chacon:  This book captures some of the ways that undocumented immigrant residents think about justice, and about what an ethical and humane system of law would look like.  What are these alternative visions of justice?  And what did you learn about how lawyers navigate the legal world that is while being mindful of the legal world their clients envision?

Susan Coutin: Those who were seeking status in the United States, whether for themselves or their family members, longed for a world in which laws and policies would enable families to be together, opportunities to regularize one’s status would be plentiful and affordable, people would not be subjected to illegalization or criminalization, those with temporary protection would be awarded permanent status, and immigrant residents would be treated with dignity and respect. The lawyers, paralegals, clerks, and volunteers who I shadowed at the nonprofit delivered services in ways that prefigured this vision of what law could be. They expressed empathy for their clients, listening to their concerns. When service providers had to ask questions that might be perceived as invasive or accusatory, such as about clients’ criminal histories, providers often apologized, stressing that they were merely translating questions on the forms. Service providers were deeply committed to empowering their clients with legal knowledge, so they took the time to explain the laws and processes that they were implementing. Providers also sought to reduce the administrative burden of applying for legal status. To that end, they charged low fees, assisted clients in obtaining documentation, and put in long hours doing much of the paperwork themselves. My research and volunteer work in the nonprofit gave me a glimpse of what the U.S. immigration system could be like if such practices were adopted by US officials: law could be a form of support for people who were compelled to move for family or because of harm or risk.

Jennifer Chacon:  What would you want anthropologists who study documents to take away from your book?

Susan Coutin: There are so many things! Perhaps most fundamentally, my book demonstrates that documents are active rather than inert. They take on new meanings depending on how they are used. For example, a school transcript that originally served as a record of academic work or a bank statement that focuses on financial transactions can become a “presence document” that is included in an immigration case to demonstrate that a particular person was in the United States over a specified period. When documents are redeployed in this fashion, their other possible meanings do not simply disappear, rather, documents potentially exceed the use to which they are put. Thus, a transcript or bank statement submitted as a presence document also conveys the ordinariness of the applicant’s life, potentially reinforcing the notion that they are de facto members of the US polity. Documents also have an archival quality: a collection of documents may have layers in that records of past events bring these forward in time, and assembling documents in a particular order conveys implicit narratives.

The book also suggests that the relationship between documents and that to which they refer is complex. A birth certificate provides evidence of a birth, but of course is not actually the birth itself. The birth as an event lies outside of the documentary record, even as the birth certificate makes a birth legally cognizable. David Dery refers to such legal representations as “papereality,” noting that in bureaucracies, papereality can take priority over the events, people, and objects to which papers refer. This power to construct social realities makes papers especially useful for immigrant residents who may hope that the papers – receipts, check stubs, correspondence – generated by their lives in the United States establish that they belong here and are deserving of status.

Further, in the book, I highlight ways that immigrant residents who face a high administrative burden exhibit agency by documenting back to the state through the papers that they accumulate and the claims that they file. Instead of waiting to see how they will be “inscribed” within government bureaucracies, as Sarah Horton and Josiah Heyman put it in their volume, Paper Trails, immigrant residents take on what I called an anticipatory administrative burden, gathering the documentation that they hope to someday be eligible to submit. Immigrant residents gain documentary expertise by virtue of living in the United States and being asked for their papers, therefore they, like attorneys and paralegals, practice legal craft in preparing immigration cases.

The image on the book’s cover conveys the creativity involved in making something of one’s papers. The cover art is a reproduction of Fidencio Fifield-Perez’s piece, “Dacament #7.” The artist used a USCIS envelope as a canvas for painting a plant. To me, this beautiful artwork conveys the notion that papers can be brought to life, and that those to whom papers refer can transform their meanings.

Lastly, the book suggests that it is important for anthropologists to pay attention to the technical and material side of documents. It matters whether forms are completed online or by hand, if they generate a bar code (which means that answers that are corrected by hand, using white out, won’t change the bar code), what makes documents look official or unofficial, how stamps, seals, and signatures are used and interpreted, and what sort of paper they appear on. Documents also have aesthetic features. One attorney told me that the many creases in a love letter that her client was submitting added to its authenticity: the client had seemingly repeatedly folded and refolded this letter, suggesting that it was important. Silences within documents also matter. What is not stated? How large are blanks on forms? What is off rather than on the record? These are all questions for anthropologists who study documents to consider.

Jennifer Chacon:  Finally, the book offers some important lessons for those who study immigration law and policy.  You describe your own work not as a passive recounting, but as its own form of “documenting back” to the state.  Can you elaborate on what you mean by this, and say a bit about how you understand the obligations of scholars doing this work?

Susan Coutin: Ethnography can be a form of accompaniment and a means of witnessing. Accompaniment refers to working alongside people who face precarity, exclusion, marginalization, persecution and other forms of injustice. Witnessing, then, consists of documenting these experiences. Volunteering in the legal services department of a nonprofit and shadowing service providers positioned me among legal advocates who were practicing legal craft with and on behalf of immigrant residents seeking legal status. I documented these experiences by writing fieldnotes, doing interviews, and producing ethnographic accounts. I describe my approach to research as not only an ethnography of law but also a paralegal ethnography in that my own role during research was akin to a paralegal who performs legal tasks under an attorneys’ supervision. My book documents the ways that immigrant residents are impacted by US immigration law, the legal craft practiced by service providers, and the visions of a more just future articulated by those seeking legal status and their allies. By producing accounts that deepen understandings and are grounded in respectful and empathetic relationships with interlocutors, scholars who engage in accompaniment and witnessing can contribute to the sorts of transformational imaginings that promote social justice.
Yasmine Lucas takes the page 99 test

July 28th, 2025

Page ninety-nine of my dissertation offers an end-of-section summary, in which I distill the analytic work undertaken over the preceding ninety-eight pages. In these pages, I draw on Immanuel Kant’s theory of the sublime to illuminate how, beginning in the early 1960s, representations of the Holocaust were experienced within North American Jewish communities and mobilized toward a range of political, cultural, and affective ends.

The core argument is that many people—from survivors to more acculturated Jews—encountered the Holocaust as an object that exceeded human comprehension. The Holocaust emerged as such through television broadcasts, such as the 1961 Eichmann trials and 1978 miniseries Holocaust, in popularized survivor memoirs, and through news reports of wars in the Middle East. Through these and other media events, the Holocaust appeared as an impossibly huge or powerful object that strained human faculties, triggering a kind of psycho-affective short-circuit—a sublime glimpse of infinity. This glimpse was not unmarked. What, after Zachary Braiterman (2000), I call “the Holocaust sublime,” was filtered through different cultural schemas, depending on the person and community.

So is it that on page ninety-nine I identify the Judeo-Christian sublime of acculturated North American Jews. To summarize a ninety-eight-page story: In the 1960s, acculturated North American Jews found themselves in a socially ambiguous and uncomfortable position. They were neither subjected to the racial exclusions imposed on Black Americans nor granted undifferentiated white (Christian) status. The Holocaust sublime allowed them to psychically transform Jewish ambiguity into strength and coherence; the movement from absolute horror to infinity mirrored their aspirations for Jewish-American empowerment. Overcoming the Impossible emerged as a synecdoche of Jewish-American achievement and integration.

Holocaust survivors’ cultural schemas bestowed somewhat different meanings upon the Holocaust sublime, as it emerged in memory and through media. Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, for example, understood the Holocaust sublime in conjunction with the Kabbalistic philosophies of his youth. The infinite he glimpsed in the experience of the sublime was not primarily social and North American in nature, but rather evoked the Jewish God—a God at once immanent and transcendent, accessed through the collective study of Talmud in the shtetl where he grew up.

Naomi Seidman’s (2006) seminal work shows how Night, Wiesel’s famous memoir-cum-novel, was de-Judaized by his French Catholic publisher. My dissertation extends this analysis through close readings of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s institutional archives. As Chair of the Memorial Council between 1978 to 1986, Wiesel presided over a process whereby acculturated North American Jews—eager to mitigate antisemitism and claim a place in the emerging neoliberal order—reinterpreted the Holocaust sublime. In this translation, infinite horror no longer indexed divine mystery or the promise of European Jewish spiritual renewal. Instead, it signified the triumph over Jewish ambiguity, and achievement in the (Christian) capitalist order.

On page ninety-nine, I recall the Wiesel example before turning to the creation of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (later renamed the Montreal Holocaust Museum), which vies for the title of first Holocaust museum in North America. Emil Fackenheim—a survivor, writer, and Reform rabbi—spoke at the 1976 grand opening. His understanding of the Holocaust sublime (discussed in previous pages of the dissertation) diverged significantly from Wiesel’s. Fackenheim saw the horror revealed at Auschwitz as a Call for Jews to militantly defend their existence as a people. He interpreted Zionism as a divine imperative—a rebirth of Jewish chosenness through socio-political sovereignty. The young founders of the Montreal museum, on the other hand—foremost among them my interlocutor Stephen Cummings—understood Zionism in tandem with their version of the Holocaust sublime, as an overcoming of North American ambiguity.

The chapter’s final thrust is a discovery I made through an archival field recording: “At the 1976 opening of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, survivors on the memorial committee handed over an urn containing ashes from Auschwitz to Cummings and the other young founders of the museum.”

This symbolic gesture encapsulates the central thesis of Holocaust Sublime: The Making of Neoliberal Affect. In North America, variegated understandings of the Holocaust sublime were conflated and homogenized from the 1970s onward to produce the version we find concretized in museums, and educational and memorial initiatives, today: one in which confronting “the Holocaust” functions as a synecdoche of triumphing over “all ambiguities of social existence” (Arendt 2017: 85), so as to assimilate into—and foster the creation of—the neoliberal order that took over the world during these same years.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. 2017 (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Classics.

Braiterman, Zachary. 2000. “Against Holocaust-Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory.” History and Memory 12(1): 7–28.

Lucas, Yasmine E. 2024. “Holocaust Sublime: The Making of Neoliberal Affect.” Ph.D. diss., Toronto, ON: University of Toronto.

Seidman, Naomi. 2006. “The Holocaust in Every Tongue.” In Faithful Renderings, 199-242. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rachael Sebastian takes the page 99 test

July 21st, 2025

The 99^th page of my dissertation is nestled within Chapter 3: When Words Fail: Therapeutic Aspects of Visual Arts—my favorite chapter. Conveniently, by explaining this chapter, I also show what my dissertation is about overall. It is about the visual arts community in the Southern Tier of New York state, and the role of community spaces to do their thing, and the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos of a particular subculture within the broader art scene of a now rustbelt town. It is about how these folks, through their artistic practices and the process of creating, are coping with, among other things, life in a de-industrialized town with limited economic opportunities.

Chapter 3 is where I present my data about the act of creating art in the “narrating moment” when the performance of visual storytelling occurs. How does the act of making self-portraits, and crafting a visual story in that way facilitate the embodiment and enactment of an identity, of a persona that is broadly therapeutic and cathartic? I love this chapter because it highlights their creativity and thoughtfulness and presents very real ways that art make life better.

However…. the 99^th page is the 5^th page of this chapter, void of the beautiful words shared with me during interviews. Rather it contains hedging and caveats, explaining that while Western psychological terminology appears, it does makes up part of the broader frameworks my participants operate within, along with therapy speak and wellness discourses. “This “therapy culture” and the broader discourses of mental health are similar to what Marsilli-Vargas (2016) noticed in Buenos Aires. She examined the unique way that discourses found in psychotherapy had permeated the broader culture to the point where discussions of projection and the psycho-somatic came up in everyday conversations.” I also draw inspiration from Grinker (2021), and wanted to make it clear that the diagnoses that came up in my work are in fact culturally and temporally mediated “idioms of distress” (Nichter 1981).

What is funny to me about the content of page 99, is that it is where I most explicitly did what ended up being a subject of critique in my defense. In my revisions, I went through the document to ensure that I took care to not accidentally naturalize these diagnoses and to be clear that these are “idioms of distress” (Nichter 1981) based in a Western psychological framework.

Sebastian, Rachael. 2025. “Sevastra—Art Saves:” Narratives of Trauma and Transformations Through Visual Arts. Binghamton University Ph.D. http://proxy.binghamton.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/sevastra-art-saves-narratives-trauma/docview/3212460241/se-2?accountid=14168

Grinker, Roy Richard. 2021. Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness. New York, USA: W.W. Norton and Company.

Marsilli-Vargas, Xochitl. 2016. “The Offline and Online Mediatization of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires.” Signs and Society 4 (1): 135–53.

Nichter, Mark. 1981. “Idioms of distress: Alternatives in the expression of psychosocial distress: A case study from South India.” Culture, medicine and psychiatry 5(4): 379-408.

CaMP Anthropology

Communication, Media and Performance